KOO'S FOUNDERS SENSE big opportunity in Twitter's turmoil

Technically, it’s an excellent app, it’s rich in features, but few know about it globally

- Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis

Remember that period early last year when WhatsApp users started abandoning the app and flocking to Signal and Telegram following What sApp’s change in its privacy policy? Today, with Twitter in turmoil and advertisers turning their backs to it, Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka are sensing a similar opportunity for the microblogging site Koo that they founded in 2019.

It’s not a vain hope. They are already the world’s No. 2 microblogging site, with 50 million downloads. The others like Gab, Truth Social, Mastodon, Gettr, Parler are at about 5 million downloads or less. Technologically, Koo looks very good, especially in comparison to competitors, and has features almost nobody else does. On Google Play, it has a better rating (4.2 out of 5) than almost all competitors – Mastodon is at 2.4, Truth Social at 3.6.

Radhakrishna and Bidawatka started with the idea of doing a Twitter for all those who were not comfortable with English, and those who wanted to reach out to non-English audiences. 80% of India and the world, they found, speak languages other than English. And that language person’s voice was stuck in WhatsApp groups, which is a closed network of family and friends, not an open network like Twitter. “A lot of people were telling us to create a tool where they could express themselves in their language. They said if they do it on Twitter, nobody listens to it, they don’t get any reactions. And if they don’t get reactions, they don’t have any incentive to post further. In late 2019, we found that on Twitter, there were just 5006 0 0 K a n n a d a tweets in a day, Gujarati was 200, Bengali and Telugu were 150-200, Hindi was 20-30,000 for a 60 crore Hindispeaking population,” says Bidawatka.