Harnessing The Power of India’s Linguistic Diversity: ShareChat’s Product-Market Fit (PMF) Journey.
While most of the world’s leading social networks have originated in the United States of America and primarily use English as their communication language, India stands out with its diverse population of around 90% non-English speakers, encompassing 22 official languages and over 6,000 dialects. Recognizing this vast linguistic diversity, ShareChat emerged to cater to the needs of the next billion internet users in the country.
As the ShareChat trio ventured into this unexplored territory, understanding the behaviour and preferences of this new user base posed a significant challenge. It took relentless dedicated efforts to gain relevant valuable insights and get them to see early signs of their product-market fit (PMF).
Let’s meet the founders before we delve further into ShareChat’s PMF journey. Ankush, Farid, and Bhanu hail from typical middle-class families and grew up in Tier-2 towns — Ghaziabad, Lucknow, and Gorakhpur, respectively. Their paths crossed at IIT Kanpur, where they bonded during a hackathon in 2012. While still in college, they tirelessly worked on 13 different product ideas. Unfortunately, none of these attempts gained traction.
Leaving Placements and Moving to Mumbai 👔
The trio, inclined towards entrepreneurship, dropped out of IIT’s placement process and ventured to Mumbai, in search of the right opportunities. To make ends meet in the initial days, they even had to sleep in the Grabhouse’s office, a real estate startup founded by their senior from IIT Kanpur, Prateek Shukla.
Through Prateek, they met Anand Lunia, a founding partner at India Quotient. Despite rejecting their 13th idea, Anand offered them office space. Here, Madhukar Sinha, another founding partner at India Quotient, became their unofficial mentor. The trio then created a debating app called Opinio, which unfortunately didn’t succeed. Ankush recalls, “Even though our ideas were failing, the India Quotient team believed in us. They knew we could iterate fast and create something for the Indian audience.”
Discovering the Potential of Vernacular Content 🗣📱
In November 2014, while working on Opinio, the trio stumbled upon a Facebook post asking people for phone numbers to join a WhatsApp group about Sachin Tendulkar. They were blown away by the incredible responses from over 50,000 participants. To better understand user behaviour, they quickly created a tool to generate WhatsApp groups focused on popular personalities such as Katrina Kaif and extracted phone numbers from Facebook posts to create Whatsapp groups. After a few hours, they found each WhatsApp group buzzing with hundreds of messages. What was particularly fascinating was that none of the messages were in English!
During one discussion, Anand and Madhukar shared with the trio several WhatsApp groups where people discussed stock tips in Gujarati. The trio decided to delve deeper into numerous WhatsApp groups and understand user behaviour. They realized that there was a whole new different internet world which existed on WhatsApp groups, which Google did not index. Ankush says, “These users were conversing differently from Twitter audiences.”
By December 2014, the trio had created a prototype of an Indian vernacular content-sharing platform with the flavour of a social network. Anand and Madhukar believed in the concept, and in February 2015, India Quotient funded the venture with $100,000.
Designing a Product for the Next Billion Internet Users in India
Back then, India’s 2G network was unreliable, especially in small towns. As a result, popular platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter often encountered connectivity issues. However, WhatsApp consistently functioned without any hiccups. This insight served as the team’s motivation to build an app that would match WhatsApp’s performance and work seamlessly across all cities in the country.
To achieve this goal, they designed ShareChat to function like a chat app, eliminating the need for an HTTP protocol. The app was architected to leverage any small burst of 2G network to push in content. As a result, users would receive a fresh stream of content without manually refreshing the app.
During their research, the team found that users struggled to discover content and groups on WhatsApp. In response, ShareChat introduced easily discoverable and searchable public chat rooms, which enabled users to find and join groups based on their interests. However, the team noticed that these chat rooms lacked meaningful conversations between strangers, and only a small percentage of users utilized them for content sharing. Moreover, the content often got lost amidst the deluge of “Hi” messages. Based on these findings, the team shifted their focus toward delivering high-quality content instead of fostering conversations.
Moreover, language selection quickly emerged as a crucial factor for ShareChat. At the outset, the app offered users the choice of regional languages and English. Interestingly, more than 50% of users selected English but didn’t use it to communicate. The ShareChat team contacted many such users on the phone to understand why. They discovered that these users saw English as aspirational but couldn’t speak it beyond “Hi.” In light of this insight, the team removed English as an option.
Another valuable lesson learned was the user’s preference for content sharing. Consequently, ShareChat launched content-focused chatbots in July 2015, offering captivating travel destinations through photos. Additionally, the team developed an intelligent chatbot that recommended smartphones based on users’ needs and budgets. However, the team discovered users were more interested in chatbots providing wallpapers, ringtones, jokes, and Shayari.
Achieving Product-Market Fit 🏆
The team found that users often felt compelled to share interesting internet content with their loved ones via WhatsApp groups. To attract new users to ShareChat, they incorporated a prominent WhatsApp icon below every post. This allowed users to easily share captivating content they found on ShareChat within their WhatsApp groups with just one tap. Moreover, the team ensured that every piece of content had a link back to the platform, encouraging WhatsApp users to visit ShareChat and explore more engaging content.
Ankush suggests that blindly pursuing vanity metrics and scaling too quickly can be detrimental to a startup’s long-term sustainability. Instead, he recommends identifying the metric that accurately measures the value added to users’ life. Additionally, he stresses the importance of identifying the users who derive the most satisfaction from the product. “Only by prioritizing them and tailoring the product to meet their needs, startups can achieve PMF.”
The sharing feature, launched in Oct 2015, organically yielded an extraordinary surge in all relevant metrics. For instance, the shares/DAU (Daily Active Users) metric skyrocketed by five times, while D7 retention, measuring app usage on the seventh-day post-installation, doubled. Ankush says, “This accomplishment holds particular significance as improving retention is typically one of the most challenging metrics for many apps.”
Evolution of the Product 📈
With no prior team experience in creating social media platforms, ShareChat decided to learn from established social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They observed that increasing engagement and retention on these platforms relied on getting users to follow a specific number of accounts or friends. As users followed more accounts, their feeds became richer, leading to increased engagement. To apply this strategy to ShareChat, the team developed a social graph feed where users could follow high-profile and suggested accounts. However, after two years of effort, the results were unsatisfactory in terms of increasing user engagement and retention.
Around the same time, a team of four at ShareChat was experimenting with an algorithmic feed that suggested better content to users based on their past engagement. This experiment resulted in a significant boost in user engagement. Ankush notes that this realization was pivotal, as it became clear that the playbook for building a social network in the USA, which dated back to 2010, was not applicable to India. ShareChat’s algorithmic feed recommended better content and resulted in hugely increased engagement. Today, 95% of the content consumed on the ShareChat platform is through the algorithmic feed, with less emphasis on the social graph feed.
Ankush says, “To achieve product-market fit, you need to step out of your intellectual bubble and understand that what you believe works on paper may not necessarily work in reality.” He further explains, “We learned this valuable lesson when we introduced features that we thought would go viral, but unfortunately, they were not embraced by our users. However, we experienced a significant shift when we shifted our focus towards providing users with what they genuinely desired.”
In conclusion, ShareChat’s journey of building India’s largest social media platform exemplifies the power of perseverance, adaptation, and prioritizing user needs. The team’s relentless pursuit of understanding user behaviour, providing a seamless content experience, and evolving focus on the right metrics has contributed to ShareChat’s success in terms of user love today. As ShareChat continues to evolve and shape India’s social media landscape, we wish the team all the best in their journey.
Starting with ShareChat’s story, IndiaQuotient is stoked to kick off its #findingPMF series, where we take a deep dive into successful startups’ journey of finding their Product-Market Fit. This term is often thrown around in the world of startups & it’s undoubtedly a challenge all founders face. Achieving PMF is a critical milestone; It does more than just validate a product’s viability, it also sets the foundation for sustainable growth and helps gain a competitive advantage.
Stick around for more!
Until then, check out our #pivotseries — Chapter 1(PagarBook), Chapter 2(Oakter), Chapter 3(SUGAR Cosmetics), Chapter 4(WebEngage) & follow us on Linkedin and Twitter 😃
