Can Koo pull off a coup in India as the govt-Twitter spat escalates?

Praised by PM Modi himself and pitched by several other ministers, it app attracts 2-3 million daily active users and has achieved 3 mn downloads in nine months

A little yellow bird has an ambition to unperch the all-too-familiar chirpy blue one in India. And it seems to have got off to a good start.

Koo, a homegrown version of microblogging giant Twitter, has seen over three million downloads in the nine months since it was launched in April last year.

Being pitched by several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders as an alternative to Twitter, which has fallen on the wrong side of the government over the farmers’ protest, Koo has a trick up its sleeve: An expansion plan focused on tapping regional India in a big way. Be Indian, koo in an Indian language — that’s the message.

Koo is currently available in five vernacular languages — Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu and Marathi — for Android phone users. The English interface is available only on iOS as of now. The multiplicity of Indian languages that it offers is one area where Koo hopes to score over Twitter.

By the end of 2021, the company intends to expand to 25 languages, including Assamese, Manipuri, Urdu and Sanskrit.

Mayank Bidawatka (Left) and Aprameya Radhakrisha (Right)

However, so far, all the “koos” — koos are to Koo what tweets are to Twitter — that government handles on the platform have put out are in English. This includes the response of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to a Twitter blog on Wednesday, where the US-based firm has detailed its interactions with the Indian government over non-compliance of its orders to take down some accounts.

So far, at least two Union ministers — Piyush Goyal and Ravi Shankar Prasad — have joined Koo, but they haven’t given up on Twitter. Besides several ministers, Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa and Madhya Pradesh CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan are also on the platform, as is India Post.

And though Prime Minister Narendra Modi has praised Koo as one of the Made-in-India apps in a Mann Ki Baat address last August, he and the official Prime Minister’s Office are yet to get on to the platform. On Twitter, meanwhile, Modi has over 65.5 million followers and his government continues to use the platform extensively.

Koo’s interface is clean and fairly easy to follow, with some familiar features: Trends, feed, hashtag and so on. The profile page resembles Twitter’s, but the feed interface feels less cluttered. The app also segregates profiles by profession, popularity and profile descriptions — government, newspapers and channels, journalists, poets and authors, social workers/activists, business owners are some of the suggested categories.

Co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna, who had earlier launched TaxiForSure (since sold to Ola), Koo is the brainchild of the team behind Vokal. A local language content platform, Vokal is a combination of Reddit and Quora, says Radhakrishna, who co-founded it with Mayank Bidawatka.

On Vokal, experts took questions from users. “These experts also wanted to express their opinions. Microblogging is the best format to do so, but the segment lacked the power of vernacular languages,” says Bidawatka. "Twitter has very little penetration in Indian languages, so we realised the potential is much larger in the country.”

Bidawatka claims Koo is a lot more immersive than Twitter, with a better interface to find people. Once you select a language on the platform, you start seeing people kooing in that language.

Last week, Koo raised $4.1 million in funding from existing investors Accel, Kalaari Capital, Blume Ventures and Dream Incubator, and a new one, 3one4 Capital.

Taking on Twitter, however, won’t be easy — unless the government puts its might behind it. “Koo doesn’t have anything unique to be a competent alternative to Twitter, barring the fact that government bodies and faces have been vocally and visibly trying it. It seems like a short-term fad,” says Bengaluru-based communications strategy consultant Karthik Srinivasan.

Some others are, however, confident about its success. “Even if it is a Twitter knock-off, it is available in Indian languages, so it can go far,” says Jasminder Singh Gulati, co-founder of NowFloats and an investor in Chingari, an Indian alternative to TikTok. Srinivasan, however, counters that on Twitter, too, all you need is a Google keyboard to write in a regional Indian language.

Last year, another indigenous Twitter alternative had surfaced: Tooter. Though it borrowed liberally from the microblogging giant, down to a similar sounding name, it failed to make a mark. And before that, in 2019, a movement of sorts had started with people shunning Twitter for Mastodon, but that, too, didn’t last.

“The primary reason people take to such platforms is to connect with those who are otherwise not reachable,” says Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder & CEO, Greyhound Research. “As far as any platform, including Koo, allows users this room, it should do well.”

For Koo, it’s early days yet. It will be a few months before we know which bird will stay to sing.