With 40% DAU growth in India, Snapchat opens first office in Mumbai

Snapchat has posted a 40% year on year growth of daily active users(DAUs) on its platform in the Indian market and claims that the social media app has over 200+ million DAUs worldwide shouldn't surprise anyone as the popularity of the app has been quite evident among teenagers and adults alike.

What started as a product design project for its co-founder Evan Spiegel, who was then a final year student at Stanford University has snowballed into this social media behemoth that neither the founders or the silicon valley projected.

Snapchat challenged the status quo in the social media paradigm with its pictorial messages. Essaying that “ a picture speaks more than a thousand words”, literally forcing Mark Zuckerberg to straight-up copy the model. All of his companies; Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook, have introduced their own vanishing story feature for their users who were swayed by Speigel's app.

The photo-sharing platform is now focusing on India to make up lost grounds after Chinese Apps like TikTok and Like have cemented their user bases in the country.

Snap’s Chief Strategy Officer Jared Grusd announced that it's looking to expand in India and will be opening its first Indian office in Mumbai in a statement given to PTI. Snap is the parent company of Snapchat, the social media applications where photos and messages between friends vanish after the user reads/opens them.

The company is already in the process of building its Indian team after hiring its first executive in India, Wishfie Co-founder Durgesh Kaushik in April this year. Kaushik, who has also spent three years at Facebook, was appointed as head of market development and managed the strategic relationships for the company in the community.

The US-Based app launched its program "Discover" in India last year, offering locally published content to its user base in India. It partnered with more than a dozen media companies including Vice India, Dice Media, Filter Copy and Brut India, among others. They produce local content to be consumed by mobile users on its platform.

Snapchat earns revenue by selling adds on the platform which load between the 10 second long stories post on their profiles. It has partnerships with Indian brands to promote their products as well as events happening all over the country.

The company also held its first creator summit earlier this year, in a bid to fuel the influencer marketing efforts on Snapchat and give a platform to the local content creators. Another move was to add four regional languages on the platform with plans of introducing five more towards the end of this year.

The efforts to penetrate the market do not stop there, it's employing the use of partnerships with Bollywood celebs and music stars to project itself among the youth as well has erected eye-catching billboards in the bigger cities in India.