💬 Hike: what went wrong?
messaging app shut in 2021 · Delhi-NCR
A made-in-India messaging app, known for stickers in Indian languages, built to take on WhatsApp.
$1.4Bvaluation (2016)
$260M+raised
Tencent, SoftBankamong investors
⏳ The moment: It's 2016 and you've just become a unicorn. But WhatsApp is free, already on almost every Indian phone, and all your users' friends are there. Getting people to switch messaging apps is brutally hard. What do you do?
What would you do?
What actually happened
Hike raised over $260 million from investors including Tencent, Tiger Global and SoftBank, and was valued at $1.4 billion in 2016. But WhatsApp kept growing in India. In January 2021, Hike shut down its messaging app, StickerChat. Founder Kavin Bharti Mittal said global network effects were too strong for a homegrown messenger to win, and the company moved on to new social apps.
💡 Network effects are a moat. If all your users' friends are on another app, a better product often isn't enough.
Sources: TechCrunch · YourStory