Open to Congress & AAP leaders; data is secure: Koo founder to Money9

Koo has been talk of the town for a week now. The winner of last year’s Aatmanirbhar App Challenge sprung into limelight recently as top ministers made their way to Koo. The list includes top names like Piyush Goyal, Smriti Irani and Ravi Shankar Prasad among others.

Money9’s Kartik Malhotra spoke to Koo’s founder & CEO, Aprameya Radhakrishna. Edited excerpts.

Kartik Malhotra: The timing of top ministers migrating to Koo comes at a time with the government and Twitter are almost at loggerheads and your platform suddenly becomes really popular. Between March 2020 to February this year, nobody had really given much attention to Koo. Now, everybody’s hopping onto it. Has this been by design?

Apremeya Radhakrishna: Not at all. We were always building on it. We started coding for local languages in November 2019. We noticed the Aatmanirbhar App Challenge and like any startup, we just said, okay, let’s go ahead and showcase what we’ve done too. It was a four or five-month old product. But this is all serendipity. Nobody had predicted that the world would react that way to the US elections and that there would be a reaction in India as well. It takes two hands to clap. Nobody knew what Twitter would do or wouldn’t do. And then this is a moment that is good for us and we have to capitalise on.

KM: You ‘tweet’ on Twitter. What do you do on Koo? What’s the term for that?

AR: You Koo, on Koo. It’s like a bird’s sound – Koo.

KM: You’re trying to take on global social media players head on, and being a ‘Made in India’ platform, what are your plans to attract global voices, both audiences, as well as influencers on Koo?

AR: So our first aim is to be able to do India well. We take the most influential voices to everyone who wants to listen to them. What we’ve solved is you can communicate in various languages and build following in various communities. Our first goal is to go deeper and once we do that and we’ve set the playbook for it, we’ll probably start looking at going to other countries with a behavior similar to India where the local language is more predominant than English. That will be our focus. Finally our focus will be on English-speaking countries.

KM: Operationally, how does it work with multiple Indian languages? You need an audience base, you also need influencers who are speaking that language. Does an influencer write in all preferred languages one by one on Koo?

AR: So we’re not going to directly auto-translate. You can make small little corrections because auto translate is not very accurate right now. Our app will give you the translated text that you can edit and publish across all languages in one go. You will be able to do the small little tweak so that you’re not misquoted in any manner and then post.

KM: You’ve seen 4 million app downloads, but is active participation coming in?

AR: Absolutely. Out of the 4 million downloads that we have, about half of them will be active this month.

KM: When do we see Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amitabh Bachchan hopping onto your platform.

AR: I hope they are listening to you.

KM: Have there been any conversations with their teams? Is any testing going on? Is anybody  speaking to you and figuring out when to do it?

AR: No, actually we haven’t been in touch. We welcome everybody. Not just BJP but also Congress leaders or AAP leaders. We are open to all to come and embrace the platform. We are not biased at all. We are a clear and transparent company.

KM: Social media has received flak over the last few years about the concerns around data privacy, data security. What are your plans? How do you ensure users’ data is actually going to be secure?

AR: Nobody can come in and take your data. We are a little 10 month old company and we are very clear that we want to make sure that data is secure. We haven’t yet started monetization or sharing data with any companies or any businesses. So that need is not there. Even when we come to monetization, we might just choose something that is not advertising. There are lots of learnings across the world and we know what the downsides of advertising are.

KM: How do you take to the jokes and the memes on social media? Some people suggesting that perhaps the bird on your logo could have been replaced with another animal and maybe the name who could have been changed to another word that rhymes with Koo?

AR: Nope, it’s totally fine. We are a lighthearted company and we don’t really want to be so serious that we take offense to everything. We welcome people conversing about us, as long as it’s the truth. Please keep talking about us, keep telling people about us.