In the last few days and over a week, the only name that has been making it to headlines is Zoho. Wherever in the country, everyone is talking about Zoho. But not everyone is talking about the same news related to Zoho. Some are about the Zoho CRM and management tools, whereas Youth is talking about Arattai by Zoho.
Starting from Union ministers to common people, everyone is going crazy about Zoho. Well, this is not any new company, but why suddenly this much buzz around it? And not just that, we will also dive deeper into how Zoho should take on and ride this wave. What are the challenges that Zoho will face? So, first let’s start this article with the major headlines that we have been seeing from the last few days.
So, if we carefully observe, there are three major news bits around Zoho that have dominated headlines in the past few days: Union ministers publicly switching to Zoho tools are fueling the “Swadeshi tech” narrative and giving Zoho a powerful endorsement from the highest levels of government. Arattai app suddenly topping the charts with traffic reportedly jumping 100x in just a few days, making it one of the hottest conversation topics among the youth. Sridhar Vembu is openly challenging Microsoft, with the Zoho founder claiming his company offers a vastly superior user experience compared to one of the world’s biggest tech giants.
These headlines also reveal something very interesting: Zoho is commanding attention on two completely different fronts. On one side, its CRM and enterprise management tools are making waves in government and corporate circles, which is a sign that Zoho is being taken seriously as a trusted alternative to global SaaS giants. On the other side, its consumer messaging app Arattai is suddenly capturing the attention of the youth, positioning Zoho in a space long dominated by WhatsApp.
But why all of this now? A few days back, Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed and asked the people of India to start using swadeshi products. The very next day, Minister Ashwini Vaishnav publicly said that he is shifting to Zoho for all his work and he will stop using other products. That started the whole discussion. Slowly people started talking about it; they started exploring the products that were offered by Zoho. And they end up using Arattai.
What makes this story interesting is that Zoho is not a new company; it is a two-decade-old company with robust revenues and strong profits. But somehow still didn’t know about it. And even if we talk about the Arattai, it wasn’t an app created in these few days. It was launched in 2021 by Zoho. Then people used it but left it aside. But now again people started going towards it.
One big question that we need to ask ourselves and understand. How long will this euphoria last? This is the real test. People will download the app and create the account, but the actual survival of the app depends on networking and updates that they get with it. Consumers are fickle, competitors are aggressive, and “buzz” doesn’t always translate into long-term adoption.
If you see the sudden boom, there is almost a 100x jump in the user engagement and downloads. The app’s daily sign-ups skyrocketed from 3000 to 350,000 within just three days, and that’s a massive 100x jump. Zoho’s Chief Scientist and co-founder Sridhar Vembu himself acknowledged the surge, revealing that teams are now working round the clock to scale infrastructure and fix technical issues caused by the unexpected load. “We are adding infrastructure on an emergency basis for another potential 100x peak surge. That is how exponentials work,” he wrote on X, while also hinting that this spike arrived months ahead of a planned November feature rollout and marketing campaign.
Now the government is ready to support and promote it like never before by publicly promoting Indian startups. Companies are ready to scale and invest huge amounts. But this all boils down to one simple and most crucial factor. Which is user retention. This euphoria will bring customers, but if they haven’t found any USP or interactive elements, there will be a higher attrition. This would be the biggest challenge for Zoho in the coming weeks. Because they need to act on it and retain the customer base.
If the trend continues, Arattai will see a massive jump in their user base. Let’s see how this turns out and help Zoho build a strong competitor to WhatsApp and other foreign giants.
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