My Entrepreneur Stint During College

Registered Company, Shipped product in 2 months, Made live for 1 week, 10000+ downloads but failed to stay long. Here is the entire rollback

During my 2nd year of college, back in 2020 June when Covid is expanding and social apps are creating celebrities, Tiktok got banned in India

and a friend came up saying I have an Idea. “Let’s build something better engaging and rewarding than Tiktok”

When we started brainstorming, It was not a bad idea that time because there are lakhs of creators who’s having the content already on their harddisk and waiting for a platform to build their fandom again

Started building the product with the scope of 60–70% features from Tiktok as we don’t want to lose the familiarity users have on Tiktok and create friction as a new product

and the rest of the features with our observation of taking to creators and users to reward better.

2 months down the line, we have the product in Playstore after endless debates and meetings. We got pretty excited as we completed and were ready to launch in a short timeline…

But suddenly we started seeing hundreds of apps doing the same, from big players like Sharechat, and Times Internet to small players like Freelancers.

And we said “No one is a winner yet, Let’s give our best shot” and launched our app in Playstore. As we are having good connections with Karnataka local creators, we build a GTM in an organic way with 0 spent on marketing.

1 week down from the launch, Stats:

Downloads: 10,000 +

Total Signups: 8343

Average Daily Active Users(DAU): 2898

No. Of Creators: 130+

Consumer-to-creator ratio: 65:1

But after all this, we did fail to sustain ourselves due to several issues like

• Unable to fund the developers to build critical features for the next release, as we outsourced dev from outside India.
• Didn’t build strong security, starting getting the unregulated content from outside servers.
• Failed to fulfill the planned roadmap.
• Mentally felt that we are lacking behind and should’ve shipped only the perfect product

And pulled back the app after 10 days of launch from the play store to make some money and invest back to build and ship the perfect product.

The day never came back to launch as we slowly learned that there’s no perfect product. It’s all about learning and iterations.

Don’t know what to call this journey, A failure or foolishness or crazy aspiration to build the next Tiktok.

This journey has introduced me to Product management with a passion and curiosity to build products that can scale and fulfill the user’s needs with prioritization and the best user experience.

All thanks to Ashish for introducing me to the world of aspiration, A best friend who always comes up with crazy ideas to build irrespective of the discouraging and unsupportive environment surrounded by to build the startup.

Btw, the app’s name is “TinTrin”. That Thumbnail is the first banner we created on day 01 of building the product (2 months before launch).