Why Hike messaging app with 20 million active users lost ground to WhatsApp, Messenger

Hike was once seen as India’s big hope in the world of messaging apps. Launched in 2012, it quickly became popular among young users with fun stickers, private chats, offline SMS, and even news updates. By 2016, it had over 100 million users and was valued as a unicorn. But by 2021, Hike had shut down.

So what went wrong? Founder Kavin Bharti Mittal recently shared his thoughts. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), he said the biggest reason was the “network effect.” This simply means that a messaging app only works well when all your friends and family are on it. Since most people were already using WhatsApp, it became very hard for Hike to keep users. Even though Hike had over 20 million active users when it closed, WhatsApp’s reach was just too big to fight.

Mittal said that only in countries like China, where foreign apps like WhatsApp are blocked, can a homegrown app really compete at scale. In India, people naturally stuck with the platform that everyone else was already on.

He also admitted that making money from a messaging app in India was tough. “India is difficult to build a business model around messaging,” he wrote. At that time, people were not used to paying for such services, and companies would have needed billions of dollars to keep things running without a clear way to earn back the money.