Komal Mor – Dutch Uncles

ShareChat: The Social Solution for a Multilingual Nation

Komal Mor — Sat, 12 Jun 2021 12:35:04 +0000

Facebook and Instagram, among other social media giants, have altered the way we interact. In India, which is largely a non-English speaking country, social media platforms such as Facebook may have a high active participation rate, but they have failed to connect with the significant majority of the people who are unable to communicate in English. ShareChat, a Bengaluru-based firm that was formed in 2015 as an independent social media platform, was one of the first to notice this setback.

ShareChat: Decoding Communication for the Regional India

The three IITians, Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva hit the sweet spot the 15th time when Ankush stumbled upon a Facebook post inviting people to drop their phone numbers if they wish to be part of a Sachin Tendulkar fan group on WhatsApp. What intrigued him was the fact that when Facebook was witnessing questions against its privacy policy, people were not hesitant to share their phone numbers. He created 10 WhatsApp groups with 100 participants each. An hour later, the groups were filled with notifications about Sachin Tendulkar, but the content was in their regional language. They concluded that WhatsApp helped them to share regional content, but there was no exclusive platform that organically provided content in their mother-tongue.

After some research, the trio discovered that out of 350 million smartphone users in India, 100-120 millions prefer their content in English; however, the remaining users preferred content in their vernacular language. This data was expected to reach 199 million for English users and 536 million for Indian language users in 2021. This knowledge made them realise the need of creating a platform which exclusively addressed and generated content for the regional audience in India. This regional audience mostly resided in the non-metro cities and the content they preferred was very different from the metro cities residents.

In 2014, they started working on an app, gathered data and conducted a user based research for almost 11 months, and finally ShareChat was launched. Given India’s rich linguistic diversity, ShareChat was the key to fill a void left by English centric social apps, through an app designed specifically to entertain the regional audience.

“Vocal for the local”

The first version of the app was launched in December 2014 under the parent company Mohalla Technologies Pvt Ltd. They wanted to analyse how the audience would respond to the app, so that they could work on the changes further. The trio noticed an unusual activity from the users. Almost 90 per cent of the users chose to operate in English, but their engagement rate was immensely low. On the other hand, the remaining 10 per cent chose to operate in a regional language but their engagement rate was much higher. They concluded that people chose English as a language due their aspirational value and not based on their comfort and hence due to minimal knowledge of this language, the engagement rate was quite low. Therefore, they decided to scrap English as one of their choices and relaunched the app in October 2015.

The app which was built thereafter, immensely focused on just feeding its customers with content in their chosen language since the main reason why the app was introduced was to provide content only. The app was supported in four languages excluding English. The content could range from memes to GIFs to videos and the list goes on. When this content was shared on WhatsApp, it would be delivered with a watermark saying “this content is shared by ShareChat” along with a link to download ShareChat. This algorithm helped the app grow organically and initiated installs when the app was just launched.

In no time, the app had almost one lakh downloads within the next two months as the app leveraged traction through WhatsApp. The average engagement time on the app skyrocketed and the demand for new and better versions of the app were also soaring.

How ShareChat Brought about Much-Needed Customisation

ShareChat, when launched, was a chatbot based app to facilitate content as per users’ request. The app later came in many versions to personalise its content with a motive of increasing the engagement rate and moreover cater to the wider needs of its audience. The app now has 15 different languages, excluding English, and has evolved from a content sharing to a content generating app. The purpose of ShareChat was not just limited to “share and chat” but went far beyond for its users. Due to customers demand, in 2016, the app allowed customers not just to share content but to create it as well, when it launched a User Generated Content (UGC) in its system to boost its reach.

But there was a big hurdle that the company had to overcome – Internet connectivity. The target audience for this app were simply the internet consumers of tier II, III and IV cities. Back in 2015, Internet connections were not as advanced as they are now and the users lacked the range they needed to access content in no time. Therefore, the founders decided to build a similar bi-directional architecture which allowed customers to send messages and built the app in such a way that people even in the low-connectivity areas could use their app.

One of the driving points for ShareChat to become a success within the first few years of its launch, was the fact that Reliance Jio had slashed its prices and offered 4G services at dirt cheap prices as low as $3 a month for 1 GB data every day. This solved the problem of low connectivity in smaller regions in one go, paving the way for ShareChat’s success.

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ShareChat was started with a vision to make users comfortable in the digital space without worrying about English literacy.

Why Does ShareChat Stand out?

For starters, the app builds a platform to close a gap within regional communities. Regional and language diversity has been India’s one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses at the same time. It is a weakness because of a simple fact that language can prove to be a barrier in voicing out opinions. Social Media provides the greatest platforms to do so. However, the most famous social media apps are the US based tech giants who do not cater to the whole of India and neglect the regional languages. ShareChat tapped on this large market and provided a “non-English” social network platform to fill the vacuum created by the English based social networking apps.

As mentioned earlier, the app was first a content sharing and then became a content generating app. It has since evolved overtime to make it easier and user friendly for the first time social media users which reside in the tier II and III cities accounting for 80 per cent of the population of the country. The app keeps introducing new features with a motive of expanding its audience.

Let’s dive into the features which made the app user friendly for the first time users.

Shake- N- Chat

This is a very unique feature in the application which facilitates unknown users to connect on the app simply by shaking their phone. This feature will connect the user to another user who is either interested in similar content or has been creating content in a similar genre. This feature certainly strengthens the social experience of the users and can lead to fruitful conversations among the unknown users

Private Messaging

This is no different from other social media apps but this feature could help ShareChat enlarge its market. Users had to resort to other social platforms to chat with say their friends or family members. Upon conducting surveys in 6 different Indian states in 2017, 88 per cent of the users wished for a private messaging feature in the application. Against this insight, a private messaging feature was introduced in the application. This did not only help ShareChat expand its market but also the engagement time in the app increased.

Create your own stickers

Users may utilize this feature to make their own stickers by pressing the ‘stickers’ button in the top right corner of any ShareChat post. Users may also personalize the sticker by using the app’s distinctive frames. The sticker is then kept in the user’s sticker pack. And it doesn’t end here; these stickers can also be shared on Whatsapp from the ShareChat app.

Post search and Repost

Post search feature intends to make searching for postings on a user’s account easier and faster. Users may do this by typing a term into the ‘search’ icon at the bottom of the home screen, and the postings that match that phrase will follow. As the name implies, the functionality will assist the user in filtering the postings in their account, limiting the search criteria.

The repost feature allows the user to re-share a post on their ShareChat account by pressing the ‘repost’ icon at the bottom of any post. Re-shared posts will appear in the feed alongside other posts, but with the original user’s username and profile photo.

Tech Giants’ Obsession with This Home-Grown Rival to WhatsApp

India Quotient was one of the first companies to invest in ShareChat in 2014 with an amount of 50 lakh rupees ($67000) for a 10 per cent stake in the company. This decision was laughed off by many, questioning if just an idea on a paper could get thousands of dollars. However, India Quotient was confident enough to invest in the company based on its idea. Madhukar Sinha, the Co-founder of India quotient had worked closely with the three founders of ShareChat and knew the potential of the brand. Hence, this decision was a no-brainer and the company kicked off with its first investment funding round.

Till date ShareChat has raised an amount of $824.8 million across 10 funding rounds. Their last Series E funding round alone raised $502 million taking the valuation to $2.1 billion.

What doesn’t come as a surprise is the enthusiasm of tech giants for the Indian market. India has become the second fastest internet growing economy hosting 650 million users online which is predicted to cross 900 million by the year 2023. Hence, they do not leave any opportunity to invest in this growing market.

Twitter has been one of the leading investors in ShareChat. Other investors include Xiaomi, Lightspeed Venture partners, Tiger Global management, SAIF partners, Shunwei Capital and many more.

Since ShareChat helps newcomers to the internet, who have no knowledge of how discovery works, by bringing the content to them, Twitter tapped into this opportunity and utilised this approach to grow its reach in regions that would otherwise be inaccessible to them and monetise new users through advertising. ShareChat is the only Indian start-up which has been invested in by Twitter, that too twice. Infact, Twitter invested more than it planned to after TikTok was banned after a standoff between India and China. Soon after that, ShareChat launched ‘Moj’, another video sharing app which reached 10 million downloads just six days after its launch. Twitter plans to make Moj international and a global rival for TikTok and hence, invested a huge sum in ShareChat to deepen its technology.

What does the future hold for ShareChat?

Google and Snap (parent company of Snapchat) are in talks to invest in ShareChat. Twitter is offering to acquire ShareChat with an aim to build a global rival to TikTok. The results of these talks are yet to be seen.

Given the fact that 9 out of 10 people in India prefer to communicate in their native dialect, the future shines bright for ShareChat. But the challenge remains; there are 22 official languages, 122 major languages and more than 1600 dialects and currently, ShareChat has a long way to go to reach this ever-growing population and widen its accessibility for its vernacular-based users.

For more inspiring stories check out our Inspire section!

The post ShareChat: The Social Solution for a Multilingual Nation appeared first on Dutch Uncles.

How CitiusTech Became a Holistic Platform for Healthcare Technology

Komal Mor — Thu, 20 May 2021 10:35:03 +0000

CitiusTech seized the opportunity of bringing a digital transformation in the healthcare sector through providing healthcare technology and consulting solutions. It is paving its way onto becoming a business which is globally relevant. The company came to the rescue of big organisations with its technology that helps organise patients’ data and drives data convergence across the healthcare ecosystem. CitiusTech has now been a leading global IT healthcare venture for 17 years now, but the question remains how the Company made itself the only unicorn venture from the whole country. This story of Rizwan Koita and his company is yet to be heard by many.

The Birth of CitiusTech

It all started when Rizwan Koita returned to India in 1995 after completing his masters’ degree from MIT, Cambridge. He started looking for jobs in the Indian market and landed himself in McKinsey and Company, a successful venture at that time and quite a reputation builder. However, life had other plans for him.

In 1999, he collaborated with an old acquaintance from IIT Bombay, Jagdish Moorjani and founded “TransWorks”, one of India’s first five BPOs. Yet, he sold this Company to the Aditya Birla Group. This call of selling the business came after Rizwan realized the inability of being able to differentiate his business among others in the crowd, and of course, the big guys like Wipro, Infosys had entered the market. And as luck would have it, he was the man who revolutionized the healthcare sector.

In 2005, Rizwan and Jagdish connected with Bimal Naik, another IITian fellow, to enter the healthcare domain. The three gentlemen identified innovative opportunities in the IT healthcare sector as it was heavily unorganised and not many IT companies focused on the healthcare sector specifically. Healthcare was one of the most underrated and unexplored sectors due to the complications that arise in coding the healthcare information. With such a large gap in the healthcare industry and the need to bridge that gap, CitiusTech was brought into existence.

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There is a need to realize a niche in the market to be a successful entrepreneur. And one change in a government regulation can give a push and create a billion dollar business out of it.

CitiusTech: From Zero to a 400 Crores Company in 10 Years

The company has built a domain centric IT business which healthcare organisations believe is a difficult and back-breaking task to execute. Being the first one in this market, CitiusTech had the first mover advantage. This advantage enabled the company to control and overtake the market and helped realize the importance of its products.

However, like any other IT company, CitiusTech struggled to attract a targeted audience to earn revenues. IT companies are often subject to security concerns and criticism. Moreover, as CitiusTech helps to organise a patients’ data, this data is very sensitive to the patient as well as to the organisation. CitiusTech focused on having the most skilled set of employees who were guided and drilled under experts. The company endeavored to build the systems to satisfy future customers with any of the concerns which can presumably occur. The company picked up its pace in the first few years and commenced to grow at the rate of 20-30 per cent every year.

Originally, the company was self-funded for nine years till the year 2014. The business ran as they wished to without any external intervention and influence. The primary market for the company was the US and not India because of its reluctance to change and the economy being loose and informal then. Hence, 90 per cent of the company’s revenues are from the US.

A Deep-Dive of the Platform: How Does It Work?

The company operates with various platforms to enable healthcare organisations to drive clinical value chain excellence across integration & interoperability, data management (EDW, Big Data), performance management (BI/analytics), data science (predictive analytics, Machine Learning, AI) and digital engagement (mobile, IoT). Following are a few of the platforms introduced by CitiusTech:

BI Clinical

This is a certified platform by HITRUST which ensures key regulations, protecting sensitive information and adhering to the industry requirements. This platform has centralized analytics for clinical, financial and operational metrics. Under this, there are various other modules such as BI Clinical-Rules Management Module (RMM), BI Clinical- Audit 360, BI Clinical- Rules Engine, BI Clinical-Analytics and BI Clinical-Compare.

SCORE+

SCORE+ is a specialized and one-stop platform for healthcare organisations to implement rigorous Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) program. This program is designed to help customers and providers with relevant information to compare health plan performances. This platform also has various modules under it such as campaign management module, chart abstraction, chase intelligence, and analytics and reporting.

FAST+

This solution provides an end-to-end Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) based platform which helps to increase the interoperability and access to patient level data. It ensures secured access of data and flexible implementation support on-cloud and on-premise.

H-Scale

It is a data integration and management platform for the Organisations and this data is the backbone of their strategies. This platform is compatible with various Hadoop distributions such as Hortons, cloudera and IBM BigInsights. This platform also satisfies the privacy and security considerations of the healthcare sector.

Medictive

This platform is another end-to-end suite of analytical tools to assist the healthcare organisations in extracting helpful insights from the data stored. It helps in making day to day decisions in operations for providing healthcare.

Perform+

Perform+ provides a solution to create, manage and monitor population health, operational and regulatory programs on a single, flexible platform with pre-built metrics. This platform helps health plans and provider groups to monitor and enhance provider performance.

The Pillars of CitiusTech’s Success

Training and certification

As the company was one of its kinds, they did not hire the employees directly from the workforce but started a referral programme. The existing employees would get in touch with other talented peers who would be fit for the job. Further, the new employees would be trained and guided within the company to differentiate them from the others in the workforce and bring a different level of sophistication within their job description. McKinsey and company also had a similar approach which motivated Rizwan to adopt for his own company as he believed it to be an effective strategy to attract and retain talent.

Client Work

The company exemplified how a business should encapsulate the projects it has executed with different clients to present actual life artifacts and case studies to potential customers.

Publications

To attract customers, CitiusTech made sure to hire enough people who can publish articles of success stories on the website and answer why to choose CitiusTech. Attractive writing and published articles can assure skeptical customers to choose CitiusTech over other companies.

Awards

The last dimension is to win awards to showcase the potential of CitiusTech to the outside world. Winning an award or simply being nominated in several awards can certainly help open doors for new customers.

These were the various dimensions that Rizwan Koita focused on to become an expert in this domain and could bring a WOW element. As he would say that many companies claim to be a “domain expert”, but none would have anything different or innovative. He believed that consistency in these dimensions could contribute to their expertise in the field. This different direction to build a business helped CitiusTech have an edge over many other companies established later in this sector, such as Health Catalyst, QuadraMed and Innovaccer, etc.

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The growth of CitiusTech is estimated to be steeper in the next 5 years looking at the relevance of its products in the healthcare market.

A Big Step towards Becoming a Unicorn

Since, United States of America was the primary market; CitiusTech got a major breakthrough after the US financial crises popularly known as the great recession, this was supposedly the best year of CitiusTech instead of being the worst one. When the US economy was shattered, Barack Obama, the then president of the US, pushed in a tremendous amount of money to rebuild its economy. He passed a law under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 called Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) making it mandatory for hospitals, physicians, etc. to implement IT systems for healthcare information and promoted the use of Electronic Health Record (EHRs) systems. Since CitiusTech was in the market for almost 5 years, it was able to build a level of trust among the potential customers and the business scaled in the US market. After this, there was no turning back for CitiusTech.

CitiusTech did have a lot of circumstantial advantages for its business to become a success. Having said that, it was also competent enough to attract foreign investments. In 2014, it was able to bring General Atlantic to invest in its company with a whopping amount of $111.25 million dollars. General Atlantic acknowledged that clinical data expertise and experience of the evolving provider, payer and life science ecosystems sets CitiusTech apart from conventional technology firms, providing a solid foundation for long-term development. Another reason for General Atlantic to invest in CitiusTech was that the company reported a growth rate of more than 50 per cent for six consecutive years since 2008.

CitiusTech: Standing in the Market

The rationale behind allowing investment in its company after 9 years was not to raise money but simply to reach international markets and to attract international talent. Rizwan Koita understood that if he wished to scale his business, he would have to allure foreign talent. Another intention behind this move was to formalise the company with an adequate number of Board of Directors since the company was headed by the founders and had international employees. An additional motive to allow this funding was to remove the general notion of the company being a “desi company”. To some extent, these objectives were fulfilled when they hired William Winkenwerder as their Chairman who was earlier a CEO at Highmark Inc. valued at $20 billion but later chose to be a chairman in CitiusTech because it had General Atlantic as one of its investors. The company is believed to have solved various problems with a single move. This strategic development certainly helped CitiusTech expand its business in the US market.

CitiusTech acquired Fluid Edge Consulting in August 2018 that was expected to increase the revenue of CitiusTech from $150 million to $175 million in the subsequent years. In July 2019, CitiusTech joined the elite unicorn club when Baring Private Equity Asia acquired CitiusTech for a valuation of $1 billion.

What Does the Future Hold?

CitiusTech is hoping to reach out to pharmaceutical and insurance companies in the near future. It also planned to expand in other countries but the challenges persist as the same approach cannot be used in other markets. The approach does not pose any clear sight to the future and might be too incremental for the company. CitiusTech however aims to explore more opportunities in the US market.

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