ShareChat Chatrooms: How we built Bharat’s largest voice-based hangout destination
Written by Nishad Shah, Sameer Gupta, Mithun Madhusudan
When A16Z, one of the marquee investors in the US tech ecosystem, came out with its “Social strikes back” thesis last year, it set off a flutter amongst investors and entrepreneurs in the US. The narrative marked a reprise in the consumer social category, something that everyone had considered to be saturated and mature for anyone beyond Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat in the US. When the Clubhouse wave hit with its new model of live audio and social, everyone started questioning why consumer social had been left for dead as a category.
Observers of the Indian and Chinese tech ecosystems however, would have known for a while that consumer social was anything but dead. New models of social interactions were continuously tested and iterated on for the billions of new internet audiences in China and India. When Clubhouse was launched in the US for iOS in March 2020, we at ShareChat were also putting the final touches on our live audio product around the same time.
After launching in April 2020, we grew quickly to become the largest live audio product in the country, with 1.2 billion minutes being streamed on our platform monthly. We quickly realised that creator gratification was an essential part of our product, and moved on to launch virtual gifting features in chatrooms. Since launching chatrooms a year back, we have completed the full cycle of engagement and monetisation of the product. We are growing usage and revenue fast, a testament to the speed of execution of the team.
Today ShareChat is consistently in the top 5 in the highest-grossing apps on Play Store.
We’ve seen a whole lot of interesting use-cases here — from users having Satsangs to Antakshari, even celebrating birthdays at midnight. We have seen NRIs join chatrooms to connect with folks from their hometowns at a time when travel was not possible. We have also witnessed people sharing their emotional stories about the pandemic with a group of strangers that they just met, and many many more that we are yet to enable.
So how did this come about?
In Feb 2020, countries all around the world were enforcing lockdowns due to the growing threat of the pandemic. We figured if the same happened in India, people would be stuck in their homes for a long time and would need to connect with other people. ShareChat’s goal is to build meaningful social connections, and it was required to build a solution to offer our community a way to overcome the lockdown negativity. The idea was conceived and we released the chatrooms feature in April 2020, within a month of ideation. With our understanding of Indian internet consumption, we were confident that live audio would enhance spontaneity and engagement among our community, without intruding or forcing people to stare at their screens. Two specific friction points that the product removed for the user community
- Conversation is audio-based not text-based, which automatically makes it more understandable and engaging
- Audio also removes the friction of ‘getting ready for the camera’ that creators on other platforms are used to doing. This makes it easier for both men and women to participate in the conversation.
Chatroom is a complex product because of its live format, social nature and multiple user types. Broadly, we look at the chatroom user community in three parts:
- Chatroom creators or Hosts
- Audio speakers
- Passive listeners
The host is the most critical part of this equation, as he/she is responsible for controlling the conversation and making sure people stay engaged. Audio speakers are the more engaged consumers, who take the initiative to request for a speaker position and share their stories, talents with the larger audience. Passive listeners are more likely to be window-shoppers, consuming content without any contribution. Each group has different motivations and their needs have to be solved separately.
Post-launch journey
Post launch, we were focused on understanding emergent user behaviors and establishing PMF for the product. A brief snapshot of the last year:
The biggest roadblock we faced initially was moderation — live audio abuse is hard to moderate, especially in native Indian languages. We built our own systems for dealing with the same, grounding it in two philosophies 1) empowering the host as much as possible, to take actions on abusers immediately 2) stricter actions taken by the platform for repeat offenders. Once abuse was under control, we started focusing again on scaling the product and growing retention.
The other big problem we faced was in deciding the feed ranking. Audio products are still in their infancy, and there are no precedences on what users look for while choosing a chatroom.
We broadly use Chatroom names, popularity of the chatrooms, and heuristics of audio activity to determine the right order for the chatrooms. Over time, we will also personalise this experience using our learnings about the user from her interactions with posts on the ShareChat Trending Feed
Once we saw initial user engagement and time spent kicking off, and understood that host gratification was an important part of making the product sustainable, we shifted gears and decided to build features that would enable hosts to monetise.
Monetisation
The chatroom host is at the center of the entire chatroom experience. He/she is responsible for making the conversations engaging, interacting with users, helping them build a strong affinity towards the chatroom and ensuring decorum. Considering that so much work goes into running the chatroom, monetisation becomes a crucial lever to reward and retain top hosts and also attract new hosts.
To enable monetisation for hosts, we launched virtual gifting in September last year. Since then, host earnings have been on an exponential trajectory.
Launching virtual gifting was not the only reason for this revenue growth. We needed to make ensure that we have the right features to incentivise gifting. But which features would these be?
Keeping in mind prominent user behaviors like having fun together, showing voice talents, we launched Chatroom Battles (audio version of duet challenge), Levels (gamification) and a host of other features. These features enhance user experience in a number of ways. E.g. During the Indian premium cricket season, we saw chatrooms duelling with each other over their fandom for their teams using Battles. At other times, we saw Antakshari duels between chatrooms.
A few myths that the monetisation experience has busted:
- Tier 2+ India does not have monetisation potential → ‘Bharat’ is not just a DAU farm. The monthly revenue per paying user is off the charts.
- Virtual gifting works in China, but not in India → Not anymore.
Road Ahead -
Most products start focused and small (Reddit — Programming/engineering, Amazon — books, Facebook — College Campuses), so did we. Now we’ve started our journey to enable more Vertical Communities — Astrology, Radio, Talent and Devotion and many more to come. We are propelling this growth by understanding the intersection of existing users’ interests and attracting new users.
Gradually, we will continue to empower our hosts with community building(and hence monetization) products. We have realized that, success of a community is directly related to the success of its leaders. We are working on reciprocation and unique gifting based products to empower hosts to help users feel valued. We are also working on a Loyalty Program to reward our most loyal hosts and motivate them to engage more. Lastly, we are looking to leverage Gamification to help further strengthen the sense of belonging our users feel towards Chatrooms.
So when people ask “What is the Clubhouse for India”, it is important to break this down into separate problems.
- What is the live audio product for Tier 1 English speaking India? Here the fight is between Twitter and Clubhouse.
- What is the live audio product that will satisfy the unique needs and use cases for the language-first audiences (often referred to as ‘Bharat’) which form the largest part of the Indian population (and also, India’s internet population)?
The second question is what ShareChat live audio has answered. At ShareChat, we have always focused on our users first. We understand that their needs are very different from the English speaking internet users — across content generation, consumption, privacy, interactions, and monetisation.
Building products keeping these unique needs in mind is challenging because there are no existing frameworks that we can copy and expect to work. This means keeping the user at the center of everything we do and questioning all the basic assumptions of product building. If you enjoy building great products, write to us at pmhiring@sharechat.co
