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Lot of people are talking about why the Indian apps did not win this market when TikTok and other Chinese apps were there. A short thread on that 
1. In social media and content business, the liquidity on platform (users) and content are the assets of the business very similar to capex investments made by Jio on laying out the telecom infrastructure before you start making revenue.
2. Unique feature of social and media business is that advertisers who are main revenue drivers come only at critical mass .
3. Any social or content business replicates the social behaviour online and that takes a lot of incentives.The above points make this business capital intensive to get stable.On top of that talent, which is very specialised like AI,ML,NLP is also very rare and expensive.
4. Indian companies were there before the onslaught of Chinese companies in 2017 second half . Sharechat, Clip, Mymandir , Samosa etc. were all there and building it out.
The amount of capital with which Chinese companies like Bytedance, Likee etc entered the markets and started spending was like 20-100 times of what Indian companies had with them
5. So the competition was like the Chinese companies entered India with a Machine Gun in knife fight in India. India is young tech ecosystem and the VC ecosystem was not deep and strong enough to support Indian companies.
6. On top of that the media continuously ridiculing internet companies for their high valuations, low revenues and huge losses was not helping the ecosystem. We all saw the trolling of Flipkart before it sold to Walmart.
7. The continued negativity around loss making internet companies made it difficult for Indian VCs as well Foreign capital and they got more conservative than what was needed
8. Finally I don't think Indian companies will only win because Tik Tok is not there . In few weeks of this frenzy users will settle on the platforms who will provide the value they are seeking .
9. So the Indian companies will need to build great teams , innovative products and features and offer the users a great value proposition else some other company may be not Chinese this time, will again capture the market .
