Know What Fuelled Odisha’s Biswatma To Fire Up the Digital Space With ‘Chingari’!

Know What Fuelled Odisha’s Biswatma To Fire Up the Digital Space With ‘Chingari’!

The ‘Vocal for Local’ clarion call by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is turning out to be a boon for home-grown brands to get a wider reach and acceptance in India and give tough competition to foreign products.

With India imposing a ban on 59 Chinese apps on Monday including Tik Tok, this also provides an opportunity for Indian apps to make their strong presence felt in the digital space.

One such Indian app has already been firing up social media users and now with the ban, they are expecting things to ‘heat up’ pretty fast! Chingari, a short video sharing platform and considered a tough competition to TikTok has garnered more than 2.5 million downloads and the numbers seem to be on a phenomenal rise since last night after the ban on Chinese apps was announced!

Developed in 2018 by a young Odia programmer from Cuttack Biswatma Nayak and his partner Siddharth Gautam, both of whom are now based in Bengaluru, Chingari is being hailed as India’s alternative to TikTok and the young founders are now excited to bring in more success and glory for this home-grown app.

In an exclusive interview with My City Links, Biswatma shares what motivated him to develop the app and other future plans.

When did you think of developing the app ‘Chingari’?

I am from an android developer background, so I have been developing applications for the last eight years. I have developed products for social media, marketing, products for dating apps among others. I studied the market, I realised what the audience wants. I applied my past experience in developing Chingari.

In 2018, we started developing this app and by January 2019, we released the app. This is not a new app, we have been working on this since the last two years and we took TikTok as our competitor. For the past three months, we have been adding new features in the app to make it interesting. However, it is only recently that the app became viral and lots of people started downloading it.

Do you think the decision to ban Chinese apps including TikTok would help Chingari get even more popular?

We have been working to promote our app and have a few users. However, ever since the campaign to boycott Chinese apps gained momentum on social media, it has definitely helped us gain an audience for our app. The appeal of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to be ‘Vocal for Local’ has also inspired people. This would definitely motivate app developers across the country to come up with new ideas and compete with foreign apps.

What makes Chingari different from TikTok?

In TikTok, one can only create videos and share them, whereas, in Chingari apart from making videos, one can read news articles, play multiplayer games, HTML-based games among others. That apart, in TikTok, the users get paid if their videos become viral, while in Chingari the users get points per view which they can redeem for money.

Lots of people have started downloading the app and appreciating it. Recently even Anand Mahendra tweeted about your app. How does that feel?

We didn’t expect such an overwhelming response from the people in such a short period. Since we have been developing the app for the last two years, we are fully prepared to deal with the increasing loads. We are working hard to make it successful. We have just started receiving the results, and we are happy. I was really surprised when Anand Mahendra Sir tweeted about our app. His tweet gave us two-three lakhs downloads.

What are the future plans for the app so that it becomes globally successful?

I want our audience to be the brand ambassador of the app. We are planning to add many features in the app so that it can be the best app and people fall in love with it. I have a dream to make it a super app in India.

Are you working on any other apps?

No. Actually, for the last one year, we have been dedicating our time to Chingari. Moreover, we have plans to take Chingari forward so I am focusing on it only. 

In 2016, you had developed another app named ‘Chotu’. Is that still functional?

No. I have discontinued that app as I could not get enough opportunity to monetise it.

Apps are proving helpful in many ways today. How important, do you think, is app development in the present context?

The digital world has changed a lot in the past ten years. After the arrival of android mobiles, things changed more and people preferred searching for everything on their mobile phones. So, all the app developers switched their focus to mobile as most companies focused on android phones. We have a website of Chingari as well but 99 percent of traffic is coming for the android app as the audience size on mobile is more. Mobile web and applications are the future.

Since the launch of Chingari app, what kind of users are mostly downloading the app?

We have observed that most of the people who downloaded the Chingari app belong to the age group of 18-25 and 28-35 years. 70 to 80 percent of the users are coming under this age group. While 75 percent are male users, 25 percent users are female.

What sort of videos are mostly uploaded in the app? Is it the same as TikTok or is there something different?

We have observed that most people upload dance videos and dialogues. However, through Chingari, users can also upload something related to education as we are soon going to have a special education category where young aspiring students can make and share videos related to various subjects.

How many people are associated with Chingari to make it functional?

As of now, we are an eight-member team, however, now we are going to expand our team. As we had never expected huge traffic on the app in just one month, we need at least 50-100 people to manage Chingari now.

How’s your life during the pandemic?

As an IT person or computer science person, we just need our laptop to work. We don’t need anything else. During the pandemic, most of the team members are busy working. We work for 15 hours a day and every day, we conduct a six hours online meeting connected with all the developers. We don’t get time to think about other stuff.

What will be your message to your users?

We would like to thank all the Chingari users for supporting us. We are glad that many people are downloading the app and enjoying it and even giving us feedback. We are going to add more features to the users where they can earn money also. We are hopeful that they would continue showing their support. I would request all the app developers in India to start something of their own. Don’t depend on any foreign products. This is the time we need to grow and someone has to start. If they need any help, they can approach me, I will help them.