‘Project Goldrush’

After one of China's most popular short video apps was banned on June 29, 2020, Ankush Sachdeva, the CEO and co-founder of ShareChat, knew this was a massive opportunity for his team to create an impact. The time was right for ShareChat to launch a short-video social-networking platform.

With several players already in the market, the competition was set to heat up several folds. The team at ShareChat had set themselves a timeline of 48 hours but ended up launching Moj in 30 hours. "Moj pe Moj" was set to disrupt things in a big way.

There were, however, several factors that needed to come together for a successful launch. The tight deadline wasn’t the only challenge. The COVID-19 pandemic had resulted in an economic slowdown. However, ShareChat had been in capital conservation mode since February of 2020. The early insight into the things to come and the approach meant ShareChat had a solid foundation to build on.

“It’s important to understand the backdrop we were operating in. We had been in capital conservation mode like most startups after the COVID lockdown. We had worked hard to make the org lean and our content serving infrastructure very capital efficient,” said Ankush. “With our traffic and burn growing more than 3x in ShareChat and Moj in the first few weeks of July, we had to quickly put a bridge round together to sustain our aggressive growth.”

Manohar Singh Charan, the Chief Financial Officer of ShareChat, echoed the same sentiment. “For the first half of 2020, we spent all our energies in achieving operational efficiencies and extending our runway,” said Manohar “Starting from October 2019 to June 2020, we had reduced our costs by over 60 percent

“Between June 29 and July 1, ShareChat traffic skyrocketed to 2.5x, and that meant our spending jumped up again and July month's cost base jumped back to Oct 2019 levels and beyond (Although at much higher traffic base) . We spoke to our existing investors and they were immediately willing to extend a funding bridge. Without that, we would not have been able to continue fueling the rocketship. There was tremendous increase in Short Video demand on ShareChat almost overnight and that gave us the momentum and confidence to push even harder to launch a short-video app. One executive decision threw open the gates to an already established consumer market. The battleground was wide open ... this was ours to lose.”

With the capital in place, ShareChat had another challenge to ace. The Artificial Intelligence team had to build a short-video feed ranking system that was capable of supporting millions of active users. “The hardest and slowest moving part of building a short-video app is feed ranking. With our experience of building ShareChat, we were confident of our abilities there. We firmly believed if there was anybody who could build a world-class short video app in India - it was our team,” Ankush pointed out.

“We had multiple challenges for the launch. We had to get the android app shipped, get the video encoding and serving done right, get the moderation in place and most importantly build a running video feed.

“We had to very quickly build a short-video feed ranking system that could support tens of millions of active users (that we were expecting in the first few weeks). Our team worked tirelessly over the 30 hours to build that - reusing a lot of components from the ShareChat infra but fine-tuned for short videos.”

Several teams - Product, Engineering, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, Content Strategy & Operations, Finance, and the Human Resources team - had to collaborate effectively to deliver a quality product.

For a new platform, it was of utmost importance that integrity of the content was maintained at all times. That’s where the role of the Artificial Intelligence team became even more significant. “There were two important challenges. One was having a feed in place, which is not very naive. We didn't go with a ready solution that was available to us, we went with a decent solution. Obviously, over the years, we have made some significant improvements. We had to replicate all the pipelines that existed for ShareChat for Moj,” said Srijan Saket, a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at ShareChat.

“The second challenge was to ensure the platform is clean and having a robust moderation system in place was very important. Any new platform is exposed to dangers from the users when it comes to content that is NSFW, has violence or abuse, and other such acts.”

Chandramauli Singh, Director of Product and one of the key stakeholders in the project, felt one of the key metrics to the successful launch was effective prioritization. "Clear ownership was another factor,” he started. “In these high-intensity scenarios, you want clear owners making clear decisions.

“The team understood the challenge and realized they were looking at an x-billion dollar market. We did well to motivate the team. Everybody was a founder that day.”

Abhishek Agarwal, an engineering manager with ShareChat, ensured the team was quickly able to zero in on the features for the first cut. "At that point, we agreed to just ship the video feed and a profile page,” he said. "We were able to release the first cut on that night itself and had a video feed running. During the day, we spent time figuring out the issues. By the end of the second night, we were ready with the whole APK."

Another one of the team's significant challenges was predicting the end user's needs. "When we did our projections, we were able to decide on the features for the first cut," said Abhishek. "We realized that 90 percent of the users bank on the video feed while the other ten percent use the other features. Post the launch, we were able to add other significant features as well."

The launch was an immediate success, with more than 50,000 downloads in the opening two days. As more and more users adopted Moj, the next challenge was for the Content Strategy & Operations team. They had to ensure the platform was clean, free of abuse, and offered the users a pleasant experience.

“The first objective was to identify top trends and map those to relevant hashtags. We then had to rank them according to quality and other factors," said Shivani Nayaka - Associate Director, Content Strategy and Operations, describing the period post the launch.

Even though the platform immediately gained popularity, the onus was on Shivani and her team to promote it even further. “ShareChat had a good amount of daily active users at that time. We wanted to leverage that and create more awareness for Moj,” revealed Shivani.

In the last two years, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have powered the growth of Moj, with the best-in-class feed ranking engine at the forefront of it all. With over 160 million Monthly Active Users and a creator community of more than 50 million, Moj has seen an exponential rise in the last two years.

It has also allowed the platform to help its creators earn a living. “Our creators are the heart and soul of Moj, and it has been our constant endeavor to encourage them and celebrate their talent,” said Ankush. “We acknowledge the value and potential of Indian creators, and the ‘Moj For Creators’ program represents our commitment to their success. Our investment will provide equal opportunity to every creator and help to not only fully discover their talent but also help them monetize it. By 2025, we envision having over one million superstar creators on Moj through this program and, at the same time, create India’s widest range of most engaging multi-lingual short video content.”

As more and more people converge and engage with short videos, Moj now aims to be the preferred destination for entertainment.

Illustration - Vaishali Jain