Watch out for Farid Ahsan, who has a finger on the pulse of Bharat users, at the Global Trends Festival 2020

• Global Trends Festival is one of the world's most prestigious events which will be live from Oct 19-23.
• While nobel laureates, some of the biggest political and corporate icons will provide thought leadership, it's a great platform to network with CXOs from around the world.
• Global Trends Festival 2020 is presented by AWS.
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In a world crowded with messaging apps, Farid Ahsan and his co-founders created an app used regularly by over 100 million Indians. What’s the difference between ShareChat and a thousand others? All its users speak either in Telugu, Punjabi, and even Bhojpuri -- a total of 15 Indic languages.

Ahsan says that it is easy to move an elephant rather than a herd of sheep. Instead of going after users who prefer English, they went after those who do not engage on Instagram and Twitter to create their own ‘space’ where they will not be subject to judgement for the kind of content they consume. Ahsan says that their app is a replacement for Google itself as their users barely use search applications.

This sweet spot that they hit did not come as intuition or an epiphany. For a team that has been innovating since the time they were in a dorm room, the reason behind their success after 14 failures is that they used a data-based approach.

The ShareChat team observed that Indian languages' engagement was much higher than what they saw in English. They soon removed English from the app, dedicating it to 'Bharat,' the millions of underserved Indians outside the English-speaking users in India, who are ambitious and aspirational. When asked why he took this bold decision, Ahsan says, "All Indians are bilingual."

Apart from being a founder and a visionary of sorts, Ahsan is also an expert on 'Bharat users' - what they want, and even how they think. At the Global Trends event, Ahsan will speak on 'The Next 200 million' at a fireside chat, which will discuss the key spokes that hold e-commerce and social media together --- the enabler, the platform, and the influencer.

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