Kavin Bharti Mittal | Founder of Hike Messenger
Greetings to all! We are back with another convincing story of a person who is the founding father of India’s leading communication company referred to as HIKE messenger. But do you know the person behind this successful application idea? How did this startup idea strike his mind? Surprisingly, we never think about these facts in spite we just follow the trend in the market. But, an entrepreneur mind always looks out for the reason and the idea behind any successful company or startup. Kavin Bharti Mittal did the same and became successful. In this article on “Kavin Bharti Mittal – Founder of Hike Messenger“, we are going to know about the founder of the world’s sixth-largest mobile electronic communication application.
Who is Kavin Bharti Mittal?
Kavin Bharti Mittal is a Delhi-born entrepreneur and the son of Sunil Bharti Mittal, the famous Indian businessman and the founder of Bharti Enterprises. Kavin studied master’s degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Management from the Imperial College London. He was also a part of the cricket team and go-kart team and a follower of Zen Buddhism.
Experience
During his graduation years in London, he uses to work as an intern at McLaren racing, Goldman Sachs, and Google whereas learning in London. During his intern at McLaren Racing, he used to help them embed an awesome technology, that would show the track flags on steering wheels, which was the plus factor for the McLaren racing and automobiles. During his final year in 2008, he founded an app called App Shark.
He additionally created a movie-ticketing application referred to as Movies Now for IOS, unitedly with movie tickets.com. The movie ticketing app received recognition by Apple as ‘One of the 10 Essential Movie Goer Apps‘. He also developed a website named Foodster to highlight popular items on the menu, while visiting the restaurant.
Origin and History of Hike Messenger
Hike Messenger, popularly called Hike Sticker Chat, was a cross-platform for instant messaging and voice over IP (VoIP) mobile application launched on December 12, 2012, by Kavin Bharti Mittal with headquartered in New Delhi and proudly owned by Hike private limited. Hike Messenger works smartly without internet connectivity and allows users to interact with messages. The application registration is done using an OTP (one-time-password) authentication process.
Within three years, Hike has grownup to become the biggest Indian web company by users—with a tally of one hundred million users. Hike provides numerous Hikemoji stickers which are user customize friendly. By July 2014, it had been the foremost downloaded application on each the Indian nation Apple app store and also the Google Play store.
A recent spherical of funding by Tencent and Foxconn has crystal rectifier to Hike being valued at $1.4 billion. The hike became the quickest Indian startup, and also the solely free application among the ton to be valued at over $1 billion. The majority of users belong to India with 80 percent of users fell under the age of 25. Hike Messenger started free voice calling over cellular networks across the globe by optimizing low voice quality using bandwidth that packs more minutes per megabyte.
Hike users additionally exchange 40 billion messages a month and pay a hundred and 20 minutes per week on the app. consistent with him, Hike can begin monetization in 2019 when having a snug vital mass on the merchandise.
How did he get the idea to start hike messenger?
The entirety of this depended on a basic insight to make the message module somewhat more fascinating. Also, right when the world was occupied with talking on Whatsapp and Facebook, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder of Hike Messenger, considered thinking of a popular and cool method of messaging. Furthermore, that is the manner by which Hike was launched on 12-12-12.
What’s more, it’d interest you to know that this application was made accessible in more than 100 nations since the time it launched. Hike relied on the massive greenbacks to launch targeted ad campaigns for user acquisition. Their most famed one was “keep your friends close”, a campaign that introduced the idea of Hike’s USP of causation ‘Stickers’ as messages inside the app.
How did the Hike Start to Grow?
The Hike is a cross-platform for instant electronic communication for Smartphones. In simple terms, it’s like this cool messenger app used chiefly for chatting, with funky and killer stickers rather than the boring smileys of the great recent days. With 90 percent of users under the age of 35, hike released a beta version for windows 10, Windows Phone 8.1, and Windows 10 Mobile. From version 5.0, it became the first social media messaging app to provide mobile payment service in India.
By February 2013, the App had started catching hold of everyone’s eye, and it casks the hell out of competitors once it had been rated the #1 App on robot Play store, iOS Appstore, and Windows Store with a 10X growth. In 2017, acquisition with Bengaluru-based startup CREO was enabled to have third-party developers.
After a successful start
Later on, the company dumped the previous super app ideas and in 2019, started looking at launching multi-specialized features for users. In may, hike collaborated with IIIT-D (Institute of Information and Technology for developing Machine learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep learning, and computer vision. After the collaboration, Hike launched separate News content named Hike news and content. by introduction Machine Learning, hike sticker chats are added to hike messenger. They also create occasional stickers and have a special pack for the LGBTQ community.
As of 2020, Hike was planning to create a smart team of employees who will develop gaming features with the new updates.
Why Hike messenger has shut down?
Hike messenger was once India’s best application beating Whatsapp by its features has been shut down. On January 6, Kavin Bharti Mittal, Founder of Hike Messenger of the eight-year-old application, tweeted that the app will start the new year with a bang by adding gaming features to the gamut and “we are announcing that we will be sunsetting StickerChat in Jan 2021. But four days later, Kavin the founder of Hike messenger Announced that “India won’t have its own messenger”.
Kavin Bharti Mittal (Entrepreneur) the founder of Hike Messenger has spent several years promoting the application and he used to believe that in the future, India will have two Leading messaging apps. Whatsapp is the one with simple messaging and the Hike is the other one with the rich form of messaging and advanced features. But with the high growth of WhatsApp in India, Mittal appears to lost his aspirations. With over 400 million WhatsApp users in India, that forced Hike to shut down.
The failure also has links with its own shortcomings. But, Kavin didn’t mention any particular reason.
Message from the story of Kavin Bharti Mittal – Founder of Hike Messenger
There could be a ton of herd mentality and few specialize in being totally different and freelance. This is often why several firms are progressing to fail. However, the correction is occurring, and that I believe the great ones are here to remain.”
Hopefully, you have added some value from the story of “Kavin Bharti Mittal – Founder of Hike Messenger“. If you find this article insightful, please let us know in the comment section.
