ShareChat's Manohar Singh Charan on why homegrown platforms need a UPI-style ecosystem push to break global monopolies

India is now at a pivotal moment in the digital economy. For years we have built our internet experience on top of global platforms. India has shown in sectors like payments and IT services that domestic innovation can become world class. But in social media and content, network effect monopolies are so strong that without active ecosystem support, India risks never having a viable domestic alternative.

ShareChat is one of the few players that has actually survived that pressure. It has built across more than twenty languages, found strong organic demand in Bharat, and recently declared its core business financially self sustained. It is an example of a homegrown platform that has put in the ten years of grinding technology work and now sits at a scale where policy, ecosystem and user support can meaningfully change the trajectory.

In an interview with Storyboard18, Manohar Singh Charan, Co-Founder & CFO, ShareChat & Moj discusses the importance for India to build successful homegrown social media platforms, systematic challenges, and more.

Edited excerpts

Why is it strategically important for India to build successful homegrown social media and content platforms?

Social media today is all pervasive. An Indian smartphone user spends anywhere between two to four hours scrolling on their phone daily. Half of this is work related. A large part is consuming content, interacting with social media, getting informed, reading news, and forming opinions. Getting informed and forming opinions has long lasting implications.

India has always taken policy measures for strategic sectors: manufacturing, defence, pharma, IT, etc. The same logic applies to social media. This is not isolationism. It is about creating a level playing field for aspiring local businesses. Social media has extremely strong network effects. These are winner takes all segments. Unlike manufacturing where multiple players can survive through geography or price, in social platforms network effects massively amplify early advantage. Global players therefore start with a huge unfair advantage.

India has done this before: UPI is a classic example. We created the environment where UPI could thrive, and today we are exporting payments technology. IndiaAI is another important intervention: it reduces infrastructure cost for AI builders. For LLM players, this solves a big part of the cost problem. But social media businesses have additional dimensions beyond compute infrastructure: demand side network effects, supply side network effects, monetization lead time, and recommendation technology. For social media to break global monopolies, interventions need to touch more than one dimension.

ShareChat’s own existence is proof: we started when 99 percent of India’s internet users were already being serviced by foreign platforms. Today we service about 200 million monthly monetizable users. We carved a niche. But to go from niche to equal footing with global platforms needs support. China is a case study. They opened trade, but they simultaneously facilitated creation of huge domestic digital platforms for years. Now their domestic platforms can compete head on globally.

Where have previous challenges been: product issues or ecosystem issues?

There was intent, and there were ambitious experiments. We saw supply side support: many influential voices used the platform. But social media needs all four legs: demand, supply, technology, and monetization. Recommendation technology is extremely difficult to build. Those who succeed invest years. Even if you have good content and creators, if your recommendation engine cannot figure out who should see what — the platform will fail. Sharing fashion with a user who wants cricket, or vice versa, kills engagement. We have been building our recommendation engine for six years. That is the slowest moving axis.

And even with good tech, network monopolies on demand and supply sides limit your ability to reach parity without ecosystem support. We need to back players that already have 70 to 80 percent of the tech quality of global platforms and already have some scale. Then you solve the monopoly problem. If ShareChat had 500 million dollars to invest, we could become 3 times our current size in 18 months. Today roughly 5 billion dollars of Indian ad spend goes to global social platforms. If even a rightful fraction of that could go to Indian platforms, we would see parity.

How strong are network effects? Can a local player realistically break through without systematic push?

We have done it so far without systematic push. We reached 200 million monthly end users. India’s diversity actually works in favor of local platforms. Global platforms will ask: is it worth investing in 25 languages for a market that is three percent of global revenue? They will sometimes prioritize European languages instead because revenue per user is higher.

We exploited this gap: we were a language-first platform from 2015. We built personalization for local languages. We built content moderation for languages as diverse as Hindi and Malayalam. We built this painstakingly.

India will soon have one billion connected users. You can sustain. You can carve your place. But to reach shoulder-to-shoulder status with global platforms — support helps.

ShareChat and Moj today are self-sustainable. We recently released financials. We are at thousand crore plus top line. The core business is self-sustaining. New investments go into new business lines.

Now is the time to boost resilient players — you can stand them up to global platforms and later even compete abroad.

How does ShareChat see its role in India’s digital future and what differentiates its model?

We like to say ShareChat is the digital public square of Bharat. In earlier days, every village had a chowk. We are that digital chowk for India’s heartland. People in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities take pride in using the platform. We cater to more Tamil-speaking Indians than any global platform. People come to ShareChat to learn about local festival rituals, what to wear, what puja to perform on each Navratri day. They come to get news. They come to find employment opportunities.

We have woven ourselves into the digital fabric of regional language-first India. We have spent nearly three years with zero spend on user acquisition, and still had strong organic inflow. That helped us reach profitability.

Can homegrown platforms coexist or collaborate with global tech giants while retaining their local edge?

Yes. We already coexist. Users overlap heavily. We have proven that we deserve the time we get from users. You must differentiate. A small-town Hindi or Tamil creator has a faster path to fame on Moj or ShareChat versus a big global platform. Once you have a follower base, your ability to monetize it is significantly better here. Sustainable value that cannot be replicated elsewhere is what creates right to exist.

Do you see ShareChat collaborating with big tech giants in future?

Beyond a certain scale, you inevitably collaborate. But not at the cost of your own well-being. Global monopolies limit local players’ growth. Europe has shown a middle path: Digital Markets Act. They didn’t ban global platforms but constrained their capacity to take unfair advantage. That environment matters.