the Koo team plan to expand
Twitter’s Indian rival app Koo has surpassed 10 million users and is gradually closing the gap between the two platforms.
Koo was developed in March 2020 by business management graduates Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka.
Since its launch, Koo has gained popularity from the Indian government.
At the same time, US-based Twitter has clashed repeatedly with the Modi administration.
Koo allows users to share posts in English and seven Indian languages, including Hindi and Kannada.
Since February 2021, when Twitter’s conflict with the Indian government escalated, Koo has seen an 85% increase in users.
Government ministers, sportsmen and Bollywood stars have all shared posts to Koo in various Indian languages.
Speaking of Koo’s success, co-founder and CEO Aprameya Radhakrishna said:
“We came into the limelight because of Twitter’s tensions with the government, but users soon realised they can express their mother tongue only on Koo.
“Our app connects English-speaking India to non-English speaking India in a country with 700 million Internet users and that’s powerful.”
Before Twitter’s clash with Modi’s government, they had 17.5 million monthly users in India.
However, India has been consistently unhappy with Twitter over the content on its platform.
Twitter refused to remove hundreds of posts criticising the Indian Prime Minister’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis.
Tensions between the social media platform and the government also rose over the farmers’ protests in India.
A court then ruled that Twitter was in “total non-compliance” with India’s new IT rules.
Soon after, in August 2021, Twitter complied with the Indian government’s rules.
The American platform even appointed an India-based person for handling both compliance and grievance issues within the app.
It is clear that Koo has used the controversy between Twitter and the Indian government to its advantage.
Also, according to Aprameya Radhakrishna, the app has benefited from users being able to post in local languages.
Radhakrishna believes this targets 100 million users a year and is what sets Koo apart from other social media apps such as Twitter.
The CEO says the Koo team plan to expand the app into other areas where English is not the dominant language.
These areas include Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia.
According to Radhakrishna, Koo’s surge in users is just the beginning. He said:
“An Indian social media startup is taking on a global giant and has a very good chance of winning.”
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