SHARECHAT: INDIA’S HOMEGROWN RIVAL TO WHATSAPP
IT'S
a weekday afternoon in India, and some eight million people are venting about love and heartache on a popular local social network.
"Sometimes, I feel everyone in India is going through a breakup," says Farid Ahsan, one of the founders of ShareChat, India's fastest growing social media platform in local languages.
Scroll through the Hindi language stream of the three- year-old app's busy Instagram- like feed and you cannot miss the flood of images, videos and words on lost love and broken hearts.
All this is flowing under an appropriately named hashtag, #PainfulHeart, with a broken- heart emoji.
There are clumsy commiserations ("sorry, but hearts are meant to be broken", says a message) and soothing hope ("learn to forgive and let go", advises another). Pictures of flickering candles, wilting roses and teary eyes make it a heaving digital heartbreak hotel. Elsewhere on the network, more than 20,000 women, mostly from small cities and towns, are descending on the hashtag #GirlAttitude and exuding some spirited swagger.
“I have a lot of attitude, but I don’t show without a reason,” says one user. In another stream, called #GirlGang, one user says, more prosaically, “Girls are smart, boys are fools.” Mr Ahsan calls such streams “regional feminism”. To be sure, not every hashtag is so febrile. In the popular #HusbandWife stream, couples share healthier roses and seek forgiveness after fights. “It’s all happening here. It’s a full-blown, organic social network where there’s something for every young Indian, in their own language,” says chief executive officer Ankush Sachdeva.
Bangalore-based start-up ShareChat, founded by three engineering school graduates who met at a hackathon, is India’s first homegrown social network. With 30 million users across 14 Indian languages, it is also one of the fastest growing networks in Asia.
Users - the majority aged 18-25 and mostly hailing from medium and small cities and towns - have doubled in the last four months. The founders say they aim to reach 100 million users in the next 12 months. That’s half of WhatsApp - and a third of Facebook - users in India. Not surprisingly, ShareChat’s scorching growth has not escaped the attention of investors.
The network has raised $124m (£96m) in five rounds of funding since its inception in October 2015. “It has been a game changer in the Indian market. They took a brave step of realising the potential of vernacular content and succeeded in going against the tide,” says Manu Jain, vice president of Xiaomi, which has invested in the company. The founders tested more than a dozen products, including a real estate app, a data analytics company which created a heat map of crime in Delhi and an augmented reality game, before hitting on an easily navigable chat app for first-time Internet users - one that would work on a patchy network.
In December 2014, they launched the first version of ShareChat, which was a chat app, offering 10 languages, including English. They found the engagement in English was low. So they scrapped English and re-launched it in October 2015, expanding it to include a feed where users could generate and share content with hashtags. “That is when,” says chief technology officer Bhanu Pratap Singh, “we saw real growth happening.”
It is not difficult to see why. India is witnessing a surge of 500 million first-time users coming online. People in smaller cities, towns and villages are buying affordable smartphones - some 400 million people already use them. Data prices have fallen by a tenth. And by 2021, according to a report by Google and KPMG, nine out of 10 users in India are likely to communicate in local languages. (India at present has 175 million English-speaking Internet users.) In many ways, ShareChat holds a mirror to the heart of India - its feeds bursting with videos, images and words in local languages and dialects. Its algorithms also identify users with similar interests and help them connect over private chats. Significantly, the app allows users to share their content on other personal messaging services like WhatsApp.
Bangalore- based start-up ShareChat, founded by three engineering school graduates who met at a hackathon, is India’s first homegrown social network. With 30 million users across 14 Indian languages, it is also one of the fastest growing networks in Asia.