There are now almost half a billion people online in India, with the vast majority of Indians (400 million) using mobile devices to access the internet.
Relying on this relatively new wave of internet users to gain success, India’s biggest messenger service, Hike, has garnered more than 100 million users since launching in 2012 and is now the country’s fourth most popular app.
But when people ask the app’s founder and CEO, Kavin Mittal, how the service managed to have such an impact in a short space of time, he tells them: “The only way to fail is to build things that people don’t want”.
Speaking at WIRED2016, Mittal talked up his discovery of Zen Buddhism – a school of thought emphasising the value of meditation and intuition rather than ritual worship - in making his company what it is today. This philosophy was the mantra he followed to understand, what he says is “the absolute truths in the world”, and how he thinks about life and thus the products he builds.
“What I mean by ‘absolute truths’ is if the sun is shining brightly outside, it cannot be argued; that is an absolute truth,” he explained. “However, if I say it’s cold outside, that’s what we call a ‘relative truth’; [people’s interpretation of the weather].”
Upon reflecting on "the absolute truths of the world", Mittal said it became obvious that across every single country, there’s a lowest common denominator, and that is people.
“Everywhere you go, you have people that constitute companies, governments, countries, and so on,” Mittal added. “To build something that is something people truly want, you have to have a very, very deep understanding of humanity; human truth.”
Mittal believes that there is one truth to existence, and that is a simple natural desire to make ourselves feel good about ourselves.
“When we wake up in the morning, every single thought we have and action we do comes down to making ourselves feel better about ourselves,” he said. "And what became very apparent to me first is that if you look at every single global company in the internet space… they are all trying to solve the need for us to feel better about ourselves."
In his discovery of Zen Buddhism and product building, Mittal found that there are seven needs that people require of themselves: social contact, acceptance, status, curiosity, romance, and independence.
He went on to explain that if you build a product that solves these needs and it does really well, you’ll make people feel better about themselves and the product will, therefore, have a much bigger, better impact.
“This is what defined the foundation of how we do product management,” he said. The Hike messenger app was therefore built specifically to solve the needs of people in India.
By launching the app in India in 2012, Mittal was essentially giving people these seven needs for the first time via something that was completely new to them. And there is no doubt this is the reason for its success. The app offers social contact via instant messaging, acceptance, status and romance via communication, information about the world via an integrated news tab to fulfil curiosity, and independence via a “hidden” feature that lets users communicate in secret on the app, requiring a lock code to access messages to increase privacy.
The success of Hike in India has been recognised by investors, too, helping Hike grow even further. In August this year, Hike had raised £142 million in a round of Series D funding. Led by Chinese giant Tencent, the round has led the company to be valued at more than £1.1 billion.
This article was originally published in November 2016. It has been updated to mark Buddha Day 2017.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
