ShareChat: Keeping the Regional Audience Amused.

Social networking platforms have just been around for a few decades, if not less since smartphones and the internet changed the way people interacted. People with common interests began to come together nicely beyond the constraints of language and geography with the emergence of social networks. However, most social media platforms are designed with English as the foundation, with English language speakers and anyone who know English around the world in mind.

As a result, in India and other nations where language variety is important in expressing the essence of their cultures, the necessity for alternative vernacular social networking apps was evident. SharChat decided to take advantage of this.

ShareChat was founded in January 2015 by Mohalla Tech Pvt Ltd as a social networking platform for Indian audiences. For the time being, the platform is available in 14 different languages for Indian users, including Hindi, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Odia, Kannada, Assamese, Haryanvi, Rajasthani, and Bhojpuri. ShareChat offers its customers a variety of vernacular content in areas like health recommendations, DIY treatments, weight reduction, religious quotes, and dictionaries, to mention a few.

ShareChat - What Is It and How Does It Work?
ShareChat, like any other networking platform, enables users to create, discover, and share content with one another. Furthermore, Sharechat users can track regular updates by following other users on the same platform, whether they are content creators, friends, or anybody of interest. ShareChat members are not only interested in consuming the information they find on the site, but they are also participating in its development.

In 2018, it added a number of interesting features under ShareChat Talkies, such as anonymous chat options and direct messaging, to mention a few. Other new and intriguing features are as follows:

• "Shake-N-Chat" unites two or more individuals who are interacting with content from creatively comparable genres over a personal chat at random.
• "Private Messaging" is intended to enable users to choose one-on-one contact in diverse Indian languages.
• The feature known as "open tagging" allows users to create tags and upload relevant content under these user-generated tags.

ShareChat - Business
According to a recent study, India has seen an exponential increase in the number of social media users, which is expected to reach 518 million by 2020. The subcontinent's social media user base is expected to rise even higher, surpassing 1.5 billion by 2040. Though Facebook remains the most popular choice among Indian consumers, as it is in the rest of the globe, the prospects for vernacular social media sites and content providers are also vast.

ShareChat - Founders & Team

Ankush Sachdeva
Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and CEO of ShareChat and Moj, was a BTech Computer Science student at IIT Kanpur. Ankush co-founded ShareChat in 2015 after interning at Microsoft. He worked for the company as a co-founder and CPO until being appointed to the position of CEO in 2017.

Farid Ahsan
Farid Ahsan was a BTech student who graduated from IIT Kanpur with a degree in Material Science and Engineering. He is presently the Co-Founder and COO of ShareChat.

Bhanu Pratap Singh
Bhanu Pratap Singh was also an IIT Kanpur graduate with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He presently serves as the platform's Head of Technology as well as the Co-Founder and CTO of ShareChat.

ShareChat now has a workforce of over 1000 people.

Mission & Vision of ShareChat
"We want to help folks create substantial connections and stay entertained," says ShareChat's purpose and vision statement.

ShareChat - Startup Obstacles
"One of the major issues we have is teaching the audience what a feed is, why you follow someone, why you create material," says Ankush, one of the co-founders. That is one thing that is lacking in all social networks, and it is for this reason that our audience, which is this new audience that has emerged in India, finds it exceedingly difficult to use Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat."

ShareChat - Revenue & Business Model
The content marketing community on the internet adheres to two distinct business models. The first aids in the development of a network in which the platform producers create and own the content. The second type of model, on the other hand, assists clients in creating a large portion of the content material. This is exactly what ShareChat does.

ShareChat aspires to be a successful social networking site where users may submit photographs, and videos, create content, chat with others, make friends, and do other things. However, unlike other social media platforms, Sharechat aids in the transmission of all communications in India's regional languages.

ShareChat does not charge its users in order for them to earn money. It makes money instead through adverts, payment transactions, and sponsored promotions.

ShareChat - Acquisitions
On September 16, 2020, ShareChat bought Bengaluru-based content production business HPF Films, which was the final company purchased by ShareChat until ShareChat's Moj acquired Times Internet-backed MX TakaTak in February 10, 2022. The transaction was a $700 million strategic merger between Moj and TakaTak. When the merger occurred, MX TakaTak was one of the four most downloaded short video apps and was an archrival of ShareChat. With this acquisition, ShareChat now owns two social short video services, Moj and TakaTak.

ShareChat - Funding, and Investors
To date, ShareChat has raised $1.4 billion in fundraising and is currently valued at $3.7 billion after receiving $266 million in the most recent funding round on December 16, 2021. A group of investors led this round, including Alkeon Capital, Temasek, Moore, and others. The most recent funding round was the Series Ground, which enabled ShareChat to raise $60 million from Times Internet and subsidiaries.

ShareChat - Revenue and Growth
Here are some of ShareChat's recent growth highlights:

• Over 21 million people have downloaded ShareChat.
• ShareChat has around 160 million members and a creator community of more than 50 million.
• Every day, around 5 million pieces of material are shared on this network.
• ShareChat has 500,000 monthly active users.
• ShareChat has a 4.5-star rating on the Google Play Store.
• In 2018-19, it increased sevenfold.
• Moj from ShareChat is the leader with roughly 75 million monthly average users, followed by MX Takatak and Josh.
• Monthly Active Users (MAU) for both ShareChat and Moj increased to $160 million in FY21 from $80 million in FY20.

ShareChat's revenue results in the previous fiscal year (FY20) were not very outstanding, with the company spending Rs 715 crores and earning Rs 9.4 crores. During FY20, the company lost Rs 676 crores, of which ShareChat lost Rs 329.4 crores in marketing and business development. The upcoming fiscal year's results were highly anticipated by the organization.

Now that ShareChat has released its FY21 financials, it is clear that the firm had a successful year of growth. The year 2021 will go down in history as a watershed moment for Sharechat. The company became a unicorn after raising $502 million in a Series E investment. What's more, ShareChat's revenue has increased by 754.3 percent to Rs 80.3 crore.

Competitors - ShareChat
Smartphones today are crammed with social networking and content-sharing apps because that is what consumers want to see and do. ShareChat competes with the following companies, both directly and indirectly, in this highly competitive field:

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

With Instagram unveiling IGTV and Snapchat's never-ending advancements, ShareChat faces stiff competition. It is also facing fierce competition from China's ByteDance, which is actively consuming ShareChat's market share. Furthermore, since ByteDance-owned Helo joined the market area two years ago, the country's vernacular social media arena has become significantly hotter.

Future Plans - ShareChat
ShareChat says that the application's functionality will undergo significant adjustments in the near future. Users should reasonably expect a lot more choice in terms of content forms. Users may also expect to see a lot more content creators becoming celebrities and people who become popular on ShareChat. In addition, India has 22 recognized languages and around 1600 identified dialects. As a result, ShareChat wishes to reach out to a broader range of regional audiences. What the platform does not want is to be restricted to India. ShareChat presently has over 130 million monthly active users (MAUs) and has been attempting to capitalize on TikTok's absence from India as a result of the government's ban.