8th July 2020: Government’s ban on 59 of Chinese applications have given a fresh ray of hope to many innovative Indian start-ups with an instant spike in their reach, followers, downloads irrespective of challenges that covid era posed! This is being witnessed as the country coming together in becoming ‘Atmanirbhar’.
Here is a list of start-ups that have gained traction in Tier 2-3 cities:
Kuku FM
Founded in 2018, Kuku FM is a podcast platform trying to reinvent traditional radio by allowing listeners to discover new, emerging and diverse audio content in various languages, and also engage with creators. It is India’s biggest vernacular audio platform with over 5,000 hours of content in regional languages. The app houses a wide range of audio content, like audiobooks, book summaries, learning courses, stories. Over the past year, the app has seen 10x user growth and has over 1.5 Mn downloads.
Trell
As the Indian government restrains the use of popular Chinese app TikTok along with 58 others, Indian content creators rush to home-grown app Trell that also provides similar short-video making features on its platform. The lifestyle community-commerce platform has witnessed a huge upsurge in the app downloads with more than 3 million downloads so far, just after the bold decision made by India to promote Atmanirbhar Bharat. With over 40 million downloads and 20 million monthly active users on its app now, Trell observes a 25x growth within one year.
Khabri
Khabri is a podcast application with more than a million downloads, is turning out to be a great platform for creators in Hindi-speaking markets across India. With around 40,000 influencers already on the platform, the company has got over 5,000 new influences onboard in the last two days. “Influencers can join ‘Earn With Khabri’ programme through Khabri Studio App and make their channel on which they can start creating content and publish it on Khabri App. There is an opportunity to earn from day one through ‘Gigs’ in addition to regular monthly earning basis content consumption”
Rooter
In Sports, Rooter is a very unique product and has built a strong moat for its business with fans and community-driven content. India’s only and biggest User Generated Content platform for Sports and Gaming. Rooter’s unique product positioning is in Live Content Technology that allows tools like Sports commentary, Live Quizzes, Mobile Game streaming etc. Rooter offers a personalized sports feed consisting of videos, images, polls etc & Scorecards in 10 Indian languages covering Cricket, Football, and multiple other sports. Rooter has witnessed 8x growth in daily users since the Chinese apps ban.
Sharechat
A social media startup, Sharechat is an Indian initiative to share daily WhatsApp messages, status across 15 Indian languages. What started out as a sharing only platform developed into enabling users to generate content to share posters, images, audios, GIFs and hashtags.
