1. There are so many social media apps already. How are you establishing Khul Ke in the Indian market? Is there room for all?
It is true that markets worldwide are full of a wide variety of Social Media apps. But the fact also is that few offer a meaningful space, where after spending many minutes or hours a user feels that the time was well-spent.
As a matter of fact, most SM users have fruitless existence on those platforms as the actual engagement for them on such platforms is almost next to nil. It is a handful of influencers alone who enjoy the massive engagement. Khul Ke wants to encourage average users to create their own networks where their average engagement levels are much higher by using the right tools for conversation.
Also, there is a huge space for new influencers. A country of almost 130-140 Cr socially aware people, cannot have just a handful of influencers who alone speak on a multitude of topics. There are so many local social leaders, community leaders, professional leaders, and leaders with a variety of interests and hobbies across the length and breadth of India spread across 33 lakh Sq km of 29 states and 7 union territories of India in a multitude of languages.
Everybody doesn’t excel in expressing their thoughts in the same style. Everybody is not even relevant for everyone. So Khul Ke allows people to create their own little communities along language, interests, location, profession, or culture and they can speak freely to these relevant communities in a manner they can express themselves best. They can speak in their language, in short, or long, casually or formally, in text, audio, or video format, publicly or privately, and in descriptive or interactive styles.
We also think Khul Ke can be a platform that brings mainstream media news businesses and social media users much closer and aligned towards an accountable, transparent, and democratic society. But that initiative has to be acceptable to media houses. Khul Ke certainly wants to change the way news is consumed in the Social Media era.
Above all, Khul Ke wants to continuously highlight the necessity for meaningful conversations amongst people around topics that matter to them on a day-to-day basis. We are hopeful that with time and support from Indians, we will establish this as India’s first credible social conversation platform.
2. What new features are you working on to make Khul Ke attractive in 2023?
Our video-based social conversations with 360-degree approach are quite unique, it is like an interactive personal television channel for each user or community. Apart from this, the composition of five different products on a single platform makes Khul Ke very unique.
Imagine, a news comes on the News timeline on our Townhall (microblogging product), and few users reply to it on a top-of-the-mind basis. Some of them network with each other and speak to each other on Yapp (our native private messaging product) discussing the same and deciding to have a conversation on this news, to understand it better. If they merely wish to have the discussion amongst themselves, they could either continue in Yapp or move to Khul Ke’s Meet feature. If they wish to broadcast their views to anyone else who may be interested, they could create a Public Conversation on RoundTable (Our audio or video-based social conversations product). They could create snippets from either the meet or the RoundTable and post them on Snip-It (our short-video timelines product).
All their needs are met on a single, powerful platform. It’s the first true super-app, where each product is our own, developed in India by young Indian techies, and funded entirely by Indian Investors.
3. What kind of newer experiences will Khul Ke bring to the audience and who would you consider as competition?
Khul Ke will bring the experience of higher per-day engagement for active user networks and leadership opportunities for a far larger number of users across wider sets of communities. Khul Ke users could experience News in an interactive manner if the News Media Houses agree to collaborate with us.
4. What is the current user base and how are you planning on growing it?
Khul Ke is yet to be launched formally. We have been in the testing phase since March 2022. And we hope to launch the platform very soon. During the test phase itself, because the platform content on TownHall, Snip-It, and RoundTable is accessible without the need for registration, therefore there are 1.5-2 Lakh Users at the moment, but only 5000-6000 people have registered.
5. What's the biggest lesson you've learned since founding App Khul Ke?
Believe in your ideas and execute them into reality. Simplify the presentation every day and highlight use cases for each community.
