Koo is Dead
Little Yellow Bird Says Final Goodbye
Koo, the Indian social media platform designed to rival Twitter, has ceased operations.
🚀 Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka, Koo emerged in 2020, a year marked by the TikTok ban and Twitter's clash with local regulations.
🌟 Koo garnered significant political and celebrity support. Prominent figures like Minister Piyush Goyal migrated to Koo, urging their followers to do the same. Cricketers Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, along with actors Shraddha Kapoor, Kriti Sanon, and Tiger Shroff, even acquired nominal stakes in the company.
💡 Despite this backing, Koo faced numerous challenges, including the need for substantial funding for customer acquisition, engagement, data servers, and employee salaries and a lack of a major unique proposition.
✂️ The initial user base was not sustainable. The user base plummeted by more than 60% in the past year and so did the revenue.
In response, the company implemented drastic cost-cutting measures, reducing its employee count from 400 in 2022 to just 60 and slashing salaries by 40% compared to 2023 levels.
❄️ The year 2023, often referred to as a "funding winter" for startups, saw many high-profile companies like Pillow, FrontRow, and Fipola shut down due to a significant reduction in funding and increased pressure to achieve profitability.
🔚 Koo's closure marks the end of an ambitious venture that sought to redefine India's social media landscape.
We built a globally scalable product in a fraction of the time that X/Twitter did, with superior systems, algorithms, and strong stakeholder-first philosophies .
At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and 9000+ VIPs.
We were just months away beating Twitter in India in 2022.