The founders of the app created as an alternative to Twitter (X), Koo, have announced plans to shut down the social media service four years after launch.
Co-founders Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka announced this on Wednesday citing the inability to raise funds and unfavorable market sentiment.
Koo, which first launched in India in 2020, announced its official launch in Nigeria in 2021 at a time when the Federal Government banned Twitter, now X. At that time, it became the favourite of the Nigerian government as all government handles were moved to the platform.
The romance with Koo, however, did not last as many Nigerians continued to use Twitter until the ban was eventually lifted, forcing the government’s social media managers to return to Twitter.
Why Koo is shutting down
Radhakrishna and Bidawatka in a LinkedIn post announcing the of Koo said they initiated partnerships with different tech and media companies to sustain the company but it failed.
“Our partnership talks fell through and we will be discontinuing our service to the public. We explored partnerships with multiple larger internet companies, conglomerates, and media houses but these talks didn’t yield the outcome we wanted.
“Most of them didn’t want to deal with user-generated content and the wild nature of a social media company. A couple of them changed priority almost close to signing.
“While we would’ve liked to keep the app running, the cost of technology services to keep a social media app running is high and we’ve had to take this tough decision,” the founders said.
Koo has been built with a lot of heart. We saw a big gap between the languages the world speaks and the fact that most social products, especially X/Twitter in India are English-dominant. In a world where 80% of the population speaks a language other than English, this is a strong need. We wanted to democratize expression and enable a better way to connect people in their local languages.
Koo’s near breakthrough
The founders said the app was just months away from beating Twitter in India in 2022 and they could have doubled down on that short-term goal but for the lack of funding.
“A prolonged funding winter which hit us at our peak hurt our plans at the time and we had to tone down on our growth trajectory. Social media is probably one of the toughest companies to build even with all the resources available as you need to grow users to a significant scale before one thinks of revenue.
“Koo Used to have a 10% like ratio, almost 7-1Ox the ratio Twitter had – making Koo a more favourable platform for creators. At our peak, we were at about 2.1 million daily active users and ~10 million monthly active users, 9000+ VIPs, which included some of the most eminent personalities from various fields,” the founders added.
They noted that they needed five to six years of aggressive, long-term term, and patient capital to make their dream of Koo come to reality, but the funding was not coming.
What you should know
Koo’s failure in Nigeria started in 2022 when the government officials who ran to the platform began to return to Twitter after the lifting of the ban. Former President Muhammdu Buhari and other government officials created accounts on the platform in June 2021 after the ban of Twitter stopped posting on the platform.
For instance, the last post on the verified official handle of the Nigerian Government @nigeriagov, which has 73,500 followers, was on February 3rd, 2022.
Koo Officially launched in Nigeria in August 2021, two months after the Nigerian government banned Twitter. The app projected itself as a replacement for Twitter even as its designs followed after the Bluebird app, except for its own yellow colour.
