Insight
Sachdeva: Non-English speaking Indians pick English app menus for aspiration
“They had no working vocabulary of English, they did not know the language, yet when given an option, they will pick that language. Because of aspirational reasons. And in fact, there was a lot of trust deficit. A lot of these regional language apps in the past…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: The first profitable Bharat business will be social media
“So the first profitable Bharat business would actually be a social media business. If you think about it from that phase, right?”
Assertion Contradicted
Sachdeva: Delhi High Court ordered ByteDance to stop scraping ShareChat
“We in fact went to Delhi High Court. If you can Google ShareChat versus Hello or ByteDance. In fact, Delhi Highcore told, told them to not do this, not scrape, and in fact, change their app.”
Opinion
Sachdeva: China Is Far Ahead of India in AI Recommender Systems
“Definitely. Definitely. There's no question about it. They're far more mature ecosystem to, like, in, in our narrow space of recommender systems, this is the specialization within AI, which we sort of work on, they're far ahead of India.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Jan 2029
Sachdeva: GenAI will dynamically create unique short videos for every session
“Every single time you open a short video app, it will generate a video for you.”
Disclosure
Sachdeva: Top ShareChat Live Gifters from Tier-2 Cities Spend ₹5L+ Monthly
“So you will find somebody out of, Lucknow, Raipur, who's the top gifter or micropayment, customer on a live product. Spending north of five lakh a month.”
Insight
Sachdeva: Every Indian City Has a Top 5% with High Disposable Income
“This narrative that tier one is where all the disposable income is and tier two, tier three is where you don't have. Is not the truth. If you have a very widely distributed product in every single city, you will find that top five percent with all the disposab…”
Insight
Sachdeva: College grads building B2B SaaS will fail without work experience
“If you ask a college grad to build a B to B SaaS company, he's gonna fail. Like they don't, like we had no experience, no working experience.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: Social platforms spend $1 per DAU annually on server costs
“It takes about one dollar or 80 rupees per DAU per year just to serve the audience. So when you're serving the audience, they're essentially coming to share chat, fetching a feed, consuming videos, commenting, whatever, right? Whatever activity they're doing. …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: Facebook generates roughly $6 per user annually in India
“Facebook in India makes about six dollars per year per day in terms of ads revenue. So that is, you can probably say that's the ceiling of the market because they're the most scaled out ads business.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: ByteDance's India marketing spend was 10x ShareChat's total monthly budget
“They were putting 10 times more money just in marketing compared to our overall monthly bill.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: India will narrow product gap with China within 10 years
“I think India today feels at the right juncture where I am hopeful that within 10 years, we would be much, we would have closed the gap much more than where we are in terms of our abilities to build World beating products compared to China.”
Disclosure
Sachdeva: ShareChat found product-market fit by dropping English and chatrooms
“Eventually we came to the conclusion We will not have English as an option and we will only show a content feed. No sort of chatting in the middle. And that is how the current form of shared chat came about.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: India's internet splits into 100M Westernized and 500M Bharat users
“See, I think roughly we split as top hundred million. And the rest of about five hundred million.”
Disclosure
Sachdeva: ShareChat monetizes via status-driven live stream gifting and badges
“One of the ways we monetize on ShareChat is, is through live stream gifting, right? It is nothing but status. So for a profile badge around your profile photo, people are willing to pay. When you enter a live stream and you get a Ferrari coming in, a Ferrari a…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Sachdeva: ShareChat office faced stone-pelting in 2016 over misunderstanding of social media
“We literally had a protest and stone pelting at our office. In, in Kormangla. That office. And the reason was those guys thought it is some magazine which is publishing content, a joke against the community. So, so people didn't even know what social media was…”
Assertion Supported
Sachdeva: ShareChat micropayment revenue has surpassed its ad revenue
“It is now crossed. In fact, because it started later, but it is now crossed because it's growing much faster.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: Top 25% of ShareChat/Moj livestream hosts make ₹75k to ₹1L monthly
“We have about, I think, about half a million host, live stream host on the platform. We see the top 25% of them make somewhere around 75,000 to a lakh rupees a month.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: ShareChat reached standalone profitability in October after eight years
“October was the first month when our first product, ShedChat, achieved profitability.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: ShareChat and Moj generate about 1,000 crore INR annualized revenue
“So we're currently at about a thousand crore annualized revenue.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: ShareChat built short-video app Moj in 36 hours post-TikTok ban
“Within one hour, we had a new sort of project spawned in the company called Project Gold Rush. Where we moved the growth team of ShareChat, and we told them that you have to build a short video app in two days. And to my surprise, they built it in 36 hours, or…”
Disclosure
Sachdeva: Most of ShareChat's AI Leadership Is Based in London
“And even today, most of our AI leadership is out of London.”
Disclosure
Sachdeva: ShareChat Filters 100M Candidates Down to 10 per Feed
“Today, when you fetch a feed on shared chat and watch, we have about a hundred million candidates, from which we will find the 10, that you're most likely to complete the video watch.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sachdeva: Delhi Police funded early student data analytics project from IIT Kanpur
“We managed to get a meeting with the additional commissioner. And he got really impressed and we got the project. So we got a project that you have to build this with certain specifications. He said, we'll fund it.”
