A desi social media app, yes I am talking about something which is hundred percent Indian and is made by Indians for Indians, ShareChat has been in the news for a few days. The reason behind that is the app’s value has reached more than it imagined itself to be in the first place and the app has gained significant fame in the last few years. Just about when the pandemic had started, the app was heavily advertised to make sure that it reaches everyone. Soon after that thousands of videos relating to meme content were streamed on various apps pointing towards ShareChat. It is a social networking app that was built by three aspiring youngsters. The aim of three people that wanted to build the company was such that they could create a social media app for memes alone.
This was the golden era in the history of memes and memes were literally everywhere. Everything we saw or felt like something comedic was turned into a meme. This was where ShareChat was introduced and it went on to become one of the most valuable social media apps in the market. Those who had invested in this app had just received a tremendous shock. This is because the stock value has almost grown by 11 percent and this might be something insignificant for many people but those people who understand what stocks are and how they rise and fall would be amazed by this. As mentioned before, it was created by three aspiring youngsters that had a vision. Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh, and Farid Ahsan, the founders of this app had a very peculiar vision with the growth of this app.
There were rumours that they have themselves developed this app and the idea was introduced in a small room back at the engineering hostel. We don’t know much about the life of these creators but we do know that the company that built this app is one of the most successful IT companies in India. ShareChat was founded by Bangalore-based Mohalla Tech Pvt. Ltd. Although the company went to the moon during its famous stages, which was during the late 2019s, it was started way back. It was started six years ago on 8th January 2015 and was released Mid-October. It is said that there were so many app releases that were ongoing at that time so people didn’t really bother about this app. But, consistency is what matters for the app.
Although the app was heavily advertised to be a meme app, it started its marketing in the gaming sector as games and memes go very well with each other. You might not know this but an entire generation of people in this era talk and use memes in their daily conversations to look cool and well informed. That’s the weirdest part because this is where our society is collapsing concerning communication. I am not saying the app fuelled this, but it did have a huge impact and no one can deny this. Be it simple cricket, football games, small games such as those that let you win real cash, stickman games and even carrom and pool had ads related to the same. Plus the ads were so genuine and funny with the autonomous fake laugh that you must have heard probably a million times in videos like these and on the famous app called Tiktok, this was the app that led almost thousands of people on the app.
It started from just 10 downloads and the rest is history. Let’s get into the details of the production behind the app and the vision. Let’s look at the databases first. The app had about 8 million people active on this database back in 2019 during its popularity and now it has about 186 million active users monthly. So, in the last two years, the engagement rate of this app has almost quadrupled which might be really surprising because it is the same app that had its videos being forwarded to weird family groups. I am a cent per cent sure you must have had a video forwarded to you where you must have seen the ShareChat logo below and people dancing or making memes in the video. Although we don’t think much about this, the 3 seconds of laughter that we get because of that is what makes this app so valuable.
Because you laughed for just about 3 seconds, you might feel the need as to why not just share this with your friends and family? And you send the same tagging to someone in your group and everyone laughs. Then, someone just like you forwards the same ahead to his other friends or family and the same thing repeats. Moreover, the person that you tagged is now curious about the app. Although you don’t know from where this content was generated, you see the logo and then try to download the app. This is exactly what is done by your other friends, now to find memes that are relatable to you so that they would take revenge. Now, this was just a casual thing that happens between all of us but did you notice something? You just advertised this content for free.
Absolutely free and the company didn’t even spend about one paise for the same and yet they got free marketing. This is where the company holds the key to its success, let’s look at this in detail. One more important thing. This app is available in about 15 different Indian languages so it might be the only app that offers such diversity. This is also another reason for the huge growth that this company got back in the 2019s because this company not only had English but also many other languages. Now, for the twist, the app as of now isn’t in English and there are no options for English and you are supposed to view the same in your local language or Hindi because this app promotes Indian languages. Let’s look into this even further.
What does social media mean for you? You might think of Instagram and Tiktok or those of you born before 2001 would consider Facebook as their reference app for social media sites. But, this is not the case. The best social media site for Indians and the internet community in India is the green messenger app, WhatsApp. If you are an Indian reading this news, you did know this answer already because WhatsApp is an app that is somehow incorporated with our phones. We don’t even realise just how much we use WhatsApp. WhatsApp is something that is considered to be the largest social media place currently in India. Bear with me and just imagine for about a moment about the weird uncle in your family group or the creepy friend that sends you good morning messages and unrelated questions.
Also, make sure that you imagine your besties and the groups that you named on WhatsApp with names like Khatron K Khiladi and Papa Ki Pariyan sending about hundreds of different memes every single day. And that weird uncle or aunty or the social activist friend that you have posting their political opinion. Where do you think all this comes from? Do you think that all of them search google for good morning messages, memes of political opinions? No. They don’t. It isn’t generated in a single day. The main power of social media is that it can forward things and make you a star or criminalize you in a single day with the power of forwarding. It just takes one second for you to do it and then if everyone takes one second to share then soon content would be available in far more quantity than it can ever be consumed.
But, we won’t ever stop forwarding or consuming content. Why? Because that’s how we are made up of. And this is exactly the reason why ShareChat has grown tremendously. It’s all due to WhatsApp forwards and people doing funny things and then these videos are shared through statuses. The CEO of this app, Ankush Sachdeva, failed about 14 times with many startup ideas and what not and this was when this idea struck him and this is where he got the idea to build ShareChat. Regarding the investments and everything, let’s look into details about this one too. The first investment was done priorly by Xiaomi themselves in the sector B developmental scheme where it became worth a staggering amount of 18.7 million dollars. Now, it has grown far more than you can ever imagine.
In fact, before I mention the latest investment, the prior investment which was made in the app that got so famous with WhatsApp forwards was about 502 million dollars. Can you just imagine how much success that is? And it wasn’t just from any investors or small scale investors that buy shares, it was with three companies which are the Tiger Woods investment company, Snapchat, and Twitter. Now it has even crossed this because the app just got about 145 million dollars from a Singapore based company called Temasek Holdings. There were two other investors too, whose names have not been revealed. Now the company is worth about 3 billion dollars. This is what success looks like.
