This Best Asian Hosted Podcast Amassed 1.5M Listeners in Less Than 3 years

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

HANTU is a content company that specialises in creating horror IPs for the Southeast Asian market—and in less than three years, we’ve amassed more than 1.5 million listeners, become the very first Singaporean podcast to win at the long-running People’s Choice Podcast Awards, and launched three series, with for two more.

Who are you and what business did you start?

I’m Kyle Ong, a Filmmaker with 10 years of experience and the Director and Co-Founder of HANTU.

We develop and produce English horror content for the Southeast Asian market. Our headline show, Ghost Maps, is Southeast Asia’s #1 English horror podcast. As the streaming wars ensue, we see a gap for high quality Southeast Asian horror content. We envision ourselves as the Southeast Asian equivalent of Disney for horror.

What's your backstory?

Growing up, I’ve always loved Hong Kong Cinema’s unique take on horror and have always wondered why there isn’t that kind of boom here in Southeast Asia, where the supernatural is synonymous with our culture.

Fast-forward a decade or so, I met with my partner, Wayne Rée, and we started HANTU with the aim to create horror TV shows, but the offers were either not great or rejected. This led to us thinking of using podcast as a viable medium, which ultimately blew up and now, we are known as 'the horror podcast guys.'

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

The first 100 days were weird. We were pretty much just creating content left, right and centre, but there were no processes. It was a lot of fumbling around before we got into the groove.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain partnerships/customers?

Numbers are key. Our numbers are always on an upward trajectory, albeit changing. It’s important for us to crunch numbers from time to time. Art is important to create, but so are understanding numbers.

What is one underrated thing in your industry that business owners should start doing/using?

We are technically in both content creation and in horror. For content creation, I think sometimes too much of a good thing can be bad. There is an intricate balance between posting regular content and high quality content. As for horror, sometimes the scariest thing may not be the ones that you show. ;)

What were the biggest challenges you faced and how have you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was creative differences. If no one was talking to each other, HANTU would probably no longer exist.

We understood from a very early point that communication was important, and if anyone had an issue about something, we would talk it out. Basically, everyone sat down in a coffeeshop one afternoon and hashed out our differences.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Our favourite tools are definitely Google Suite for remote collaboration, but I think the most underrated of them all is Buffer. It’s free and allows us the ability to schedule content anywhere. Need I say more?

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We are currently scaling the team to create more shows. Our fans are one of our main supporters and we would like to leverage more on that. That’s why, we are training the core team to take on more of a face-of-the-company role, in order to gain further traction in our following.

Ultimately, we would like to find someone that’s right to invest in our vision. But we are also happy to take this all the way and grow it traditionally like a media company. Either way, it’s a hell of a fun ride to be on!