Bengaluru: In their bid to fill the void left by TikTok, several entrepreneurs are looking at companies that offer clones of the now-banned short-video app. The demand for the social content/short video app has been soaring in the last few weeks, ever since the ban came into place, with one entrepreneur feeling over 1000 requests for TikTok replicas in just over a month.Last month alone, as Rahul Sharma, founder and CEO of the Bengaluru-based AppScrip says, 20 people have bought the company’s TikTok clone product. He says, “The interest really shot up. I’ve had 1000s of people asking for it, and we fielded like 350 requests in one day. Also, some of these want it for cheap.” As low as $500 (~ ₹40,000) which some of his rivals offer. “A good TikTok clone app starts at around $8000 (~ ₹6 lakh) and goes as high as $25000 (~ ₹19 lakh) depending on the features they want — live-streaming, social commerce etc,” Sharma adds.The broad categories of interested parties in these TikTok clones include news media outlets which want to offer quick, bite-sized content in short video form, subscription-based content products (Onlyfans model), edtech companies which see potential in short video for education content, celebrity management companies which want to monetise the captive market of existing clients, and “wannapreneurs” — entrepreneurs who want to ride the opportunity of a short video by quickly building a “me too TikTok” product to fill the market gap.These entrepreneurs, typically, are on the lookout for clones for two reasons — first, to save cost and time in building their own product and two, get access to instant scalability, given that these apps, “emulate business models.” Other companies in the space include the Chennai-based AppDupe and Jaipur-based UI Slick. Sharma of AppScrip says that 85% of his client base is global, while India constitutes for the remaining 15% of that pie, though the latter has seen a spurt post the ban on Chinese apps.Cheaper alternatives would mean relying on freelancers or buy off-the-shelf codes and modules from marketplaces such as CodeCanyon. One such example is the newly-launched app Mitron, which bought its TicTic module by Pakistani company QBoxus, which is currently priced at $43 (~ ₹3,200). Other than social media, AppScrip also builds products in other categories including on-demand dating, delivery, mobility, and is slowly getting into e-commerce. “We build apps that emulate business models,” says Sharma. In doing so, he adds, “We are very careful. We don’t overstep. It is not an exact copy, and nor is it the same UX. The homepage might look similar, but it is not exact. We are not copying apps.”Pandemic boostBesides the TikTok ban, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has come as a massive boost to companies like Jungleworks, which offer “out of the box on-demand services,” with a focus on hyperlocal e-commerce. “We are like Shopify, but for on-demand,” says Samar Singla, CEO and founder, of Jungleworks, who also founded Jugnoo, an on-demand mobility service. “We have seen tremendous growth in categories such as food, grocery and home services.”
from Economic Times https://ift.tt/2XL7sDN
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