Super apps won’t work in India: Kavin Bharti Mittal

It has been fantastic to see the engagement on the platform. People are spending 50 minutes per day and that is pretty high engagement. What is exciting for us to see is that the demand for shared experiences is big. Given that people are spending more time in their home, they are yearning for these experiences. So, we are launching games inside the Hikeland home, as a way for people to hang out. We are very excited about bringing Ludo to Hikeland home

In our history, the average time spend has been no more than 25-35 minutes per day. Now we are looking at 50 minutes per day for the Hikeland user. So that tells us that the engagement of the product is off the charts.

We are working on it. We prioritise ludo above that because we believe users want more interactive ways of hanging out. The main experience we have at home is watch videos together. But we are not gonna watch videos every day. So we said why don’t we launch ludo. It is more about giving users diversity..of experiences inside the HikeLand home. We have already watched streaming and it does really well.. Lets see the game, lets see how it does and so we move on both there is tracks forward as time progresses.

VR is a very different consumption channel for the end consumer...and VR is more akin to consoles while we are in mobile phones. And VR device penetration in the world is very small. In India, you have half-a-billion consumers that are on the smartphone-that have access to unfettered data. Do we think about VR at all as a part of our plan? We just don’t think it is an India way at all. We just think it is a western play and a very niche western play that is slowly moving to AR. Your point of these companies having a lot of distribution...sure..which is why we have to innovate more and build something that is completely different from what exists today.. Which is what we are doing with Hikeland. We are trying to carve out a niche for ourselves.

I would like to see them execute on this. I can tell you that this is not gonna work. For a market that has such good smartphones at low pricepoints, data that is practically unlimited, customers can download 80-90 apps on their phones. The super app is not what customers want, customers want the best user experience. Now, businesses would absolutely love a super app as they can pack in more things into an application and the distribution is there, so customers can use more of their services. It is always a business first mentality when people want to build a super app as they want to control all the customers. But customers don’t necessarily want that. And you see a market like India what is the big super app that exists? China is the exception, by the way, where most apps look like super apps. Its not a customer first strategy. So far we have not seen a super app model sustain itself here in India. Could that change in 4-5 years from now? Let see.

We have revenue experiments ongoing for some time but nothing headline worthy just yet. I think we will have something by the end of the year or early next year. But it is something we will focus inside the company. It has become very clear to us that people have the propensity to pay online if it is micro transactions. The question is what is it that millions of people will pay for online. And so we are excited and hopefully soon we will have some more to talk about. We are more focused on the social and gaming spaces. We will have multiple products in these spaces that will have 30-50 million users. Can we monetise these users at a dollar per user a month? I think so.

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