One Indian messaging app gives up, pivots to focus on team collaboration

Today’s not a good day to be a messaging app. With everyone talking about the big bucks Facebook-WhatsApp deal, it’s even more painfully obvious who are the minor players in this social media niche. One such struggling messaging app was GupShup, which threw in the towel this week.

Amidst a dozen strong rivals, GupShup’s area of speciality was that it worked nicely with SMS, plus it was a perfect multi-lingual fit for India, supporting nine Indian languages in addition to English. But it turned out that being more inclusive wasn’t the magic key to the secret garden.

New wave of enterprise messaging

Now, the startup team behind GupShup has pivoted and launched Teamchat, an enterprise messaging app focused on employees who need to stay connected when on the road. GupShup app is being shuttered.

The NextBigWhat blog notes that Teamchat allows working groups of unlimited sizes, making it a better choice for working than SMS or any other messaging app. TeamChat also has backend APIs and access points to enable integration with existing ERP, CRM, and other enterprise systems. It’s fairly minimal and mobile-only, in contrast to most online team collaboration tools.

But enterprise messaging is far from an area bereft of rivals, so the GupShup team might have jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. There are plenty of good options out there for online teams, such as Wrike, CatchApp, Convo, or Podio. Or there are more established tools like Yammer.

Teamchat is free on Android, with apps for other OSes in development.

(Source: NextBigWhat)

(Editing by Terence Lee)