Bharat ka Twitter

“Made with love in California” - Talk about a one-line growth hack. We had made it with love, but sitting in my co-founder’s room in Kalkaji, New Delhi. We were competing with the valley boys and how (2007-9)!

A whole decade before Koo India came Kwippy! So, Mayank Dhingra, K. A. Anand and me decided to take the rather hard plunge into the crazy world of microblogging startups by building Kwippy. We were moonlighting to build this out as we all worked in SlideShare back then. Saurabh Tuteja helped up think it through! Now, this was going to be hard, but we knew this would change our lives.

Now the basics are still the same as with Twitter; you can post snippets. However, we took it one step ahead; we had a bot you could add on Yahoo messenger, AIM, ICQ, and MSN, which would log your status messages. (Yes, that was a growth hack!) also, we had a 100% compatible API with the Twitter API back then.

So technically, our users didn’t need to come to the site to post the content, and more so could push any content through their messengers. We ran this on a single VPS on Linode and well had scale (Alexa 500 worldwide at its best). We shipped swag to our US community manager, (Matthew Phillips) who helped us growth hack it to 20K+ US users back then and well, hopefully still remembers us after all these years. We ran the search backend on sphinx fulltext search, which is still a supremely underrated piece of software today!

Of course, we didn’t survive (Twitter raised far too much money), but much of what we did was replicated (possibly independently) by Facebook and other networks. One such feature was to invite any friend into a conversation!

We did manage to get one termsheet though from a fund called Kuruvindium and nearly managed to be the first Indian startup to be TechCrunch ed!!! (Now thats another missed opportunity ;) )

#startups #growth #india #twitter #hosting #funding #notaunicorn