Koo’s Story & Beliefs
Why Koo exists
We started Koo for a purpose. To help unheard voices on the internet.
India has 1000s of languages. With the internet revolution started by Jio, India got over 600 million internet users with 60% of the users being vernacular (reading and writing a native Indian language). English is a nationally accepted language, but not native to it. India is nearing 900 million internet users now and 75% of them are native language users. That is double the size of the entire United States. That’s how large this population is.
We knew this population would seek internet services they could use to connect with each other and get social updates — in the same way as it happens on global social media platforms today. However, they needed a language immersive experience. They needed to be spoken to in their language, given a language keyboard to express themselves and be shown people to connect, who speak their own language.
And if you think that this is just an Indian requirement, think again. Just 20% of the world speaks English. 80% of the World speaks a language native to its land. Most global products have a broken experience in languages. Nobody has as yet created a language immersive experience for expressing and connecting with the world.
Many users asked us to enable this experience on the internet. When asked why they wanted it when Twitter already existed, they said that the experience was broken. They didn’t even have the ability to find people who spoke their language. When we delved deeper too, we noticed that Indian language content was highly underrepresented. We saw a gap that could be addressed not just in India, but the whole world
This is the insight behind Koo.
How Koo started
Koo didn’t start off as a replacement of Twitter. It started to do something that Twitter wasn’t doing at all — to connect language users better. While a lot of people in India thought Koo is like Twitter, the audience we wanted to cater to was almost mutually exclusive.
We launched Koo in Kannada (in Mar 2020) and beat Twitter’s Kannada numbers within a week. This gave us an idea about how large an opportunity we had ahead of us. That event started our journey of launching in multiple Indian languages. We applied for the Prime Minister’s Aatmanirbhar app challenge in July 2020. With 8000+ entries, we didn’t hope for much to happen. To our surprise we were chosen in the top 3 apps in the country. The Prime Minister even spoke about us in his Mann Ki Baat speech. We got into the public eye, had senior politicians and celebrities joining the platform, got many users.
Koo shoots to limelight
We kept launching multiple languages in the months ahead. We also saw some Twitter users flocking to Koo and requesting for English to be made available. Given the user interest for English, we decided to launch the language in Dec 2020. In Feb 2020 Twitter got into a spat with the Indian Government over banning and unbanning certain accounts during the farmer protests.
Almost a million users flocked to Koo, only to find that we had very shallow content in English and a bare bones product. We were a 30-member team and 11 months old then. We get a lot of brickbats for not being ready. But we hadn’t invited anyone. Let alone the English users! Given our meagre resources, we still had a long way to go before our product could compete with the best.
After the Twitter spat many celebrities and eminent personalities from India also joined. Koo became a national topic. It rose to prominence suddenly as an alternative to Twitter. We got a lot of investor interest and raised a round for our future growth. Our young team suddenly grew from 30 to 150 within months. We added a lot more functionality, made rapid changes, grew the community, put processes in place, expanded the core team and filled in many leadership roles.
What lay ahead of us was a few quarters of product development, lots of machine learning to solve for recommendations & personalization and asset creation across the company. We built many features, added many millions of users, and kept hitting new milestones in terms of downloads and the personalities joining Koo. We won many awards and scaled new heights. What started as a hunch and an experiment had become a crowd puller!
Our Focus
Our focus remained non-English users. It was an audience that wasn’t being catered to by any other platform and we grew rapidly in Hindi and other native languages. Our plan was to keep building on the language differentiation and growing rapidly in India and across the world. But India, before the world. And this focus has helped us get to 50 million downloads in India, create a globally competitive product and be ready to scale to any language in the world. India is one of the most complex markets to crack. Cracking India helps open up the world. Today Koo boasts of India’s most eminent names as its users, with over 7,500+ eminent personalities using it everyday.
Global Changes
Then came some global changes. Elon Musk made an offer to Twitter. And after a few weeks of negotiation, backed out. After a few months of back and forth and legal battles came the final decision of him buying Twitter after a long-drawn suit over the presence of a large % of bots on Twitter. He entered a world infested with bots. A problem created by Twitter in the first place and decided to make users pay for it to solve it.
The new owner started making changes rapidly. Some of them being diametrically opposite to what we believed in. We’ve always believed that a micro-blog is a public space for exchange of information and views, that should be open to all without any barriers. Language or otherwise. Nothing should prevent someone from using this service. While this is a private company, we’ve always given it the treatment that a public good deserves.
We used to believe that our product is relevant to 80% of the world. We now believe that a true alternative to Twitter is not only needed but also very important. It needs to have strong philosophies that don’t go against the interest of humanity at large. Protecting public exchange of views without a paywall is a basic right that the internet must provide.
What we believe
This brings us to the question of what we believe in. Here are some things that we think are crucial and form the backbone of our existence:
- People power: A public platform like this is about the people. Not about the platform. Every decision is always made using a user first lens. The collective good of the people is given more importance than the benefit of a smaller section.
- Languages: People connect better in their ownlanguage. It’s important for a micro-blog to enable expression, consumption (either through the language or translation services) and discovery of people in languages.
- One world: We believe that everything done should help close the gaps in the the world, rather than divide it. This includes bridging the language barrier.
- Content moderation: We believe that the laws of the land must be followed as far as content moderation is concerned. Why? Because nations know their cultural and legal context better than a platform based out of another country. We think it’s disrespectful to create your own legal structures based on a superficial understanding of a country’s context. We can’t deem something illegal if the country’s laws don’t believe so and vice versa. We want to operate out of respect for local laws.
- Neutrality: This means that the platform doesn’t slap its own views on users. It’s neutral in its operations. A platform needs to be about the people. Not about itself and its interests. Which means that the platform will never influence a user’s choices or decisions.
- Transparency: We believe that users should know everything that goes on the platform so that they can operate on it with utmost trust. They need to know the algorithms, policies, community guidelines, rules to get an eminence tick mark etc. They need to know before they can trust. We publish all of these clearly on our website to drive this value system within our community and internally.
- Fairness: Fairness is about having a rule that is either just or unjust to all. It’s about having the same rules for everyone. And to be respectful to people. We believe that people can make mistakes. We never penalize a user for mistakes made. We deal with the mistake instead of dealing with the user. Unless there was a very clear harm to the larger good. Very rarely do users get banned on this platform. We deal with the content. Not the user.
- Free access for all: We want to provide access to our service for free, without having to charge users for this valuable access. We will introduce monetisation methods that help subsidise this access, either through advertising or through in-app transactions that help users appreciate the content of creators. Access alone will not be monetised.
- Shared success: We believe that everyone should benefit from using the platform. Not just the platform. If the platform earns revenue, every stakeholder involved also should. Be it the creator or the user. Everyone should make money. We are on our path to create these streams that will enable this going forward so that the platform can respect the time and involvement from the users and creators, alike.
Koo is a breath of fresh air from a language, transparency and fairness perspective in the world. With a great product that empower users globally, in a language of their choice. We invite you to experience the new.
