Twitter rival Koo shuts down; What a missed Chaupaal opportunity!
Koo raised $70mn (~600 crores) and had an effective revenue of 20L in FY 22
India’s twitter rival, Koo has shutdown.
This is what the founders have shared in their Linkedin post
In total, Koo raised $70mn (~600 crores) and had an effective revenue of 20L in FY 22 (which is fine as social networks typically take a while to bring revenue..and when they do, when the network effect kicks in, everybody envies them)
An opportunity missed
Koo cracked 2 things which very few startups in the Bharat market have:
A blue ocean of opportunities (no social network was going after non-English market), and
Early backers (thanks to founders network). It’s not easy raising even $10mn for a social network in a post-FB world (Koo ended up raising $70mn).
Koo had a great launch timing and was a perfect platform to leverage India’s rising digital wave.
Of course it did benefit from anti-Chinese and anti-everything sentiment, but the bigger opportunity was in building a Chaupal for the Indian mass.
A Chaupal, or chopal, is a community building or space in the rural areas. Although chaupals are fundamentally a feature of rural life, in the popular perception a chaupal is any place where people "sit and discuss their problems, celebrate their pleasures, share the pains of an individual, family or a particular group, sort out their disputes." It is "a sacred place of secular nature" that "guarantees freedom of speech and expression to everybody - via wikipedia
India definitely needed its own ‘chaupaal’, its own Townhall and given how much we as a country love to talk, share and discuss *everything*, Koo had immense possibilities – even at a micro community level (for e.g. an entire village using Koo for info awareness, crop pricing updates etc etc).
What REALLY went wrong with Koo?
Koo was at the
right time,
right place but with the
wrong intent/approach.
Given PM Modi’s anti-China and anti-Western sentiment during 2020/21, Koo was rightly timed and was able to attract a wide variety of audience - right from (BJP) politicians to actors like Kangana Ranaut.
All this worked well for Koo given the mass appeal of these celebrities. The platform was a huge success - 10 million DAUs is no kid’s play after all.
And that early success also became Koo’s failure point
The founders mention 10% like ratio as a great success metric - but once you see that the likes were done by ‘Bhakts’ for their fav politics, you know that the real metric should have been different (# of non-political posts created?).
Koo eventually ended up taking the shortcut approach, i.e. of nationalism.
Loved by politicians and their followers, Koo saw massive success in the early days, but no real peer to peer interactions.
Some of you might like to say that Koo didn’t innovate on product front - but I’d completely disagree as I believe the audience they were trying to reach out to weren’t even on Twitter, so for them the format itself was something very fresh.
The failure was in missing the obvious - i.e. aligning the platform with political agenda and overlooking the fact that politicians aren’t in for the platform, but to make a point / have their own nationalistic agenda. And when the point was made, they moved on - leaving the platform with lots of users, but no user behavior.
Wishing the team all the very best! And by the way, the opportunity to build Chaupal is still out there - if you are building one, reach out to me.
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