"EDITION 5"

Published: 6/5/2020

“EDITION 5”

Happy Valentine’s Day ❤️❤️❤️ We have a couple of new consumer companies in the news today who both have vernacular-content as one of their core product features but both might be looking at it from different lenses in the future.

http://bit.ly/2UL46Aa (YourStory): SimSim, the video eCommerce platform, announced a $8M Series B round led by Accel & Shunwei. I’ve previously tweeted a bunch about video eCommerce platforms and how it only makes sense when the platform has engaging content (which none of them have so far) & a high repeat userbase (who purchase more expensive items). The problem with a “vernacular-first” strategy is that you ignore the english-first population who tends to spend more on eCommerce purchases. SimSim says they will be using the money to invest in their influencer base, and they need it bad because the only way a company can build a moat in this space is with their content. My old tweet thread- https://twitter.com/anmolm_/status/1196241247955902464

http://bit.ly/2vuIFbV (Entrackr): In slightly different news, Helo (ByteDance’s competitor to ShareChat) the vernacular first social platform is considering adding English as a language to the platform. The reasons are two-fold: i) it sounds like they are pivoting to a social content + news platform and are tying up with Indian news publications, and ii) with English on a platform, they can also target people in Tier I cities. This also probably has to do with the fact that ByteDance is building an ad-network for their Indian apps and people with higher disposable income tend to prefer to use apps in english. This is very different than ShareChat’s monetization strategy of launching different apps which are more easily monetizable on top of ShareChat’s existing platform. Both platforms are very well funded, so only time will tell who wins out.

Feedback & ❤️ always appreciated

More tomorrow :) BONUS (Tweet of the day):https://twitter.com/madhavchanchani/status/1227853382393585664