If you’re not based in India, you probably won’t have heard of SMS GupShup. Nevertheless, this is probably the largest mobile social network in the world – and it works off the back of old, reliable SMS. And today it has announced the securing of $12 million in funding – in addition to the roughly $25 million it has already gotten.
How does it work?
GupShup is based around SMS “communities” – a community can be formed around any topic, and it works like an emailing group. If you send an SMS to the community, every community subscriber receives it. And with a user base of 26 million people subscribed to over 2 million communities, that adds up to a lot of texts. In order to keep costs at a reasonable level, GupShup has to limit the number of SMS a user can send. Subscribers to larger communities are limited to 4 or 5 texts a day.
And it’s not just user community driven. Advertisers, brands and businesses (and even Facebook) have created their own GupShup communities, in order to communicate with Indian audiences. GupShup claims to host over 100 advertiser communities at the moment – and also claims to generate 5% of all SMS sent in India.
Beerud Sheth is the Chief Executive of SMS GupShups parent company, Webaroo Technology. He says that interest in GupShup isn’t just limited to India: “our user base and revenues have grown substantially over the last year and are seeing strong interest from carriers worldwide. We expect to use the proceeds from this funding round to accelerate our growth and expand our operations globally. Our products are useful to each of the the 4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide”.
What we think?
The Wall Street Journal pointed out an interesting wrinkle in the GupShup model: sending that number of texts every month is damn expensive. This service is gold in a country where SMS is still King, but in places where IM and other mobile-friendly messaging services are cheaper than texts it will wither and die.
