Shared experiences are the future of social, says Kavin Mittal

“Our huge takeaway from the final six months is that the demand for synchronous shared experiences is totally humongous,” stated Mittal. (Picture: Hike)

Simply over 1 / 4 after he launched HikeLand, his reimagining of the social media, Hike founder and CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal is satisfied that shared experiences are the way forward for social. He’s so assured of this that Mittal has determined to carry HikeLand out of the early preview mode immediately.

“Our huge takeaway from the final six months is that the demand for synchronous shared experiences is totally humongous,” Mittal instructed indianexpress.com, including how since there are nonetheless not sufficient avenues on-line to hang around and the demand for that’s completely big.

HikeLand, which calls itself the world’s first mobile-first digital world, already sees customers clocking 50 minutes of common time spent, stated Mittal. He stated that whereas individuals love to observe movies along with buddies on-line, a whole lot of them simply wish to hand around in HikeLand’s digital rooms with voice calls or chats. “The largest request that we have now received within the final three or 4 months is that whereas watch collectively is nice, customers needed us to offer one thing extra interactive,” he stated, explaining why HikeLand will now rollout Ludo for its customers.

HikeLand, which calls itself the world’s first mobile-first digital world, already sees customers clocking 50 minutes of common time spent, stated Mittal. (Picture: Hike)

“We’re actually enthusiastic about this as a result of Ludo is a type of evergreen video games that individuals are used to from the offline world… naturally these behaviours transfer on-line. However, there’s a nice hangout Ludo expertise,” he stated. HikeLand’s ad-free Ludo is developed in-house with some assist from companions, he added.

Additionally, HikeLand has upgraded the HikeMoji to full-body dimension on the platform together with over 40 localised components. “We have now additionally made some optimisations to the person expertise and made residence easier and simpler to grasp in order that the experiences we talked about are very simply discoverable,” Mittal stated, including how this was one of many methods to get individuals extra attuned to this new digital world UX.

Mittal stated whereas the Covid bump has helped HikeLand too, most of its customers had been on-line late at night time, which might not have occurred even when individuals weren’t caught at residence. “We’re nonetheless manner above the common (on common time spent). And the important thing factor for us now could be how can we take this expertise and get it to extra individuals,” he added.

On his earlier speculation that customers in small-town India, who didn’t have avenues to hang around in, would discover HikeLand helpful, Mittal stated with extra customers he now has “deeper and wider solutions”.

“About 66 per cent of our person base is from Tier 2 and three cities, and so we’re constructing for that market retaining the constraints of India’s infrastructure in thoughts.”

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