Koo App Shuts Down: Read Founder Apramey Radhakrishna’s Full LinkedIn Post With ‘Final Goodbye’

Here is Apramey Radhakrishna’s post on LinkedIn:

“Here is the final update from our end. Our partnership talks have fallen through and we will be discontinuing our services to the public. We considered partnerships with many larger internet companies, conglomerates and media houses but those talks did not yield the desired results. Most of them did not want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company. Several of them changed their priorities right before we signed the agreement. While we would like to keep the app running, the cost of technology services involved in maintaining a social media app is high and we had to make this difficult decision.

Koo was built with a big heart. We noticed a big gap between the languages ​​spoken around the world and the fact that most social media products, especially X/Twitter in India, are English-dominant. In a world where 80% of the population speaks a language other than English, this is a strong need. We wanted to democratize expression and enable a better way to connect people in their local languages. Most global products are dominated by Americans. We believe that India should have a seat at the table.

We built a globally scalable product in a fraction of the time that X/Twitter did, with better systems, algorithms, and a strong stakeholder-first philosophy. Koo had a 10% like rate, almost 7-10x more than Twitter – making Koo a more creator-friendly platform. At peak, we had ~2.1M DAUs and ~10M MOAUs, 9000+ VIPs, including some of the most prominent voices across various fields. We were just a few months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022 and could have doubled that near-term goal with the capital behind us.

The prolonged funding winter that hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to moderate our growth trajectory. Social media is probably one of the hardest companies to build, even with all the resources available, because you have to grow users at a significant scale before you can even think about revenue. It took 5 to 6 years of aggressive, long-term, and patient capital to make this dream a reality.

Unfortunately for us, market sentiment and the winter of funding took over. Market timing is an underestimated variable. Sometimes it can define and discount everything. Koo could have easily scaled internationally and given India a global brand that was truly made in India. That dream will remain.

We are grateful to everyone who has supported us on our journey. To our team who has dedicated thousands of hours to build this beautiful product and company, to our investors who have supported us, to the millions of creators and users who have poured their hearts into the platform and spent millions of hours consuming content, and to our journalist friends who have covered our updates for a wider audience.

Our team has been with us through thick and thin the whole way. We are very lucky to have worked with such a passionate group of people who believed in our company’s purpose. It was a long journey, over 4 years from idea to finish. We have experienced the biggest ups and downs while running Koo. It has given us the greatest professional memories and we are grateful to the little bird for that.

What we have built is truly amazing. We would love to share some of these assets with someone who has a great vision of India entering social media. We will also evaluate turning this into a digital public good to enable social conversations in vernacular languages ​​around the world. It is a very difficult and complicated technology that we have painstakingly created in record time.

Patient, long-term capital is essential to build ambitious, global products from India – be it in social media, AI, space, EV or other futuristic categories. It will need a lot more capital once the space has a global giant. And once one of these companies takes off, it cannot be left to the whims of the capital market, which goes up and down. It needs a strategic view to secure it and make it grow. They should not be treated as profit machines within 2 years of launch. They need to be nurtured for a broader, long-term play. We would like to see this long-term perspective for large bets from India.

As for us, we are entrepreneurs at heart and you will see us back in the arena one way or another. Until then, thank you for your time, attention, wishes and love.

A little yellow bird says its last goodbye…

“Aprameya and Mayank”