A possible positioning strategy
The caveat first
Let me start with a caveat: Zoho is probably the best IT product company India has ever had, and surely has a long and great life ahead. I am the least equipped to advise it on strategy.
I don’t pretend to know even a wee bit of what Sridhar Vembu does on this subject. But in this day and age of social media, everyone is an expert on every subject, me included. That makes me bold to make my humble suggestions.
The big idea, and why it deserves a real hearing
Most bold ideas about challenging a giant market leader get dismissed in the first thirty seconds, waved away as wishful thinking before anyone has heard the whole argument. This first part tries to avoid that trap. It states the big idea broadly, then answers the obvious objections a sceptical reader would raise, in short, before the following parts (2 and 3) go into full detail on each one.
The real reason anyone would switch
The strongest reason to use a new app is never patriotism or a better product. It is convenience. People do not switch apps because a better product has come into the market, or it is good for the country; they switch because the new app makes their own life easier; this includes inertia to change.
So the real case for Arattai has to start there, not with a better messaging platform, data protection, or national interest, but with two plain, selfish questions: does this save me time and give me more than what I already have, and why should I change when what I have works well?
Right now, most people open four or five different apps every day to do what is really one job: staying in touch, seeing what is happening, sharing something, and maybe making a little money from a skill or a following.
WhatsApp for messages, Instagram for pictures and stories, X for news and opinion, LinkedIn for professional credibility, YouTube for video, and often another app just to get paid for any of it.
My suggestion for Arattai’s new pitch is simple: one app that already does what all of these do, and does some of it better, so nobody needs to keep switching between five apps, copy-paste, fact-check, and the like, to live one digital life.
One app instead of many, the differentiator that actually matters most
This is worth stating as plainly and as strongly as possible, because it is easy to undersell. One app instead of five is not just a convenience feature sitting alongside everything else in this series. It is the single advantage that no competitor can copy simply by adding a feature.
WhatsApp can, and already has, added Channels, Communities, and payments. Instagram can add shopping and creator tools. LinkedIn can add newsletters. Each of them can chase individual features one at a time.
What none of them can do is stop being five separate apps built by companies with five separate business models: ad revenue for Instagram, watch time for YouTube, professional data for LinkedIn.
Merging into one app is not a product decision any of these companies can make, because their entire businesses are built around staying separate, each optimising for its own slice of a person’s attention.
Arattai’s single-app design can be a structural position, not a checklist item, and structural positions are far harder to copy than any single feature, however good.
For the person using it, this means messaging, already done well, a feed of channels a person actually chooses to follow, replacing the Instagram and X scroll, video and long posts inside the same app, replacing the need for a separate YouTube tab, a place to build professional credibility, the way LinkedIn does, without a separate app for that either, and a direct way to earn money through UPI, replacing a separate payment app or platform fee. All of this without leaving one screen, one login, one place.
For those who want to use Arattai just as a messaging platform, that option can still be offered. So, there is no risk of losing the current users due to the changes in the product.
Answering the objection before it is asked: Is this not just a WhatsApp clone
This is the first objection any fair reader may raise. Arattai today does look, to many people, like a smaller, later copy of WhatsApp, same chat bubbles, same basic features. That criticism is fair as things stand.
The answer is not that Arattai has better individual features; it is that no individual feature is the point. The point is the structural position of being one app that already does what five separate apps do, a position none of those five companies can occupy, because becoming one app would mean giving up the very business model each of them is built on. A feature can be copied in a product update. A structural position cannot be copied without a company restructuring itself out of existence.
Answering the objection: A closed circle of contacts cannot reach very far
A second fair objection follows quickly. If Arattai’s foundation is a closed circle of real contacts, how does anything reach a large number of people the way a post on Instagram or YouTube can? A closed circle sounds like a ceiling on reach, not a way past it.
The short answer is that reach does not have to come from an algorithm pushing content to strangers; it can come from real people forwarding things onward, the way news has always spread in real life, and this is not a theory: WhatsApp forwards already reach tens of millions of people across India within hours without any central algorithm at all. So do Arattai forwards. If lack of pushing content is considered a drawback, nothing prevents Arattai from doing this. But doing so would trade away the very thing that makes it different.
Part Two lays out exactly how this reach is organised, built, and kept trustworthy, and how this clones the ‘following’ and ‘follower’ communities, in detail.
Answering the objection: All this AI will be too costly to run
A third fair objection is practical rather than philosophical: Won’t building AI into discovery, tagging, and personal coaching turn this into an expensive, fragile business?
The short answer is that most of the AI involved here is the cheap, narrow kind already used quietly in ordinary apps for years, and the one genuinely costly feature can be substantially placed behind a paid tier so it pays for itself.
Part Three walks through this, including why Zoho in particular is well placed to carry the cost that does exist.
Answering the objection, WhatsApp is too dominant for this to ever work
The hardest and most difficult objection to answer is the last one, that network effects make WhatsApp’s dominance in India essentially unbeatable, however good a rival product is.
Part Three attempts to answer this, built on what has actually happened outside India when a domestic messaging app tried exactly this, against WhatsApp, in an open market. The short version is that it has been done before, more than once, though never quickly. And Arattai can do it not only in India, but also in the 100+ countries where it is operational.
Five things Arattai can do differently, in brief
The rest of this series works through five design choices in detail, each aimed at giving Arattai a genuine advantage rather than a cosmetic one.
AI as a disclosed, visible helper that polishes and translates a person’s own words, never a hidden author. Discovery that people choose for themselves, rather than an algorithm guessing and quietly deciding on their behalf.
Reach that spreads through trust, one forward at a time, carrying a person’s own reputation for good judgement with it.
Recognition earned through real value and skill, not a public popularity scoreboard.
And income earned directly through UPI, tied to what a person actually delivers, not how long they can hold someone’s attention.
What comes next
Part Two explains, in full, how Arattai can reach far beyond a person’s own contacts without losing the trust that makes it different, how it can give people the feeling Instagram gives, of being seen and taking part,morehealthily, and how a private score and a resettable design can quietly make people better at judging what is worth sharing.
Part Three covers the economics of the AI involved, how this quietly builds a more responsible society rather than a more addicted one, protects creators from ever being cut off by a platform’s whim, and closes with an honest, bias-checked assessment of how fast, realistically, any of this could actually grow.
To be continued…
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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