Koo - this bird has flown
An Indian language microblogging platform finds itself in the perfect storm. And it's not all luck.
In India, when a brand gets on the famous Amul ad series, it’s safe to say it has arrived. For better or worse. In this case, the stars seem to have aligned for the founders of Koo in a most serendipitous way. While most will say that they got lucky, I have a slightly different take.
Really successful creators can sense a tide coming. They don’t know if it will become a tsunami but they take the next step and position to take advantage of it. In anticipation. Most of us have the same ability but don’t act on our gut. In this case, the founders of Koo, saw that:
Atmanirbhar (Self-dependent) Bharat was going beyond words and becoming a thing
Bharat spoke in their mother tongue, not in English
And they decided to position for this. From the Indian Express:
The Koo website notes that only 10 per cent of India speaks English and “almost 1 billion people in India don’t know English.” The website adds that the “majority of the internet has been in English. Koo is an attempt to make the voice of these Indians heard. They can now participate on the internet in their mother tongue by listening to the views of some of the sharpest Indian minds and also speak their mind by sharing their thoughts.”
It’s important to note that the app was launched in March 2020 and in August 2020 won the government’s Atma Nirbhar app challenge, much before the current Twitter fracas broke out:
The U.S.-headquartered firm has been under fire from the government over non-compliance to block 250 accounts using hashtags related to “farmer genocide”, and about 1,178 accounts that security agencies suspect are backed by Khalistani sympathisers and Pakistan.
The meeting follows a blog post by Twitter, where it said it had withheld “a portion of the accounts identified in the blocking orders given by the government”. It, however, added that no action had been taken against the accounts of news media entities, journalists, activists and politicians. “To do so, we believe, would violate their fundamental right to free expression under Indian law. We informed MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) of our enforcement actions today, February 10, 2021,” Twitter said.
At this point a disclosure is warranted. Koo is a client of our consulting firm, Accelero. We are working with them to create better product-market fit. We must also state that we can claim no credit (sigh!) whatsoever for Koo’s surging numbers.
Back to the story. The real boost happened over the last few days after Union Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad joined Koo and started to actively promote the app.
This has led to a slew of politicians and government agencies joining as well. The related press coverage and chatter has been quite incredible. Leading to a surge in downloads.
So, is it all going smoothly. Well, not yet. The usual expected server crash happened. More seriously:
A French cybersecurity researcher, known by the moniker Elliot Alderson on Twitter, posted early Thursday that he could access personal data of Koo users, including e-mail ID, date of birth, marital status and gender. “You asked so I did it. I spent 30 min on this new Koo app. The app is leaking the personal data of users: email, dob, name, marital status, gender…” Alderson tweeted, along with redacted screenshots of the data he was able to access.
To his credit, Aprameya Radhakrishna, co-founder, seems to have managed the situation quite deftly:
> Aprameya clarified that the data that was claimed to have been leaked was actually the data that a user "has voluntarily shown on their profile". "It cannot be termed a data leak. If you visit a user profile you can see it anyway," he said.
> Alderson claimed that he checked the point before levelling the allegation and it was not true.
> To sharpen his allegation against Koo, the hacker even shared the profile page of IAS officer Sonal Goel and claimed that he could access more data than what was displayed on Sonal Goel's profile page.
> To this, Aprameya asked the hacker to contact him if he wants to help Koo in its journey to "do something for our country".
Then there are the murmurs of Koo becoming an Alt-R platform:
The fact that the possibility of Koo acquiring shades of QAnon is being discussed on Clubhouse, which is iPhone only, is kind of ironic. If you get it, that is.
One will have to wait and see how Koo deals with the current seemingly disbalanced audience mix. It can only become a true Indian platform if they are able to attract birds of differently hued feathers.
But for right now, Bharat seems to be be Kooing along.
I am a partner at AcceleroBiz LLP. We deliver growth ideas, tested for market fit, at speed.