‘Start-ups need great talent’
Voice & Data: What, according to you, are the biggest challenges and opportunities for start-ups in India?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: Our journey has been fantastic so far and there has been tremendous learning since the beginning. One of the biggest challenges that we face in India is lack of great talent due to the mobile-internet ecosystem being at a very early stage. It is extremely hard to find people who have dealt with large-scale consumer services. But, with both Bharti and SoftBank Co’s backing, it makes it easier to find the best and nurture this talent within the company.
Voice & Data: In a competitive market like India with several other messenger apps like Wechat, WhatsApp, etc, how do you place your product?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: India is a diverse and unique market. The potential for growth in the mobile-internet space is attracting established players, which have been around for years, with roots in smartphone-evolved markets. In India, people are accessing the internet for the first time on mobile phones and their needs and demands are very distinct. Being a company based out of India, we are able to catch the pulse of the local market, faster and better. We look forward to building exciting apps for this ecosystem!
Voice & Data: How was the year 2013 for Hike?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: We have made humble beginnings and great learning in the year 2013. Within four months of our launch, we crossed 5 mn users. The traction and uptake is massive and we only strive to go higher. India is now the world’s second largest wireless market and more importantly has the world’s largest population under the age of 25 years. This kind of demographic (young population) provides a perfect base for a company like ours, which is completely focused on mobile-internet. We are just scratching the surface of what is possible in the mobileinternet space. 2013 was brilliant and 2014, as we see it, is going to be.
Voice & Data: With Hike completing an year now, how many users does it have?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: Hike surpassed 5 mn registered users as of April 2013, and is handling over a billion messages every month.
Voice & Data: What was the business case that led you to move to the cloud?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: As a fast growing messaging app, we have our hands full with many things. We needed a customizable and flexible solution where we could experiment fast and scale up aggressively to align with our fast growth pace. Moving to the cloud has given us that flexibility.
Voice & Data: Why did you decide to move to the cloud instead of managing your own data center? Please elaborate on the parameters you looked at while evaluating your strategy. What were your requirements when you moved to the cloud?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: Before adopting Amazon Web Services (AWS), we hosted our infrastructure in India on a small cloud of our own. However, after the growth we’ve seen with Hike, we needed more flexibility to experiment with multiple stacks and at the same time scale up at a fast pace to meet the fast growing user demand.
After using AWS, we are now able to focus on core areas such as mobile development work; rather than spending time on those hardware infrastructures and worrying about capacity planning.
Voice & Data: How has your move to the AWS cloud helped? What benefits have you seen?
Kavin Bharti Mittal: We have seen tremendous benefits. Scalability and reliability are at the epicenter of our user experience and being on AWS has made it far easier for us to ensure a high up-time for our users. As a result, our entire team is able to give more time and attention to building really unique features for the local market.