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WhatsApp, an app primarily used for chatting, is helping a growing number of people hone their entrepreneurial skills.
New Delhi: WhatsApp , India’s favorite social media portal for good morning and good night messages and viral forwards, means so much more to Aditya and Gayathri Sharma from Rajasthan. It has helped them lose weight, change their lifestyles and tap into their inner entrepreneurs.
The Rajasthani couple is part of a growing brigade that has embraced an app primarily used for chatting to hone their entrepreneurial skills and make some serious cash.
Aditya and Gayathri's weight loss journey began in 2015 with a diet and exercise advisory group called 'Squats.' Since then, while Aditya, an employee of the Rajasthan education department living in Sirohi, has reduced his weight from 72 kg to 58 kg, Gayathri, 32, has lost 10 kg, now weighing 52 kg.
“I was obese and nothing I read on the internet worked. A friend suggested I join this WhatsApp group where I met my guruji JC.”
JC is short for Jitendra Chouksey, the founder of Squats, who has since created an app for the group. The app has raised $10 million since its launch in January 2016.
JC was able to build this business with little initial capital, since WhatsApp is free. “Oh, absolutely,” JC said on his social media when asked if WhatsApp was crucial to its success. “WhatsApp has been an incredible foundation for this business.”
“WhatsApp is a powerful social media tool and we use it only for good reasons like staying fit — not for sending meaningless information and TikTok videos,” said Aditya, who added that the lessons he learned at Squats inspired Gayathri to open her own gym in 2016.
WhatsApp's Big Challenge
Squats was among the 10 finalists in a startup competition organized this month by WhatsApp and Invest India, the government's national investment promotion and facilitation agency. The competition, 'Startup India — WhatsApp Grand Challenge,' was part of a startup program launched by the two entities in October 2018, aiming to inspire entrepreneurs to develop solutions "that have a socioeconomic impact on the Indian economy at scale."
avis, one of the five winners of the competition, who received US$$50,000 each, is another WhatsApp success story.
Based on the chat app, Javis is an AI-powered service for automated messaging. For example, if a salesperson in a company wants to know about their performance-related statistics, they can type in certain keywords and the platform will access the company’s database to provide the answer.
Nine months old, Javis is now earning a monthly recurring revenue of Rs 20 lakh, according to founder Parthasarathi Sinha.
Javis is able to run its in-app messaging platform because the 'WhatsApp Business API' tool allows select businesses to integrate their messaging system with WhatsApp.
According to Sinha, Javis pays WhatsApp a “nominal fee” to use the service.
WhatsApp's own attempt to monetize
While it provides a platform for multiple ventures in different ways, WhatsApp has so far failed to monetize its own popularity in India, which, with around 200 million monthly active users, is the largest market for the Facebook-owned app.
For instance, the service for media publishers to send content via WhatsApp is being shut down, while the chat app is yet to receive RBI approval to expand its payments feature beyond the one million users allowed in the pilot phase.
Additionally, the guidelines reportedly mulled by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology may force WhatsApp to crack its encryption feature, one of its key USPs among users.
The app reportedly plans to monetize its status update platform by allowing ads in Stories by next year. The app is currently ad-free.
However, Javis founder Sinha said the path ahead for WhatsApp looked bright. “People used to wonder how Facebook is going to make money…” he said of the social media giant that now has a market value of over $1.5 billion. “WhatsApp’s model is similar. It will first connect people and businesses to its service and then explore monetization… When WhatsApp monetizes things like its status updates, it will be huge,” Sinha added. “The potential for WhatsApp to make money is scary.”
