 Hello and welcome everyone to Entrepreneur India. Today we have a very special guest with us whose product or app has made headstone. It has won the App Manipura India App Challenge and has been endorsed by even the Prime Minister of the country. So let us welcome Mayank Vidwatka, the co-founder of the social networking app Koo. So Mayank, welcome and thank you for talking to us today, taking your time. It's a pleasure to talk to you. Everyone wants to know about Koo and so here we are to ask you some questions so that people know more about Koo. So, you know, just to start with, what are the latest numbers for Koo in terms of downloads and active users? Where have you reached? So we crossed about 4.3 million on our app platform and the web has seen tremendous growth as well. We've grown 50-60x on the web. These are people, this is the diaspora trying to use the website where apps are not available and things like that. We're not yet available in Europe because of GDPR compliance. We'll get there soon. So, you know, the growth has been way beyond what we expected it to be. So yeah, it's nice, it's heartening to see this happening. Yeah, it's giving you sleepless nights, I'm sure. So even in terms of active users, so you have in different languages right now. So which ones are the ones that have picked up the most and if you can share some numbers from there? Yeah, so Koo started in March 2020, so March end 2020, and we had started off in Karnataka and then we launched Hindi, we had Telugu, Bengali, Tamil, we were there in Malati, there's a soft launch in Gujarati, so a bunch of the languages that are now live on the platform, they're all healthy, you know, much larger than any other competitor in that language. The content sizes much more, the number of creators is much higher. So, you know, we recently launched English and that's got a great update with this entire thing happening, a lot of folks from Twitter trying out the product. But you know, Koo's largely been envisaged as giving a voice to Indian languages because that's really the gap. And most folks that use any micro block today are largely using it in English because it was meant for the global audiences and was, you know, delivered in English and a couple of other global languages. But we have the kind of language diversity that we have, but no other country in the world has, right, no country in the world has more than a couple of languages, right, and most of the large ones have just one language. And with thousands of languages, different dialects, we have 50 plus languages with over a million users. So you really need to Indianize micro blogging for a larger India to be a part of it, right, and that's Koo's mission saying let's let's get India here and let the voice of India and India be heard. You know, Twitter is a great product, right, I'm a big user of Twitter and tremendous respect for them. In Facebook, I will always say that if there's one internet product that I wish I had created, it would have been Twitter, it won't have been Facebook or Snapchat or Pinterest or WhatsApp. I identify so much with Twitter because my entire startup journey has been about democratizing something of the other. Right, you know, Redbus was about democratizing access to information on bus travel and simplifying it. You know, Media Ant was about democratizing media options. Good Box was about democratizing access to having a mobile presence for 16 million SMEs in our country. Right, the biggest thing that you could possibly do is democratize voice and you know, Koo is hence one of the most largest projects that were undertaken in terms of size in terms of scale in terms of vision. And I hope in terms of reality, right, because that's really what we want to achieve, you know, make any Indian feel that they are heard. So any numbers for these specific languages in terms of part of the future in terms of active users or we haven't talked to yet. We're not sharing any of these numbers. It's going substantially across. Okay, all right. You know, you just talked about that, you know, if there is one product you would have loved to build this Twitter. So, you know, in the same vein, you know, like when, you know, Facebook acquired Instagram because they knew that the people behind Instagram what they did in terms of tech was possibly not replicable or would have taken, you know, ages to do that, the use of tech that they had done the algorithms that they were using. Now, coming to you, you know, Twitter is like a, like a, like they must have maybe 100 times more engineers or people working for them. I'm sure you have a very smaller team. So, you know, how do you, how do you, how do you go to that level? I mean, of course, you have a theory right now, but you know, still, you know, getting all the features that I mean, not all the features, I would say, but the kind of experience that a world platform gives us. What, what will it take for any Indian platform to do that, even if you want to have a genuine answer for that. We have the tech talent. We have the intent, we have the capability, we'll do it in a fraction of time and resources that much I can guarantee. Okay, okay. So, the reason I was asking that question is that, you know, at times we have seen in gaming space, especially that, you know, someone we have, we have created similar kind of products of a product which was made outside and then Indians used it but it did not work with them. So, just, you know, what are the challenges if I may ask you that we face in terms of, you know, creating that kind of product, is it the money or is it the available infrastructure or what is it? So, I think most people who comment on stuff like this, I think they are just, how do I put it, I think they're just intellectually innocent. Right, then I, and a lot of the times they just mis-perspective. Go back to Wayback Machine. It's a simple tool. Take a look at what Twitter looked like when they were eight months old. Right, take a look at what who is when we are eight months old. There's a, there's a world of a difference. You're trying to compare something that's been around for 15 years with something that's been around for less than 15 months, 10 months. Right. There's a lot of learning to happen. Having said that, we have a lot of under the hood technology that is waiting to be unleashed in terms of machine learning, in terms of recommendations, in terms of people recommendations, in terms of content recommendations. So, there's a lot of stuff that we build that companies would have taken years to build. Right, so that's perspective. Right, and that's an honest answer. I can give you an answer. Yes, we're going to work hard and stuff like that. But I just want to be honest and tell you that a lot of hard work has gone in with a team that is, you know, 1% the size of what Twitter has. Twitter has 4,000 people. We have 40 people. We're going to compare something that's been around for a decade and a half. It's something that's been around for 8, 10 months and we run two products today. We run mobile and Google. Right, so that's something for perspective. Yeah, I'm sure. So, you know, how does it feel when, you know, we hear, you know, the union ministers, Piyush Goyal and, you know, Mr. Navishankar Prasad and then the Prime Minister himself. And I was reading that, you know, cricketers, Anil Kumle, Javagal Srinath and many people have joined. So, you know, how does it feel or do you think it was like, like being at the right place at the right time or was it inevitable that was going to happen because you have a market, which is quite different, you know, language in itself, we have like one state is one country, one European country possibly, and that has a different language. So, how would you describe this, what has happened to Ku right now? So, we can break this down into multiple aspects, right? I mean, did we have the dreams to make this happen? We always dreamt about it. You know, we're going to create a product that the entire country will use the top most prominent faces of India will use it right from the Prime Minister to, you know, Hollywood stars to cricketers. You know, we as Indians, right? I think you'll see certain characteristics. The guy is trying to break the line. He's trying to drive fast. He's trying to get ahead. You know, and the global audience will look at it as, you know, this guy is a crazy guy. He's lacking civil behavior and stuff like that. But under the hood, the reality is we're just so aspirational, right? We have big dreams, we want to achieve, we want to get ahead and that comes out in other forms. So that is aspirational India, right? Aspirational India wants to connect with the people that they look up to. That platform has not been created. Right? We have social media that largely caters to the mode of entertainment to Indians, right? There is Facebook, there is TikTok, there's gossip platforms. There's no platform for me to connect with the Prime Minister in my language. There's no platform for me to connect with the Chief Minister of my state, right? And I speak Sikami, let's say I speak Sikami, right? Where is a platform that gets all the Sikamis people together? Where's a platform that gets all the money put into it? There's a platform that gets all the unrights together, right? So those platforms have not been built and cool is one such platform that can be used across India. So we always have the dream, right? We always have the vision of, yes, we're going to make this happen one day. Will it happen so fast? And the fact that it's really happening, you know, I've never created a product which has been spoken off by the Prime Minister. It's a matter of pride for all of us, right? You know, winning that app challenge, being at this place at the right time, like you said, you know, it's the right place, right time. I think a lot of startups have an element of luck that's dropped onto them, but they have to be prepared. I think we were prepared. I think this has been an element of luck. It has come at the back of someone else's misfortune, right? And I feel bad about it because that's a product that I really, really have tremendous respect for, right? But it's worked out well for us, right? And I cannot complain about it. As you can see, it's led to a lot of good things for us. It's created network effects that are very difficult to create. You know, the government talking about it adds such a large seal of trust to a platform like this, which depends on trust, right? So a lot of things have fallen into place. We worked really hard to get from where we started in March till now. I would never have predicted that this would have happened in February of 2021. And also, I think we're all humbled. We're extremely grateful for this. We have a lot of work ahead of us. A lot of responsibilities that we shoulder. You know, we get emails from people saying, you're doing this for the country and we're so proud of you. You know, that puts a lot of pressure on you, right? You feel like you're in the stadium and you're batting and you have a billion Indians watching you, right? Everyone has suddenly become a product manager. We get emails saying, you know, this is a bug. I'm really empathic, guys. You should have fixed it. You're doing it for India. What the hell is better than this? And I understand that emotion. He'll never get an angry email back from us because I totally get where that guy is coming from. He wants us to get better, right? He wants India to win. So that's really the emotion that's behind our startup. And I don't think any startup in the country till date has had this emotion behind them. And I don't think there's anything wrong with, you know, there are people who would say that, you know, I think there's nothing wrong with you. And, you know, just to put in perspective, mind just if you can explain to me, there was an option to tweet in other languages on Twitter as well. But you were saying that, you know, interacting with each other. So if you can further larger audience and for me, even if you can just, you know, clarify that what is the distinction between the two that you're pointing towards? Yeah, so there's a simple difference, right? One is that when you get on to cool and select a language, all the instructions and everything is in that particular language, right? Let's say that you're a creator and telling me, right? You don't get discovery on Twitter. I have to use search, right? So I will use search only when I know you. But if I'm, you know, I'll probably search for KTR or search for people that I know of in my region, right? So the famous guys get searched for and then they get followers. But what about guys like you and me? Not even you, but me. I'm a common man, right? Nobody knows me. So nobody's going to search for me, right? So I will never get discovered there among the teleguides if I'm contributing in Telugu. On our app, when you select Telugu, you're shown a list of people who are contributing in that language, right? So you're shown faces that you may not have ever seen before. But these are content creators who've been creating consistently. They have a certain following. They have a certain reaction percentage. We have an algorithm that prioritizes people basis various variables, right? So we make discovery easy for a user to find a common man that has been logged on the platform or to find the most prominent faces. So it's not difficult to find people who are contributing in that language. That's one. As far as creation is concerned, you know, we allow people to create using text, audio or video. You will see that a lot of the billion users that we talk about in India, which are vernacular and never had access to the internet and stuff like that. For them, the keyboard is a new concept. You and me have gotten used to laptops, desktops, where keyboard is an integral part of it. For them, it's very unnatural to be using a keyboard on a mobile. So voice creation is very important. So you will see that we have a voice creation button in our create. You will see there's a video creation button in our create. Twitter doesn't have any of that because the English people always used to keyboards and they're used to typing their thoughts out. So we have really Indianized micro blogging as a format and taking it for Indians. If you type something, let's say you want to write Chepo in Telugu, right? Even if you write the English form, it will come out in the Telugu text. So there's a bunch of Indianization features that we've done that makes it very easy for the native Indian language speaker to use this product. And so say I selected a particular language, say Telugu, I have selected and I'm following those people. So I won't see things if that Telugu person has been treated from English or Tamil or how does it work? But do I see everything that that person is? I see the entire activity of that person, right? Yeah, so when you, let's say you follow me, right? And I'm saying something in English, but you are following me in Hindi, right? And I created something when I was in Hindi as my language, you will see that. But if I'm creating something where my language was English, you will not see that because you made your intent very clear that you just want to follow me in Hindi, right? So we've actually made it easy for anyone who's a prominent face and wants to contribute in different languages to not flood up their field of users in other languages. Let's say the Prime Minister wants to say good morning India and he's saying it in 15 languages. If you follow him in Hindi, you will not get all his 15 coups of different languages. You will just get the Hindi coup because that's what the requirement is. The person who speaks Telugu will get his coup only in Telugu. So we're going to make it easy for people to have multi-level experiences. So if you speak Hindi and in English, we'll allow you to have a feed in both the languages and in one place. So we're going to create these modular templates that make it easy to customize the product. Okay, okay. So I actually wanted to ask this friend, but I'll ask you now, what's about this name? Cool. I mean, how did it come to you that you know, let's call it. Is there a story or just a random, I'm sure that there is a story, no one names randomly anything. So share that with us. Yeah, so, you know, we're talking about micro blogging, we're talking about communication, we're talking about messages from people. Both of us love creating brands, right, me and Avramya. So we're very cautious of creating brands that bring out certain emotions in people, right. So we love associating a brand with an animal or some symbol that people can recognize. So we wanted this to have the same emotional connected people because we knew we're building for India and India is an emotional country. So you need an emotional brand, right. When we thought of messages and communication, we said it has to be a bird. That is, that's the, that's the symbol of taking messages from one person. Twitter is not a bird by chance. We did not copy Twitter when we're thinking of birds, right, they don't have the copyright. So we wanted it to be a bird, right. We wanted a very happy color to be associated with this bird because we understand that large part of India's aspiration, aspirational, right. They want to associate with something happy and hence the yellow color. We have thought of the brand Kuhu because that's the sound of a bird, right. But Kuhu became two syllables. And, you know, when you're creating a brand for a larger India, I cannot call it Bolo because it makes sense to the guy who speaks Hindi, but it doesn't make sense in Tamil and Kannada and every other language. I cannot call it something in Kannada because it doesn't make sense to the other folks. I can't, I can't, I can't call it same because it doesn't make sense to anyone except for the English user. So when you're creating something that has to cut across languages, you have to use something that's emotional and vague to everybody rather than making sense to one particular segment only, right. You'd rather be vague to everyone. So we needed a brand which could just be the sound of something, right. So we thought of Kuhu, but Kuhu was too syllable, was too long. It didn't roll off the tongue easy. And we did not want something like, you know, this is Twitter and this is a tweet, right. We wanted something that's common between them. So we said Kuhu is still the sound, the sweet sound of a bird. And whether you use Kuhu or you go and create a Kuhu, it's the same. So that's the little story behind the brand name. You rightly said that when you're building a platform that has to cater to, you know, so many people speaking in so many languages. So it has to be a neutral word that everyone just feels it and doesn't have to mean something. So, you know, moving on to another question. So you just said that you're not in Europe because of the GDPR regulations. So when do we see you in Europe already planned? And what other things we expect from Kuhu in the immediate and the distribution? You know, our main objective is to bridge the language divide, to bring the Indians together, to make it easy for me to understand what you're saying, for you to understand what I'm saying without a language constraint. As a part of that vision, the first part is to make sure that we unite people who speak the same language. Right. And I think we've achieved that with the current format of the product. The next leg will be inter-language communication, right? Connecting with people, even though they don't speak the same language as you, but, you know, use translate. Use multi-language capabilities. You know, create better. You should be able to create longer text by creating sequenced Kuhu. You should be able to schedule your Kuhu. You're busy right now. You don't want to send it out, but you have the thought right now. You should be able to schedule a Kuhu and say, send this out at 7pm. I've got the thought right now. I've made note of it, but I want to send it out at 7pm. Right. So like that, we have a whole lot of features that we have in mind. You know, there's going to be Kuhu live, there's going to be Kuhu chat rooms. There's just so many things in mind with such a small team. So, you know, our priority right now is just to go ahead, hire, create a large, great team that can, you know, realize all these dreams. And what about Europe? Yeah, so, you know, there's a certain timeline to be able to, you know, comply with GDPR and Western in the process of getting the details and stuff like that. But as soon as that's done, you know, we will, we will announce a presence where I don't have a clear timeline. So, you know, coming to a different question, you know, you know, in India, we have examples of really big, if you see the taxi, you know, the taxis, the internet taxis that we use. Or in food also, we have seen some of the players who, you know, were there in the Western world, but, you know, they came here, but Indians thought of them, I mean, competed and succeeded. But then there are other examples also which have failed. There was a messaging app service which recently got closed because it could not take on the challenges. So, some work, some doesn't work. So, what do you think is your, USP obviously have said that, you know, languages are there. But if you have to compete, you'll have to really, you know, think of taking it to the next level, to outside the country as well as others. So, what do you think makes cool at a very comfortable place where you will be the next big one in this space? Because we've also seen some others who have had kind of had similar features were there but have not made that big. So, if you can, you know, just in the nutshell, tell me, what's the USP that you think will make cool stand out even, you know, if things are not, if things, you know, Twitter and the government. I think that, you know, a lot of these products that we speak of, right, they are successful because they're able to create a network. All internet businesses that we've seen in the last decade or so, pretty much starting from red bar stairs. It's always been about network creation. It's not the app, it's not the UI, it's not the design. You know, this is above the whole kind of things that we see, right, the difficult part is to crack the network. And, you know, we've had experiencing experiences in cracking chicken and egg problems. Right, what is the chicken and egg problem? Creators won't come to the user's home. Users won't come unless creators come. That's your, that's your deadlock. That's a chicken and egg problem. We've run enough internet businesses to know how to crack this. There are very few entrepreneurs in the country who made this happen. Right, fortunately, both of us have cracked chicken and egg problems in our careers earlier in the startup ecosystem. Right, so that's one, right, a lot of the, any other player who launches this will not know how to crack network effects. Will not know how do you solve the chicken and egg problem. I've seen some people trying to do this in the past and now. And, you know, they'll just copy paste the profile of the Prime Minister and put it on the app and see this guy's here and you can interact with him. That's not how you crack the chicken and egg problem. That's the fastest way to get to jail. Right, so you cannot copy paste certain things and say and misrepresent and say this person is now here because when someone comments on that person's post and the person does not respond, you left him in a very, very dicey situation. So you have people who are trying to do something like this in India even today, and it's being done wrong. Right, so unless you crack network effects, unless you crack the chicken and egg problem, you will not be able to do this and these are very defensible businesses. Right, it's very difficult to own the trust of the prominent faces that are coming on to prove. Right, whose existence goes beyond this little event that has happened. Our objective is to reach 250, 300 million Indian users using our product every day. Right, the 1 billion spike that we get from some Twitter users moving here is going to look like one small event that happened at the lifetime of our company. Right, we're trying to build something of great value here by catering to a real problem statement. And the real problem statement is that there are 60 to 70 million Karnadas in the world, Karnataka's in the world and there are less than 1000 Karnataka tweets every day. That is not close to the potential of this community and you can see that happening across every Indian language. Right, we're trying to crack that problem. For that, you need to create very, very immersive experiences into the product and that's basically what we're busy doing. It's not about the features, it's about the kind of people you get, the kind of trust that they enjoy here, the traction that they get. It's a bunch of 20 things coming together that start working out for you. You know, there are celebrities here who get almost 20x the followers that they get on Twitter every day. What they have gained over 10 years as followership, they might get here in less than a year. That is a network effect. That makes sure that that person will never ever leave this place. And if that person never leaves, you've got a million users getting access to that celebrity's thoughts every day for the rest of his life. That's a network effect you cannot emulate. So there are lots of things that are under the hood in terms of technologies, in terms of recommendations that we're going to work on. We're going to be far ahead than anyone else in the world, not just India. Okay, I wish you do that. We'll be more than happy to see you doing that. How do you react when you read headlines like Twitter, like platform 2? What do you say about it? How do you react to it? I'm a huge fan of Twitter. I think that, so again, I'm happy to share perspective. But Google wasn't the first search engine. It was the 17th search engine. It's a fact. I think what really matters in the world of entrepreneurship, where you don't start out with, you start with statements of, I'm going to solve this problem. And this problem is genuine. And I can see it and nobody else sees it. That's basically been our case. We've been talking about vernacular and the power of India, and it has to be unleashed across languages and stuff like that. We've been talking about it for a few years. And Avramya was one of the first entrepreneurs who left the transaction business and started thinking about these things. All credit to him. He's the one who did this. Because he was dealing with cab drivers when he was running taxi for short. And I identified with it because of my background. I speak Hindi at home with my mind. So I understand the language divide. So when we're creating products like this, which is for a good part of the country, it helps when people say it's like Twitter. They used to, I've read the book Hatching Twitter, and if you've read it, you know that the founders used to have a disagreement about what is Twitter. For the first few years when Twitter was in the world, I had no idea what Twitter was. Is it about what are you doing? Is it about what is happening? These are two different things. And they would always have arguments about what should we write in that text where you can create a tweet. Should we say what are you doing? Or should we talk about what's happening? Because what are you doing is about me and what's happening is about the world. So what should we stand for? So Twitter is not an easy product to explain to someone who's not seen microblogging or expression in the world. When people say that you're just like Twitter, I can understand why they're saying it and I don't take it personally. We say that we are like Twitter. There's nothing wrong in it. It just makes it easy for people to understand that while you know about Twitter, but this is something that's different. Why? Because you're solving it for you in your Indian language. It's just easier to explain. So none of these statements are taken personally and like I've said to you. I'm a huge fan of Twitter. The media doesn't talk about it, but anyone who knows me knows that I'm a huge proponent of democratizing voice and there's no product in the world that democratizes voice as well as Twitter does. I would never have access to President Obama's thoughts if Twitter wasn't there. That's a great value add in the world. We want to do exactly the same thing, but we want to do it for India. So that's where our head is at. But just a thought, so you said democratizing Twitter was about democratizing, but if you say that we're doing it for India and if it gets regionalized, it's not democratizing. It's the other way around, is it? Or am I really doing it wrong? I don't think so. So again, you know, urban users like us, we want to connect with the world, right? You talk to the normal user who's speaking the language, he wants to connect with the government. He wants to connect with his favorite star. That's favorite star is not some Hollywood actor. It's not the president of the United States. He wants to connect with his community. You have to enable that. So broader India, there's a reason why Bollywood movies are in Hindi, right? It's not like the actors can't speak English. Why is it in Hindi? Because that's what a majority of the population is. Regional movies are made in regional languages and not in English. The English movie will not make close to as much in the box office as a language movie. So that's the reality of India. So that particular Indian doesn't want to connect with the globe. He wants to connect with other people in the community and that's basically what you're enabling. I'm saying one very simple thing. India is the second largest internet population in the world after China. The internet population is going to be more than double the size of the United States. And a few years hence triple the size of the entire population of the United States. That's how large it is. You have global companies coming here for their growth trajectory because they've made their product accessible to the rest of the world. They need to show a big spike in India where you have 1.3 billion people, where you have 500 million internet users. So the world is coming here and we talk about going global. I don't understand that phenomenon. Why aren't we building for India? India is a massive market. You have enough companies that have shown that if you build for India, you can create some of the largest countries in the world. We're very focused on solving problem statements for India. There will be opportunities for us to go global when we have great technology that works across languages across the globe. There will be problem statements at that time. If there is some problem statement that everything is relevant, we will look at solving global markets. But I think what we're doing today as a product solves it for the Indian market for sure. Probably the last question, mine to you. If I have to ask you to be self-critical and tell us that these are the possible things that we lack right now and will have to be addressed or we should have thought about in the hindsight maybe now that we have so many users. What would you do? So many things. I'm sure. Any startup has so many problems. See, we're both the kind of personalities that have no ego and we're straight to the face. We'll tell you exactly how it is. I think we could have been more prepared. I think we could have had larger teams. We could have predicted exactly this happening at this time. We were working towards preparedness. In some aspects we were caught off guard and we could have been more prepared like in terms of technology. There were certain things that broke. We had OTP issues. We had people from around the world trying to access school. In some countries we were unavailable and we could have put up better messages that we're not servicing this country right now but we will inform you. So I think in terms of preparedness, given how small we are as a startup and the time we've been around I think we've been more prepared than any other startup but we don't stop beating ourselves to we could have done a better job. That's just the curse of being a serial entrepreneur saying, you know, could have done better. Won't let this happen again and we'll make up for it. We will show you one of the best products you would have seen coming out of India from cool. I'm sure and I wish that happens. We all will be happy to see that kind. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a real pleasure to understand what the product is because we've been hearing about the fame that you've got but understanding the product and what your vision is very important to understand how we are going to see the future. Thank you so much for joining us.