With Hike Stories, Mittal aims to stop fall in weekday traffic
NEW DELHI Hike Messenger, the Indian instant messaging app, on Thursday launched Hike Stories that allow you to upload pictures and videos, and decorate them, but which would vanish in the next 48 hours. Hike Messenger, that has features similar to Facebook and Snapchat, has been struggling to arrest the falling messaging traffic during the weekdays.
“Most of the activity takes place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday,” said Kavin Mittal, CEO of Hike, who is also the son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, founder of Bharti Airtel. Hike is owned by Bharti SoftBank.
“The features will help us increase traffic across the board,” said Mittal. Stories replace Hike’s timeline that allowed its users to post pictures and status updates.
Mittal loves to give a twist to its features. “Camera is the new keyboard,” he said. The app has integrated the camera into the app and provided filters that can make you look like Prime Minister Narendra Modi or actor Ranveer Singh.
That doesn’t appeal to every one.
“Hike needs an identity … it needs a clear business model, and so far its model has changed too many times. However, the upside is that it has large investments from credible names,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst of Greyhound Research.
Meanwhile, Whatsapp is gaining popularity. Couples chat on it for long hours, people build communities in offices, municipalities through groups. India is already the app’s largest market with 160 million users. Hike lags behind with 100 million.
Mittal said Snapchat was “very small in India” and Whatsapp is very basic.
“We worry less about other firms and focus on the youth of the country. They want to transact, buy stuff, recharge phones, send money back and forth among friends, and consume content,” said Mittal. That will make it more like Facebook Messenger and WeChat (its owner Tencent led a round of $145 million investment in Hike).
He wants to build all these features in Hike. Through Hike News, users already consume two billion stories every month. It has live cricket scores. “We are already working on the idea of building content sellers,” said Mittal, who is in contact with taxi aggregators and commerce firms.