Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of
Facebook, recently stated that
rather than just being used for personal communication, WhatsApp is a “great
channel” to have interaction with businesses. As the Mountain View, California
headquartered company took a decision to launch video calls on Whatsapp, it
took a giant step towards fulfilling demands of its customers in India, its
largest market with
160 million monthly
active users, accounting for 16% of its total user base in the world.
Users in India are
communicating via WhatsApp not just to stay in touch with family and friends,
but also as a business tool for founders to keep track of daily operations. OYO
Rooms, a hotel room aggregator has operations in over 100 cities; its founder Ritesh
Agarwal has a WhatsApp group for every city to stay in touch with his sales and
operation executives.
As the chat app is
available in 10 local languages, its usage has even increased in Tier 2 cities
and rural areas, where farmers have groups to share agri-price and weather
updates. But in its largest market despite stepping up its efforts to sustain,
increase and diversify its user base, Whatsapp is facing stiff competition from
unicorn Hike Messenger, founded by Kavin Mittal, son of Sunil Mittal, chairman
of India’s largest Cellular operator Bharti Enterprises.
Hike was founded in 2012, and has
successfully raised $175 million in a fresh round of funding led by Tencent
Holdings and Foxconn Technology Group in August this year, thereby joining the
coveted unicorn club of startups in India with a valuation of almost $1.4
billion. This messaging app has been the fastest of the pack to reach the
milestone, in just about three and half years after its launch. It took
e-commerce major Flipkart five years, rival Snapdeal seven years and analytics
firm Mu Sigma nine years to become unicorns. Hike is also, however, the lone
company in the unicorn pack that is free and has no revenue to show. What it has, apart from the dizzy
valuation, is a 100 million user base that sends more than 1 billion messages a
day.
Arpan Sheth, partner, Bain & Company, says there are credible benchmarks like WeChat, SnapChat and Twitter to compare (with Hike). “With 120-150 minutes per user per week, Hike has created stickiness. In this business the challenge is creating high levels of engagement and Hike has shown that promise.”
Initially Hike’s early users
flocked in from Germany and the Middle East, attracted by the security that the
platform offered. According to its founder Kavin Mittal: “We
built 128 bit encryption over Wi-Fi. Germans are paranoid about security and
they simply loved it. We had a few lakh users, but none in India.”
Gradually
however, due to aggressive branding and distinct features that aren’t
present on WhatsApp, Hike has reached a position where 95% of its users
are based in its parent country – India. What’s making Hike so appealing to
Indian users? Its distinct features include sending offline messages, a hidden
mode, stickers and multilingual user interface.
Offline Messages
As this messaging app has
been built with data constraints in mind, users can send messages without an
internet connection. They can even chat if they are offline. This feature has
been useful in conditions that exist in India, where internet penetration is
not very high and speed of internet is slow in comparison to developed
economies. This instant messenger provides facility of free messaging to
non-Hike numbers too. Although these messages are limited in a month
they can be extended with user activity incentives.
Stickers, Stories and Live
Filters
A feature very similar to
Snapchat, “Stories” lets users share their daily lives with their friends
through photos and videos. These stories vanish 48 hours after being posted,
and similarly to Snapchat, allows users to see who has viewed their story as
well as offering specialized filters for photos and videos. Hike has 12 live
filters, including one that changes a user’s face to Indian PM Narendra Modi.
Its content includes 10,000+ stickers in 40 languages, themes with multilingual
user interface and an AI bot named Natasha that interacts with users.
Hidden Mode and Two Way
Wallpaper Theme
“Hidden mode” allows
Hike users to have conversations that can only be opened with
a password, while the less practical “two way wallpaper” feature allows
users to live change the wallpaper in a chat.
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