App fatigue is real: Ankur Singla, Founder and CEO, Helpchat

As the toggling Indian market has it for all budding entrepreneurs, Ankur Singla’s journey speaks the rise and fall of the Indian startup market. He built a platform that addresses “Personal assistance” for millions of Indian audience ‑ Helpchat.

The platform witnesses over 50,000 transactions every day, and the app has over 2.5 million active users. At the seventh edition of YourStory TechSparks, Ankur took the centre stage to speak about “Building bundled app for Indian users”.

Building for the mass Indian user

According to Ankur, the average Indian user is very picky when it comes to using apps. So much so that they don’t even use Twitter or Instagram. He adds that the vast majority of the people in India houses over 30 apps on their phones. Hence ‘bundling’ becomes critical.

Bundling is a marketing strategy that joins products or services together in order to sell them as a single combined unit. It allows the convenient purchase of several products and/or services from one company. The products and services are usually related, but they can also consist of dissimilar products which appeal to one group of customers.

Ankur said,

The top 5-10 million users are not usually the mass users. So one can distribute their consumers into two parts; one before the 10 million users and one after that. It is very difficult to judge the likes/dislikes based on the end-user activity. Every product designer needs to understand these audience to be able to build large and scalable internet businesses in India.

He added,

If they have heard of Game of Thrones, they are not real Indian users. Indian consumers connect to apps that take pride of our Indianness, most of the product designers fail to understand their roots.

This implies that the product designers have to think straight and understand the Indian consumer market, which is evolving.

The following points need to be kept in mind while building a product for the generic Indian users:

• Accept and internalize the importance of your audience.
• Interact with your target audience.
• Personalize content for them – vernacular works beautifully and this tests a lot of assumptions.
• User demands vary from storage to battery to data- so be open to change (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs).

App fatigue is real

When building an app for the mass Indian user, keep it simple.

In India, an average user experiences over 70 percent uninstall rate by day 90. And strangely, only developers know this.

We are soon heading towards a reality that supports multiple use cases from each app.

Challenges of bundling

• UI/UX - keep it simple
• Multiple uses cases
• Cross-category

While the consumers across the world are turning digital at the drop of a hat, there’s need to consolidated all their requirements into one single app. Most of us have lived through the quote “change begins from home” and that’s the dent Ankur is filling in through Helpchat.

A big shoutout to all our sponsors - Zendesk, Axis Bank, Sequoia Capital India Advisors , Digital Ocean, Microsoft, AWS, Akamai, Target, Verisign, Kerala Startup Mission, Brand Launch Centre, Tork and Blink.