Can Koo Be King?

Forbes India delves deep into the new bird app and its content moderation policy to find out if the migration from Twitter will stick

- Aditi Agrawal

At the height of the back and forth between the government and Twitter about the latter’s refusal to block accounts of journalists and activists, Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal publicly threw his weight behind another app—Koo. On February 9, Goyal tweeted, “I am now on Koo. Connect with me on this Indian microblogging platform for real-time, exciting, and exclusive updates. Let us exchange our thoughts and ideas on Koo.”

Within two days, the platform with a yellow bird for a logo started seeing 20 to 30 times the number of downloads it used to have otherwise. Torn in a number of directions due to the “sudden surge in the number of users”, the team has barely slept since then, Aprameya Radhakrishna, CEO, and co-founder of Koo tells Forbes India. This is the first time the 10-month-old platform had seen such “crazy spikes”. “Before this, [there were] many small, manageable spikes but no big spikes,” he says. One was when the app won the AatmaNirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge in August 2020; another when Google Play Store listed Koo as one of the Best Everyday Essentials apps from India in December.

A Twitter alternative, Koo has about 3 million downloads across iOS and Android, claims Radhakrishna. Its 40-member team has been “trying very, very hard that all users have a great experience”. The sudden growth means that the team is finding it difficult to make sure that the servers are up.