From hunch to hustle

A CHANCE DISCOVERY ON FACEBOOK AND RELENTLESS EXPERIMENTATION THAT FOLLOWED EVENTUALLY BECAME A PLATFORM THAT TODAY REACHES OVER 200 MN MONTHLY ACTIVE USERS

- AYANTI BERA

WHEN ANKUSH SACHDEVA decided to skip IIT Kanpur's final placement season in 2014, he wasn't chasing a grand startup dream—he was chasing a hunch. That hunch, sparked by a chance discovery on Facebook and fueled by relentless product experimentation that followed, would eventually become ShareChat, a social media platform that today reaches over 200 million monthly active users (MAU) across the country.

As a final-year student, Sachdeva used to tinker with a debating app called Opinio along with his college peers and eventual co-founders Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan. While promoting it in a Sachin Tendulkar fan group on Facebook, he stumbled across something odd: 50,000 people were sharing their phone numbers in the comment section of a post, asking to be added to WhatsApp groups where jokes and memes were being shared.

"It was bizarre," he recalled. "But it made me realize that there was a deep need for vernacular content, and no one was addressing it."

Over the next 48 hours, they created several WhatsApp groups using those phone numbers, and the result was surprising. Strangers coordinated effortlessly to share jokes, memes, and videos in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and other regional languages. The energy of this interaction lit the first spark for ShareChat.