Kaagaz — A productivity suite for ‘Bharat’

Who is a ‘Bharat’ user?

If you are reading this article, very high chances that you are a first-generation digital citizen — someone with access to a laptop/desktop, someone who has always had access to the internet, someone who is an email user, someone who can read, write and speak English (obviously!).

Now think of a person exact opposite of this — someone who doesn’t have a laptop & has only a smartphone as their gateway to a digital life, someone who has come to the internet for the first time in the last couple of years thanks to the Jio revolution & smartphones becoming cheap & accessible, someone who is a Whatsapp user and doesn’t use email at all, someone whose preferred language of communication is their regional language. This is the ‘Bharat User’.

Out of the 600M+ internet users in India, 500M+ are Bharat users!

Their characteristics are different, their requirements are different & their understanding of technology is very different from the earlier generation of digital citizens.

A ‘Bharat’ user from a Tier-4 town in India using Kaagaz!

These users so far mostly used their smartphones as Entertainment & Communications devices but are now getting exposed to the idea that their smartphones can be a lot more useful for them.

With a strong payments infrastructure built over UPI, with social commerce growing & all kinds of accounting apps becoming available, these users have started understanding how powerful their smartphones can be.

Understanding Bharat users & their needs

Picture Arjun, a self employed Real-Estate broker, or Sarita, a Home Baker (selling things online), their business today is largely happening through Phone, Whatsapp & Social Media. But there is another aspect to their business that requires a lot of documentation whether it is making a product catalogue, making posts for their social media handles everyday, making invoices, scanning, organizing & storing a lot of documents etc.

Since these users don’t have a laptop/desktop, it is a challenge for them to consume, store, edit & create these documents on their smartphones itself without the right tools.

There are many such Bharat users — a self-employed person, a shop owner, a small manufacturing unit owner or a student.

As they look for tools for managing documents that can help them with their Business, Work, School & life in general — there is a void that they are facing right now. Either they try to manage it through a hacky / offline solution which is a mix of Whatsapp & Pen-Paper or keep trying to use apps available on Playstore.

But productivity Apps that are available on smartphones today, were built for the first-generation digital users (built for desktop & largely for the western world) — whether it is GSuite, Adobe Suite or MS Office Suite.

Existing Solutions have a lot of challenges for Bharat Users

This means for the Bharat users there are many challenges in using these tools:

• Since Bharat users have not seen these products in desktop environment ever, these become very complicated for them to understand in the mobile version.
• Flows in all of these products are something that the Bharat users doesn’t understand. For example, all of these apps start with an email login, while Bharat user is a mobile number & OTP based login user.
• These tools are all available in English only.
• These tools are DIY while Bharat users want hand holding & templatizing of their work flows.
• Bharat users don’t understand terms like ‘Cloud’, ‘Backup’ etc. They have different terminologies such as ‘MB’ vs ‘Storage Space’, ‘jpg’ vs ‘image’ etc. ‘PDF’ vs ‘Document’
• They are not even used to the iconography in these tools. They need us to spell out every icon for them to know what it does. For example, a lot of them don’t even understand what we consider usual things, like rating an app 5 star (great) vs 1 star (bad). We get a few reviews every day where the users give a 1 star and review the app as ‘Great App’ because they thought they were giving our app 1st rank!

Building for Bharat

As we kept learning more about the Bharat users, what started as a simple scanning app a little over a year ago has now taken shape of a ‘Documents Super App’. Kaagaz today is a Document Scanner, PDF Maker, PDF Reader, PDF Editor, Document Manager, Cloud Storage & Document Creation tool — all rolled into one!

We are continuing to learn from our users and are building Kaagaz as a suite of apps that are built for mobile, very easy to use, available in Indian languages & are in-line with how they use their smartphone today (clicking pictures, watching videos, using social media, sharing things etc.), instead of requiring them to learn a new way of doing things. This means Kaagaz doesn’t have a compulsory login to start using it, there are no annoying ads, it is available in 11 Indian languages, it has Bharat user specific features such as Import Documents from WhatsApp, a cloud backup option using mobile number instead of email login and a lot more nuances like these.

As we continue to build Kaagaz, we draw upon our Tier2/3/4 towns roots as a team. Forced by the pandemic but now by choice, our 7 member team is working completely remotely, based in small cities & towns in India — Udaipur, Mahasamund, Nalanda, Agra, Meerut, Allahabad — building for Bharat. Having our eyes & ears close to the ground, gives us an opportunity to understand what a lot of people around us struggle with as they come to the digital world for the first time. These are our parents or some relatives or others in the neighbourhood. We see this as a large opportunity to create impact for millions of people.

Future that we are building for

There are two large trends that we see today which are going to be huge opportunities in the next few years and we are building towards these:

1. Productivity Apps for Bharat: 500M+ users coming to the internet & a digital life without a Desktop / Laptop, which was the primary productivity tool for the first-generation digital users. These users are looking for productivity tools on their smartphones to help them with Document Consumption, Storage, Editing & Creation.
2. Cloud for Bharat: Bharat users are not Cloud users the way we have been. This is a large opportunity to get millions of users to Cloud, but they need a gateway to Cloud and the productivity apps that we are building will be that for these users.

While we build for Bharat, there is an even larger opportunity that we can see unfolding in front of us. Bharat users are representative of the next billion users globally who are coming to the digital life for the first time using their smartphones and in future all of them are going to need these tools. Hence, as we re-imagine Office or GSuite for Bharat, we believe we are also building it for the Next Billion Users making it an even larger opportunity!