Is this app on track to become the WeChat of India?

Smartphone usage is booming in India. Photo credit: Wikimedia.

“Imagine a Hike user walks into a mall,” says Kavin Bharti Mittal, CEO of Hike Messenger. It sounds like he’s setting up a joke. “The coupons app in Hike pings you and says, ‘Hey, welcome to the Ambience Mall in Delhi, what do you want to do?’”

Talking to Tech in Asia at last week’s RISE conference in Hong Kong, Kavin outlines a day’s activities. Hike’s coupon service proposes a deal at Zara, the user goes to the store, and uses Hike payments to buy some jeans. Then he pops into McDonalds, and uses Hike to get a discount on a burger. On his way out of the mall, he gets pinged by Zara again – this time with his receipt and an invite to follow Zara’s channel on Hike.

If Kavin’s dreams come true, then Hike will look a lot more like WeChat than WhatsApp.

“That’s the world that I want to build,” Kavin says. “You can’t do that today. Given ten different apps, you can’t do it. The closest that comes to it is WeChat.”

That world is at least a few years out – but if Kavin’s dreams come true, then Hike will look a lot more like WeChat than WhatsApp.

Hike isn’t exactly a new upstart. It was founded in 2012, soon after WeChat began in China. But India is in a very different place than China was, and its messenger market is fractured between WhatsApp, Hike, Facebook, and a large population that isn’t on any chat app at all.

“People say ‘the [Chinese and Indian] markets are very similar, it’s a 1.2 billion person country’ but it cannot be more different,” he says. “The biggest difference is that there are a billion people coming online for the first time in their lives in India – it’s the first of its kind.”

WeChat now commands an unassailable share of the Chinese messaging space – but it wasn’t always like that. In many ways, WeChat’s early days were similar to Hike’s – but the comparison only extends so far.

Hike CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal.

The similarities

Like WeChat in 2012 and ‘13, Hike is facing some intense competition. WeChat faced off against Kik, Line, and WhatsApp. But it managed to hold its own against the foreign competition by creating a number of highly-localized features, from plug-ins with existing networks like QQ to features like “shake” for meeting people nearby – which quickly evolved (devolved?) into a de facto Tinder.

Hike also has a number of localized features that aren’t likely to be rolled out by globally-minded apps anytime soon. To compensate for India’s lackluster cellular coverage, for example, Hike can seamlessly switch between data- and SMS-based messaging. It also supports a wide number of Indian languages, private messaging, and includes heaps of special stickers.

Hike has a number of localized features that aren’t likely to be rolled out by globally-minded apps anytime soon.

The differences

Now time for some reckless predicting