Dailyhunt has plans to launch an entire family of ‘Bharat’ apps in the near future, after the success of its nascent short-video streaming app Josh.- Founders Umang Bedi and Virendra Gupta claim that their back-end super app can churn out a new app every 42 to 72 hours but being careful about what they put out into the market.
- In an exclusive interview with Business Insider, they spoke about Josh’s expansion plans, how Dailyhunt will take on Facebook and Twitter and what the future holds for India’s homegrown local language content giant as it looks at the next frontier of growth.
“We’re being careful and choosing those opportunities, hopefully wisely, instead of flushing out half a dozen apps out there,” said Bedi in an exclusive interview with Business Insider.
According to him, things like product-market market fit, size of the market, the effort put into making an app, and other factors are weighed against each other before anything formally hits the shelves.
However, Gupta and Bedi hinted that soon ‘live’ and casual gaming may be among the new use cases that the team is edging to launch. “Think of us innovating on the fly very very quickly to drive multiple use cases for Bharat. No use case in the area of content isn’t something that we’re built or experimented with,” said Bedi.
“We want to own the mind-share, time-share, and revenue-share of local language audiences across content on a family of apps,” he added.
Aggressive growth plans for Josh
Dailyhunt was already experimenting with multiple formats before it pushed out its new short-video streaming app Josh right before signing on as an associate sponsor for the Indian Premier League (IPL).
“It took Dailyhunt a couple of years to hit 23 million. Josh did it in just a couple of days,” said Bedi.
The app saw massive growth in the first few days of its launch and has plans to double those numbers within the next 60-90 days.
Josh and Dailyhunt have the same super app at the back-end
Josh may be the new kind on the block, but at the back-end it’s built on the same tech stack as Dailyhunt.
“It’s a super app in the back-end where there’s common artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) reinforcement learning based local language tech stack, common user identity platform, common ad-tech stack and a common go-to-market (GTM) team,” explained Bedi.
Using AI inputs like time of day, usage patterns, festivals, clusters and social signals, Dailyhunt is able to categorise content — like detect whether it’s about dancing, pets, pranks and other things.
Currently Dailyhunt has a clickthrough rate of around 20%, which is considered to be the gold-standard in the industry. They claim they’re only ones — aside from Google and Facebook — to have their own ad-tech online real-time auction bidding engine.
Aside from big wigs like Coca Cola, Airtel, OnePlus, Maruti Suzuki, Xiaomi and others, Daily Hunt also has smaller brands like Dairy Day, Zophop, Dilbagh and others using its ad-tech platform.
Dailyhunt is ready to pit itself against Facebook and Twitter
Two years ago, Dailyhunt was India's largest local-language news aggregation platform before the founders thought it was time to switch gears and focus on more than just the news. “We wanted to be the largest local language platform to serve content, enable discovery, consumption and socialisation with the content,” said Bedi.
Come 2020, Dailyhunt is pitching to be a social networking platform. “We’ve recently launched a social feature where people can not only consume content but they can create, converse, comment, reposts and do all kinds of things that you can do on a Facebook or Twitter group,” said Gupta.
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