Twitter bought an Indian startup popular in the country due to the effect of a “dropped” call

Twitter’s purchase of an Indian startup ZipDial demonstrates a very curious example of using “local” technologies to capture emerging markets from the already large IT companies of the latest generation.

Recently, Twitter shareholders have been unhappy with the “insufficient” growth of the user base of the service, and this irritation only intensified after it turned out that Instagram statistics in absolute numbers are even higher than those of Twitter. Obviously, in this situation, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has to take unconventional steps and actions in order to improve the performance of the company and reassure many investors.

ZipDial exists around one very simple phenomenon, with which every reader from Russia is probably familiar with the forced “missed calls”. In India, cellular communication in full (with unlimited / cheap SMS messages and unlimited traffic) is available to an extremely small layer of the rich population. All others are forced to save on calls, SMS and Internet traffic, which is expensive. It was the solution to this problem that gave birth to ZipDial, which has a serious user base in India - with the help of a “dropped” call to a specific number, you can subscribe to the SMS mailing of news of interest to you, which is received for free.
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Have you guessed what ZipDial did? Created the ability to subscribe to a news or commercial service through such a “dropped” call. For example, one call may send you a discount coupon, and another - sign on messages from the Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi. Or even install the application.

In India, the “missed call” has become a whole social phenomenon, for example - so the relatives tell each other that they have safely reached their destination on a long journey, or invite each other to an evening meeting.

In the emerging Indian market, this method of “subscribing” to the owner of the phone is almost the only way to turn it into a “user” - to the extent that, according to rumors, Facebook also fought for the absorption of ZipDial, but ultimately got Twitter. Now, using the service, you can subscribe to a specific user’s tweets or a hashtag, which, according to Twitter, will help increase the number of users in a country with 1.2 billion people.

Exact data on the transaction are not disclosed, but, according to rumors, Twitter gave $ 40-50 million for ZipDial - a relatively small amount in the scale of Silicon Valley. Especially considering the fact that many people compare ZipDial with WhatsApp, which was not known to the public even before the takeover of Facebook, despite the millions of users of the application.

And taking into account that ZipDial service is suitable for any phone, any cellular network, which means for any emerging market, it is possible that this experience will be transferred to other countries with a large potential attracting users, such as Pakistan or Southeast Asia