With 100 mn users and counting, Mittal hits the right notes with his third app
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Hike,
the messenger app, is the latest Indian Unicorn: it has raised $ 175 million
from its existing shareholders, Bharti SoftBank and Tiger Global, and new
investors, Tencent Holdings of China and Foxconn of Taiwan, at a valuation of $
1.4 billion.
Kavin
Mittal, the 28- year- old founder and chief executive of Hike, wants to use
this money to make the app smarter. Features like e- commerce and news could
get added to it in the days to come. This, Mittal would hope, will help him
take on the onslaught from WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
Like
his father, Sunil Mittal of Bharti Airtel, Mittal is a fast talker and can mix
macroeconomics with consumer behaviour and corporate balance sheet with
consummate ease. Both believe in scale and leveraging the consumer for growth.
And both are tech savvy.
Actually,
Mittal has had a way with technology from an early age: at 15, he was writing
software code.
In
2006, during the first year of his undergraduate course at Imperial College,
London, Mittal helped McLaren Racing, the British Formula One team, embed a
technology that would show the track flags on the steering wheel. The highlight
of the assignment was a meeting with an upcoming driver named Lewis Hamilton.
Apart
from technology, speed thrills Mittal. As a child, he had racing simulators
fitted at home. Later, he was a member of the go- kart team at Imperial
College. ( He was also in its cricket team.) In 2007, Mittal did his summer
internship at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, and was
impressed with its informal work culture.
And
the next year, Mittal interned with Goldman Sachs in London. At the end of it,
he decided that he would do any other work but become a banker “because the
learning curve plateaus after a while”.
While
at Goldman Sachs, Mittal founded his first start- up, AppSpark, along with
classmate Namit Chadha to make apps for the Apple iPhone.
The
first app they launched, in the middle of 2009, was called Movies Now. It would
list all shows and feature trailers. In the US, users could even buy tickets on
it. And based on your location, it could tell you which theatre was the closest
to you.
The
app was downloaded almost 500,000 times. Mittal then planned to give it another
feature which would help theatres sell vacant seats at a discount one hour
before the show. He even pitched the idea to PVR in India but there weren’t too
many takers — the app was put on the shelf.
Mittal
next came up with an app called Foodster which told people whenever they went
to a restaurant what was popular there. This it did by converting online
comments into scores. “ But the algorithm ran into trouble when it came to
comments like ‘The lemonade is better than my girlfriend’s kiss’,” Mittal said
in an interview in early 2015. Foodster met with the same fate as Movies Now.
By
2011, Mittal knew that he had to do something that was of more value than just
movies or food. Growing up, he had seen how mobile telephony had changed lives
in India. He decided that he would do the same in the mobile internet space in
India.
He
relocated from London, leaving his course for a private pilot’s licence midway,
to New Delhi, and started work on Hike in early 2013, and rolled it out towards
the end of the year. To attract youngsters to Hike, Mittal introduced features
that hid personal chats from parents. Stickers were customised for local
markets: those available in Mumbai were different from those in Patna. A range
of coupons was made available to users.
Hike
has over 100 million users, who, on an average, use it for 120 minutes per
week. “ That makes it one of the top five apps in the country,” Mittal says
with barely concealed pride.
The
new investments are meant to give Mittal the wherewithal to close the gap with
the market leaders. In addition, he hopes, Tencent and Foxconn will give him
vital strategic inputs. “ Tencent runs the extremely popular messenger service
WeChat in China which has half a billion users, and Foxconn’s knowledge of
software, especially Android, on which India runs, is tremendous,” says Mittal.
The
two investors were identified and inducted into Hike by Mittal. Tencent had
launched WeChat in India, with limited success, in 2011; Mittal says he had
been in touch with the company since then. Similarly, he had several meetings
with the Foxconn brass which came to India regularly in search of investment
opportunities.
In
the early days, Hike was often called a Bharti Airtel app. Today, the users are
spread across service providers and more or less reflect the market shares of
the incumbents. Almost 75 per cent of our users are non- Airtel subscribers,”
says Mittal. The big question is, will Hike be picked up by the subscribers of
Reliance Jio, which wants to launch soon and has locked horns with incumbents
like Airtel? “ Absolutely yes,” says Mittal.
Watch
this space.
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