Turning terribly tiny stories into a big business

It made a small beginning as an online micro-fiction platform. Today, Terribly Tiny Tales has a million followers, a book of its bite-sized stories, and a business that spans micro-films and micro-brand content

It started out small…make that tiny. With a Facebook page that invited stories no longer than a sentence or two. That was 2013. Today, the one-million strong Facebook community of Terribly Tiny Tales is something of a mini business empire with merchandise, workshops, short films, a mobile app, digital ad campaigns, and about a hundred curators sifting through thousands of story submissions. Now, founders Anuj Gosalia and Chintan Ruparel have also spun off the popular ‘micro-fiction’ page, popularly known as TTT, into a book with 250 tiny tales.

In the online genre of what is called micro-fiction, a few punchy lines or a dialogue alone must provide the setup and denouement of a ‘story’. Sample this: “The corporation came to take the building down. She ran towards that corner where the echoes of her laughter were stored.” Another one reads: “The first kiss took her to cloud5. The proposal to cloud8. Marriage would have taken her to cloud9, had cancer not taken him to heaven.”

Feeding the TTT empire are wannabe writers who submit their stories through the app. In all, says Ruparel, they have received between 3.5 lakh to 4 lakh entries to date, of which close to 6,000 stories have been published on its Facebook page. These have come from 75,000 writers from 4,000 cities.

Several I ndian microfiction and micropoetry platforms have mushroomed on Facebook and Instagram over the last few years such as TalesXpress, Little Letters Linked, Beyond Layouts, Scribbled Stories and Poetic Awakenings but perhaps none as successful commercially as TTT.

Gosalia says the rise of online microfiction has to do with shortening attention spans. “The idea of finishing a book is more and more demanding,” he says. Ishan Mahajan, a 29-year-old Gurgaon-based professional who regularly posts short verses on Instagram as @ishanmn on, says: “With these, you hammer just one emotion somewhere, and it’s done. Also it is absorbed more easily since Instagram is a visual medium, and it is easily searchable and discoverable with hashtags. Blogs or even Facebook notes tend to be text-heavy.”