Head of Emerging Business Gaurav Jain.
Credit: Special Arrangement
To its credit, short video and social networking service platform ShareChat has managed to emerge as a unicorn with over 350 million users, despite the popularity of Instagram’s Reels and YouTube’s Shorts. This is mainly due to the company offering content in 15 vernacular languages, allowing it to penetrate into deeper untapped markets in the country, Head of Emerging Business Gaurav Jain told DH’s Anjali Jain. He also unravelled the company’s plans for its revenue growth this fiscal, which, incidentally jumped 4.3 times last fiscal to Rs 347 crore, while toning down its spend to rein in losses.
Edited Excerpts:
How has user base growth been for the platform?
We are very proud to have 350 million plus users coming to our platform for entertainment. The way I see it, there will be a billion Indians on our platform in the next five years. Because, as the internet penetrates Tier-III, Tier-IV cities and rural areas, the network effect of our platform will only become stronger. But today, we are not focusing on user growth, and that’s because we first want to monetise what we have. Growing the user base is the least of our concerns.
What are ShareChat’s monetisation streams?
There are primarily two ways through which we make money. One is the most obvious one, which is advertising. Brands of all sizes today come to ShareChat to reach out to their consumers. And this is done across categories from gaming to FMCG to media and entertainment to real estate, education, you name it, and we have it. And the second big part is what we call our live business, which is essentially creators coming onto our platform and users sort of appreciating them for the content they make and you know we are enabling microtransactions so that you can directly pay influencers etc.
What is your revenue target for this fiscal?
Our revenue has doubled since last year. In Q1 of this year, our year on year growth was 20%. In Q2, it was 35%. In Q3, it was 80%. So we’re doubling the revenue, while at the same time drastically reducing your expenses and the math plays out.
With the festival and cricket season coming, so many users will flock to our platform, and so will advertisers. I see 100% year on year growth continuing, not only for Q4, but for 2024 as well.
By when do you think ShareChat will hit profitability?
I can tell you the way things are going, I am quite confident that we will be profitable before the end of the year. If you look at any social media, global ads actually have the highest profit margin. So we are keen to build out the ads business at the same time.
We actually have cut down on marketing expenses to near zero now. And that happened in the last 12 months. And that’s because despite that, our retention numbers are fine. Our engagement numbers have gone up more. That is an important reason why I said that profitability is just around the corner. Because we have cut down on marketing. We have done great engineering work on our cloud costs. So can we make our apps smarter and faster to reduce our cloud costs. These are the biggest costs for any social media company.
If profitability is just around the corner, is the company looking to go public afterwards?
The aspiration definitely is that ShareChat will not only be the first profitable social media company out of India, but will also be the first listed company at some point. Our aspirations are definitely that, but it’s hard to commit to a timeline on that. But I can for sure tell you, by the end of the year we should declare profitability. As our country progresses with the GDP per capita and the consumption metrics increasing, we are very hopeful and confident that there will be a public listing at some time in the future.