ShareChat: Building a desi social network for next billion smartphone users

India’s start-up world is full of a few successes and many failures. The journey of Bengaluru-based vernacular language social networking start-up ShareChat summarizes all of it.

IIT graduates Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva, all in their 20s, always wanted to be a part of the start-up ecosystem, and after 14 failed attempts in several sectors, including building a real estate portal, a crowdsourcing platform, and a civic data platform, the trio came up with ShareChat in 2015.

“We are building a desi social network for the next billion smartphone users,” says Ahsan. “That is where the market opportunity lies.”

ShareChat claims itself to be the country’s first vernacular language social platform targeting Tier-II and Tier-III cities with about 92 per cent of the users coming from such regions.

Considering local language internet users will account for over three-fourths of India’ user base according to a KPMG report, the company is one of the most sought-after properties in the start-up space with Chinese mobile phone maker Xiaomi looking to lead an investment of $100 million in it, according to media reports. ShareChat has already raised around $24 million so far. Xiaomi is already an investor in the company, along with venture capital fund Shunwei, SAIF Partners, and India Quotient.

Indian languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Odia, Bhojpuri, Assamese, Rajasthani and Haryanavi are available on ShareChat’s multi-linguistic keyboard with the founders looking to add a few more such as Tulu and Konkani by the end of the year.

The platform is a little bit of everything from Facebook, to Twitter to Instagram, to Pinterest. “We are unique in our own self. We have an amalgamation of features from all these platforms. You can share a lot of things on our platform ranging from community posts to news, jokes to couplets, songs to videos,” explains Ahsan. The platform has a unique share of WhatsApp button and the content from ShareChat can be shared on the former on the click of a button. The founders are also following in the footsteps of WhatsApp and want to become a valuable and solid tech-backed company run by a tiny team.

However, Ahsan is quick to clarify that they are not aspiring to be the WhatsApp of India. “We do not want to be the Facebook or WhatsApp of India, but be the ShareChat of India.”

The three-year-old company already has 16 million active users on the app and another 8 million on the website. The app is currently on Andriod, and the founders will be launching an iOS version in the coming quarter.