In an exclusive conversation with NewsX as part of NewsX India A-List, Aprameya Radhakrishna, founder & CEO of Koo said that on learning over 90% of people were not comfortable with English they built a platform giving equal recognition to local languages for them to search information, connect and communicate easily.
As Koo expands its network across the length and breadth of the country, Aprameya Radhakrishna spoke about his journey, taking the big leap from the corporate world to establishing his own venture Koo. Sharing insights from his journey, Aprameya said, “After graduating from IIM Ahmedabad, I started working and understanding how a business works. With that understanding, I began to brainstorm what businesses I could run. The first problem that we solved was the cab-hailing problem. Before Vocal and Koo, I founded Taxi for Sure, which was the second-largest player in the cab-hailing market in 2015. We sold it to Ola for $200 million and that was my first entrepreneurial experience. Post that, we started thinking about what would be the next big wave. We saw that people were getting access to phones and the internet. The one thing that would stop them from using the internet was that every app was in English. More than 90% of people in India are not comfortable with English. That is when we started thinking about building something in local languages so that people can search information, connect and communicate with each other, express oneself and that is how our product got formed”.
Speaking about the necessity of microblogging in India, he expressed, “Vocal is a question and answer app. Although some of our community, which were answering questions, needed to express themselves without answering questions. This made us curious as to why they needed a separate app even although there are other apps. When we deep-dived, we saw that all the major options were in English and if you have to give a comfortable environment for people to express themselves on what is on their mind, it has to be in their own language. If you enter any community, the app converts it into their language and you can find people from the same community who are speaking the language. You will be able to create content in that language very easily including the hashtags and you will talk about things that are important to that community. That did not exist before and so to bring the voices of India, irrespective of language was a new problem to solve. We are solving the problem of connecting India on a deeper level whereas the existing options only connected English-speaking India to the rest of the world. The core philosophy of KOO is the experience we have given to users in terms of local languages and allowed them to easily express themselves in those languages. Nobody has built an app around microblogging and expression of thoughts and opinions ever before in local languages and that is what we have focused on.”
Emphasising that technology-building has undergone different stages in India, Aprameya said, “We have had the resources to build them. Internet access and technology access define who we built the technology for. Companies like Infosys and Wipro built technologies for companies outside because that is where it was needed. Next came, the English-speaking Indian where most cases were about booking tickets, searching for jobs, booking movie tickets, cabs, and buying things online. Now, is when the majority of Indians are getting access to the Internet and technology. There is no better person than an Indian to build technology for them in their own language. Once we build this, we will know how to create apps for non-English audiences as well. We will take this technology to the world, which has a majority of the non-English population, and to those who face the same kind of issues that Indian users face.”
When asked about the policy challenges, he replied that the guidelines introduced by the Indian Government are rather flexible. “Most of the social media users are behaving very well. Few people, a small percentage of them, are trouble-seekers or mischief-makers because of whom the community faces problems. The idea is to ensure that people behave as they would behave offline. As long as they feel a sense of responsibility while exercising freedom of speech, it is good enough. What you say should not harm other people’s lives. Abiding by the laws of the land is crucial and as an Indian company, we respect that.”
The immediate priority for Aprameya is to “build the team and get young talent to join us in this mission.” He elaborated, “Building and hiring, especially in engineering are important. Our user base has grown, we are close to five million downloads in India across various languages. Our primary objective is to further make it reach 100 million users in a year or so is.” On a concluding note, Aprameya advised the young entrepreneurs: “Make sure you solve a real problem so you do not have to worry about users coming.”