Lokal — Hyperlocal News and Jobs Platform

Why do we exist and what problem are we solving?

English speaking users in India have access to good internet products for jobs, classifieds, e-commerce, education — essentially everything. On the other hand, there is a total lack of quality internet products for non-English speaking users for anything other than entertainment.

Lokal founded in the summer of 2018 is changing that by building a world-class product for 900 million non-English speaking Indian users providing them local news, classifieds + more meaningful use-cases evolving every day. The app is available on the android store and has been downloaded more than 6M times in just three Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu and delivering hyperlocal telugu news live and tamil news live.

Growth Story

Jani and Vipul created a news aggregator platform TheSoup to fight the problem of Fake News which was rampant on the web. But the product did not last long as it was built with zero understanding and needs of the users.

After TheSoup failed, the duo realised that most users in Tier II and III cities were still heavily relying on newspapers, as unlike news apps and television channels, newspapers carried a lot of local news, and relied on stringers to source these stories. However, they were limited to pages and were not timely. This is when the duo tried to build a platform that would address both these challenges while focussing on providing hyperlocal news.

By Feb 2018, In those early days, the local news was sourced from stringers and distributed on a WhatsApp group. That one WhatsApp group quickly became one of many as more and more people kept joining it and that led to the creation of Lokal. Lokal was started as an informative WhatsApp group in Kodad, a small town in the Suryapet district of Telangana. Today, the Android app has become the go-to information hub for millions of people in 25+ districts in the states of Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Lokal telugu news app works through a network of 250 on-ground reporters, stringers, and on-ground sales teams. These reporters gather information in Telugu and Tamil about local news, job openings, classifieds, and submit them on the app. Lokal also gets a regular inflow of user-generated content which is published on the app.

Sponsor Ads

• Ad Space Available - Rent it Now!

Report this Page

Created on Sep 17th 2020 05:56. Viewed 319 times.

Share on APSense

Comments