ShareChat - Entertaining the Regional Audience

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The evolution of social networking platforms only dates back a couple of decades, if not less, when smartphones and the internet revolutionized the way people communicated. With the rise of social networks, people with common interests started to group in nicely beyond the barriers of language and region. However, most of the social media platforms have usually been worked out with English as the base, keeping in mind the English language speakers and others who know English around the world. Therefore, when it comes to India and other countries, where the diversity of the languages plays a major role in exuding the quintessence of their cultures, the need for alternative vernacular social media apps was prominent. This is what ShareChat decided to tap into.

Founded in January 2015 by Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd, ShareChat was set up as a social networking platform to cater the Indian audiences. The platform for Indian users is available in 14 different languages: Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Odia, Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri for now. ShareChat provides its users with numerous vernacular contents across categories like health tips, homemade remedies, weight loss, religious quotes, and dictionaries to only name a few.

Read about ShareChat founders, funding, revenue model, competitors, and business model here with StartupTalky:

ShareChat - Company Highlights

ShareChat - About & How It Works?
ShareChat - Industry
ShareChat - Founders & Team
ShareChat - Startup Story | How It All Started?
ShareChat - Logo
ShareChat - Mission and Vision
ShareChat - Startup Challenges
ShareChat - Business & Revenue Model
ShareChat - Shareholdings
ShareChat - Acquisitions
ShareChat - Funding and Investors
ShareChat - Growth and Revenue
ShareChat - Product And Service
ShareChat - Partnership
ShareChat - ESOP
ShareChat - Competitors
ShareChat - Future Plans

ShareChat - About & How It Works?

ShareChat, much like any other social networking platform, allows its users to create, discover and share content with each other. Furthermore, Sharechat users can follow other users on the same platform, regardless of whether they are content creators, friends, or any person of interest, and track regular updates. The ShareChat users are not only excited about consuming the content they find on the platform but are also involved in the creation of this content.

In the year 2018, it launched quite a few exciting features under ShareChat Talkies like anonymous chat options, and direct messaging to name a few. Other exciting and newly launched features include:

• “Shake-N-Chat” randomly connects two or more users engaging with content from creatively similar genres over a personal chat
• “Private Messaging” is designed to encourage the users to opt for one-to-one communication in the versatile Indian languages
• “Open tagging” is the feature that allows the users to create tags and post relevant content under these specific user-generated tags.

ShareChat - Industry

On delving into recent research it has found out that India has been seeing an exponential expansion in the number of social media users, which has grown to 518 million in 2020. The social media users in the subcontinent are further looking to grow and touch the 1.5 billion mark by 2040. Though Facebook was still recognized as the popular choice among the Indian audiences as is the case with the rest of the world. The opportunities for the vernacular market for social media platforms and content providers are overwhelming too.

ShareChat - Founders & Team

ShareChat was founded by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva.

Ankush Sachdeva

Co-founder and CEO of ShareChat and Moj, Ankush Sachdeva was a BTech Computer Science student from IIT Kanpur. After Interning at Microsoft, Ankush co-founded ShareChat in 2015. He served the company as the co-founder and CPO of the company before being promoted to the rank of CEO in 2017. Sharechat was Ankush Sachdeva's 18th attempt to build a startup, and Sharechat has truly turned into a considerable giant operating in the social media space, whose valuation was last estimated at $5 bn.

Farid Ahsan

Farid Ahsan was a BTech student who completed his degree in Material Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur. He currently serves as the Co-founder and COO of ShareChat.

Bhanu Pratap Singh

Bhanu Pratap Singh was also an IIT Kanpur who completed his degree in Electrical Engineering there. He is currently the Head of the technology vertical of the platform along with serving as the Co-founder and CTO of ShareChat.

ShareChat currently has an employee strength is between 1,001 - 5,000 employees.

ShareChat - Startup Story | How It All Started?

ShareChat is based on a very generic insight. All of this all started when the co-founders observed that there exists a segment of users, who would love to express themselves but do not have a platform, and given an opportunity, they wouldn’t be reluctant to express themselves. So ideally, this regional audience has its own preferences when it comes to content consumption, which most assuredly cannot be served by social products used by the metro audience. According to the co-founders, this regional set of the audience was widely unaddressed and the market was relatively untouched until ShareChat came into the picture. This is how ShareChat was born by three brilliant minds who capitalized on a general insight to make it a million-dollar startup.

With the vision of providing great communication and then a networking platform in mind, the ShareChat founders started their journey.

The story of founding Sharechat as a startup can be traced to the year 2015, when three IITians from IIT Kanpur - Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva sat frustrated. Ankush Sachdeva had tried to found 17 startups earlier but all of them seemed failed attempts. Besides, 2015 marked the end of his college days. Companies started to come in for placements and Ankush was also in a hurry to secure a good job. Things started to get tenser for Ankush when a batchmate of his got an offer worth Rs 2 crore from Oracle. It became a piece of national news in no time and reached Ankush's family too, who also, along with his relatives, started pressuring Ankush to get a job.

Suddenly, hope came to them in the form of a Facebook growth hacker, who made a post mentioning that he would be discussing cricket and Sachin Tendulkar on a WhatsApp group, and asked people to comment on their numbers in the same group. As soon as Ankush went through the post, he teamed up with his friends, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Singh, who together wrote a code to extract the numbers from the Whatsapp post and used those numbers to form Whatsapp groups.

They used these groups primarily to research people's behaviours. Going by the groups, Ankush was taken aback by the fact that though the people in the groups were total strangers, they were bonded by cricket and Sachin, and it was in no time that they started sharing videos and memes of Sachin. This is what sprung the idea for the 5 billion dollar business for Ankush and his friends, who realised that people wanted to consume content but didn't have the idea to search for good content. Thus, they needed a solution to discover good content. This made Ankush, Farid and Bhanu sit together to form the app that was born in October 2015 as Sharechat. Here, as they targetted people from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, they had not kept English as the language, but instead included Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and more such regional languages.

The app soon started to emerge as a big hit and registered 1 lakh downloads within just 3 months. People began to love the platform, and soon Sharechat received Rs 50 lakh funding from India Quotient. In 2016, Ankush Sachdeva switched to User Generated Content (UGC) for Sharechat.

The next growth phase started in 2019 when the Indian government banned TikTok. This news came as a huge opportunity for Ankush Sachdeva and his team, who quickly worked on the TikTok idea to build a similar business model-powered platform known as Moj, which is currently among the most popular short-form video apps in India.

Next, it was the time of the pandemic, which surely made things difficult for most of the startups in India and those operating globally, however, for Sharechat, it was a boon. Yes, the Covid-19 pandemic, in fact, helped Sharechat raise its user count from 60 million to 160 million. Such a growth impressed even Google, and the search engine giant offered Sharechat $1 bn to acquire the company, but Ankush and others declined the same.

Sharechat today boasts of having over 400 million users and is targeting to reach 1 billion users soon. Courtesy, Ankush Sachdeva, who didn't sit for placements then back in college.    

Initially, ShareChat started as a content-sharing tool for the famous messaging application WhatsApp for the users who need to share more than 100K content pieces in a day. However, the platform gradually evolved successfully into a regional language-driven social networking platform.

ShareChat - Logo

ShareChat - Mission and Vision

ShareChat's mission and vision statement say, "We aspire to help individuals form substantial connections and stay entertained."

ShareChat - Startup Challenges

According to one of the co-founders, Ankush, “One of the biggest challenges we have is teaching the audience what a feed is, why you follow someone, why you create content. That is one thing which is missing in all the social networks and that’s why our audience, which is this new audience that has come up in India, finds it extremely difficult to use Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat”.

ShareChat Content Pieces and the Actions Taken Against Them!

ShareChat has taken action against around 2.85 mn contents that it received in the month of May 2022. It received over 5.4 mn user complaints via numerous reporting platforms. These content pieces have been categorised as Others (26.42%), Abusive Language (25.53%), Sexually Explicit (10.23%) categories and more. Over 11K ShareChat user accounts have also been terminated lately because they have breached the community guidelines. The user complaints have been around 5.01 mn in April 2022.  

ShareChat - Business & Revenue Model

There are two prominent kinds of business models followed by the content marketing community on the internet. The first one helps in building a network where the content material is created and owned by the platform creators. On the other hand, lies the second kind of model, which helps create a major part of the content material by the customers. This is what ShareChat does.

ShareChat believes in existing as a popular social networking platform, where users can upload photos, and videos, create content, chat with others, make friends, and more. However, unlike the other social media platforms, Sharechat helps in conveying all the messages in the regional languages of India.

ShareChat does not charge its users to earn revenue. Instead, it generates revenue through advertisements, payment transactions, and sponsored campaigns.

ShareChat - Shareholdings

ShareChat - Acquisitions

ShareChat acquired Bengaluru-based content production company, HPF Films on September 16, 2020, which was the last company that ShareChat acquired until ShareChat's Moj acquired Times Internet-backed MX TakaTak on February 10, 2022. The deal was a strategic merger between Moj and TakaTak, and was valued at $700 mn. MX TakaTak stood among the four most downloaded short video apps and has been an archrival of ShareChat since the merger happened. With this acquisition, ShareChat now has 2 social short video platforms namely Moj and TakaTak under its arm.

ShareChat - Funding and Investors

To date, ShareChat has raised a funding of $1.7 billion and is valued  $5 billion as of 2022.

Here's looking at the most prominent funding rounds for Sharechat:

ShareChat - Growth and Revenue

Here's taking a look at the growth highlights of ShareChat:

• ShareChat has been downloaded over 21 million times.
• ShareChat has around 160 million users and a creators' community of 32+ million.
• On average, around 75+ million content pieces get shared every day on this platform.
• ShareChat has an average Play Store rating of 4.5.
• It has grown 7x in 2018-19.
• ShareChat's Moj is leading with around 75 million monthly average users leaving behind MX Takatak and Josh.
• ShareChat's active users currently stand at 180 million.

Financials

ShareChat Expenses

ShareChat total expenses rise from Rs 3,408 crore in FY22 to Rs 3,959 crore in FY23.

EBITDA

In FY23, ShareChat's EBITDA margin increased from -686% in FY22 to -401% in FY23, while the operational revenue expense per rupee dropped from Rs 9.82 in FY22 to Rs 7.16 in FY23. But from -69% in FY22 to -502% in FY23, the return on capital employed (ROCE) declined.

ShareChat - Product And Service

ShareChat Learning Hub

In order to better serve marketers, advertisers, and brands, ShareChat has introduced ShareChat Learning Hub, a comprehensive certification program that is unique in its type in March, 2023.

Pinning Card

On July 10, 2023, ShareChat revealed the launch of a brand-new feature called Pinning Card, which allows hosts to increase the visibility of their chatroom sessions by pinning them themselves.

ShareChat - Partnership

GroupM

GroupM and ShareChat has partnership on August 29, 2022, to drive a new chapter in contemporary marketing. The strategic alliance will concentrate on offering customers efficiency & efficacy throughout the digital marketing ecosystem's pillars.

Dukaan

In order to help merchants on its platform work with creators on ShareChat and Moj to promote their items through live and video content, Dukaan announced that it has partnered with both platforms on September 9, 2022.

Httpool

To increase sales and broaden its market, ShareChat (Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd) has partnered up with Httpool by Aleph, a global partner of significant media platforms on November, 23, 2022.

ShareChat - ESOP

With support from Google, ShareChat increased the amount available for its Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) in November 2022 from INR 1,475 Cr to INR 2,375 Cr. For this expansion, additional options worth INR 900 Cr, or around $110.5 Mn, were added with the intention of rewarding and encouraging new workers. This step is indicative of ShareChat's dedication to promoting employee engagement and coordinating the team with the organization's long-term growth goals.

ShareChat - Competitors

Smartphones today are full of social networking and content-sharing applications because that’s what people want to see and do today. In this highly competitive field, ShareChat, directly and indirectly, competes with:

• Roposo
• BetterButter
• Giphy
• Nerdery
• Koo
• Chingari
• Josh
• Digg

With Instagram launching IGTV and Snapchat’s endless innovations, there’s immense competition for ShareChat to face. It has also been facing cut-throat competition from China’s ByteDance as it is actively eating up ShareChat’s market share. Besides, over the past two years, the vernacular social media space in the country vastly heated up after ByteDance-owned Helo entered the market space.

ShareChat - Future Plans

In the coming future, ShareChat claims that there will be major changes in the way the application functions. The users can fairly expect a lot more variety in the area of the content formats. Also, the users can expect a lot more content creators to transform into celebrities, and to see people who become famous on ShareChat. Also, India has 22 official languages and more than 1600 known dialects. So, ShareChat wants to cater to more regional audiences. What the platform doesn't want is to limit itself to India. ShareChat currently has more than 130 million monthly active users (MAUs) and has been trying to take advantage of TikTok’s absence from India amid the government’s ban.

ShareChat has already merged with MX TakaTak and the combined platform is eyeing to grow to 100 mn creators, 300 mn monthly active users, and close to 250 bn video views.

FAQs

What is the ShareChat app?

ShareChat, much like any other social networking platform, allows its users to create, discover and share content amongst one another. However, the platform is distinguished by the regional languages that ShareChat uses for the content shared.

What services does ShareChat provide?

ShareChat provides its users with health tips, homemade remedies, weight loss, religious quotes, and a dictionary to only name a few.

Who is the founder of ShareChat?

ShareChat was founded by Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Singh, and Ankush Sachdeva.

Who is the CEO of ShareChat?

Ankush Sachdeva is the CEO of ShareChat and has been so since 2017.

Who are the competitors of ShareChat?

ShareChat, directly and indirectly, competes with Roposo, BetterButter, Giphy, Nerdery, Digg, and many more.

What is the ShareChat user base?

ShareChat user base currently stands at 180 mn monthly active users.