Koo’s user base is growing at 20-25% each month: Mayank Bidawatka
Koo Co-Founder Bidawatka noted that creators on the micro-blogging platform, many of them unknown, have managed to build followers in lakhs because of the people feed
Home-grown microblogging platform Koo is growing at 20-25% month on month (MoM) over its existing user base of 10 million. Currently, Koo is available in eight Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Assamese, and Gujarati. It will soon support Malayalam language as well.
“We are growing at 20-25% a month on our existing base,” Koo Co-Founder Mayank Bidawatka told exchange4media.com. “We plan to have a much larger community. Within a year, we will be in 25+ Indian languages,” he added.
In order to increase the platform’s credibility, Koo wants to onboard prominent names from multiple fields including politics, government, cricket, entertainment, and business among others. “Currently, we have 2500 big handles on the platform, which is quite sizeable,” he stated.
Talking about the key focus areas in the next one year, he said, “Our focus areas include increasing the language coverage, bettering the technology. As a company, we are building a team. We are getting larger and stronger. Another focus area is to increase the creator and user base.”
For Koo, the biggest language markets are Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Kannada. Being a local language-driven platform, Koo is also building an ecosystem for regional content creators. “A good part of our country doesn’t speak English. We have hundreds of languages and there are people who are very good creators in each of these languages, but they never had a nice place to speak their mind in their own language,” he noted.
The platform wants to give an immersive experience to users in their mother tongue and draw more creators from each language. “With every language we start with a lot of creators in that language to come and start posting what’s on their mind and lots of other creators start following them.”
Bidawatka further stated that the platform has features that are creator friendly. “We have a People feed on the app. When you get into the app, you have to select a language. Let’s say you select Assamese. When you come to the app, you will see there is a list of people you can follow, and these will be all Assamese-speaking people.”
He noted that creators on Koo, many of them unknown, have managed to build followers in lakhs because of the people feed.
The platform also has a feature called multi-language creation, where users can create content in multiple languages in one shot. “If I know English, Hindi, and Marathi and I wanted to say ‘Hello, how are you’ all I need to do is just go back to the English feed and hit the translation button. The same post will go to three different language communities.”
In May, Koo had raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Tiger Global with existing investors Accel Partners, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator also participating in the round. IIFL and Mirae Assets are the other investors who came on board the cap table with this round.
Bidawatka said that the funding will be used to strengthen engineering, product and community efforts across all Indian languages at Koo. With 130+ employees, the platform plans to increase its headcount, particularly on the tech side. “We will utilise funds in product development, building new technology, and Machine Learning. We don’t have fund-raising plans right now, since we are well capitalised.”
According to Bidawatka, the investors see huge potential in building a Bharat focussed microblogging platform. “They all understand the power of a language microblog and the fact that a good part of the country doesn’t speak English. Twitter largely has a bunch of intellectuals and then English-speaking folks, but a good part of the country doesn’t use it. That is the opportunity.”
Koo will launch its monetisation programme once it attains scale. “We have not started monetisation. It’s still early days. We will launch it at the right time. We will start monetising once we reach a higher scale,” Bidawatka averred.
Koo was among the first social media platforms to meet the compliance requirements of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (Rules) ahead of the prescribed date of May 25, 2021.
Bidawatka said that the intermediary rules are user-centric and is the need of the hour. “IT Rules is very user-centric. There is a need for grievance redressal mechanism. Users need a compliance officer who they can deal with. They need a nodal officer to deal with. We need to proactively look at unlawful content and manage it. 99% of the users are good, posting normal content and want a healthy internet. These laws are good to protect these 99% users from the 1% that want to create mischief.”
The Koo co-founder said that the app can be downloaded in over 150 countries today. “In terms of community, we have a presence in Nigeria outside of India. We will announce future community building efforts internationally when we plan to launch in other countries.”
In June, Koo forayed into Nigeria after the African country banned rival Twitter. The US-based social networking platform got banned after it deleted a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari for violating rules.
