Messaging is going to become the highway for the people coming on to the Internet, Kavin Bharti Mittal tells Sangeeta Tanwar.
Where is Hike's growth coming from?
The biggest market for us is Mumbai, then Delhi, followed by Gujarat and Jaipur. The demand for our messaging service is larger in lower tier cities.
People here are starved for content and use SD cards for accessing content. They plug these cards in their phones, watch the content and go back to the shopkeeper for new content.
This goes to show that there is a strong demand for content and it's just that a lot of this content is yet to be made available on internet.
If one provides a simple avenue to people to come online and offer them an experience that goes beyond messaging, there is a large opportunity for a player like Hike to become a one-stop shop for users looking for engaging content.
What does Hike offer that your competitors don't?
Hike is still a young company and in a short span of time, we have managed to get on board 50 million users who, on an average, spend more than 140 minutes every week on the application.
Hike offers unique features such as sticker suggestions, free calling and group chats.
Our vision for Hike is bigger than messaging. In the world of communication, messaging is going to become the highway for the people coming on to the internet.
In a crowded market what are the unique challenges before Hike?
The go-to market of the internet is very complicated in India. About 95 per cent of the population use prepaid connections.
For people who use data back to back, the churn is very high.
The real question is, out of the total internet users, how many are using data services on a month-on-month basis.
Most people in India are using sachet 2G or 3G packs. Despite lower data prices as compared to other global markets, data continues to be expensive in India.
So the affordability of data services is a key challenge.
For internet users in India, the average number of applications downloaded is half of the global average. This is so because downloading an app is expensive.
Each app takes up to six to seven MB, which means significant cost to the user. Also, there are issues related to limited storage available on users' smartphones.
Market trends indicate that users want less number of apps and instead want to do more and more things through a limited number of apps.
Companies like ours have to work around consumer constraints such as expensive data, limited space.
So we are asking ourselves can we, through messaging, bring use cases that are simple to use and go beyond texting.
With growing privacy concerns, what are the unique security features offered by Hike?
Hike offers users features that allow them to choose who can see their last update or their last presence on the messaging platform.
The latest update of Hike allows users to secure their chats with a password.
The idea for this hidden feature came out of an insight that we drew from tier II towns, where smartphones are shared in households. With such usage patterns there is no privacy for the user.
Therefore, the password feature offers Hike users the much-sought privacy while using shared smartphones.
Security is an important aspect for us since Hike is a messaging application that is being used by people for transferring personal messages.
What is Hike's monetisation model?
The tough part of our business is how one builds a product that is going to be used by 100 million people in a complicated market such as India.
However, coming to the monetisation model, messaging always has to be free. It is the ecosystem that one builds around messaging where one makes money.
For example, our teams are working around games and stickers and Hike will make money through the value additions it offers. History shows that every great company has first invested in building a strong product and in the process made monetisation easier.
So what would be the key focus areas for Hike going forward?
We are working towards making messaging better, faster and cheaper.
The thrust is on making the messaging experience richer and more private.
We are focused on building micro apps on the platform. With over 50 million users, we recognise that there is a need for localisation and collaboration.
Our services are already available in English and Hindi and we are going to offer users eight more regional languages.
The product strategy for Hike has ensured that messaging is embedded at its core, and is supported by new features such as free calling.
And it is around messaging that we are building other applications including coupons, stickers and news.
As a company, we keep asking ourselves questions such as how can we build applications that can be used by everyone: Are they simple and easy to use?
