I Built a TikTok Competitor, Got 10k Downloads in a Week, and in 3 Months I Shut It Down

2022-04-30

TinTrin First Banner That thumbnail is the actual first banner we created on day 01 of building the product, two months before launch.

Registered Company. Shipped product in 2 months. Live for 1 week. 10,000+ downloads. Failed to sustain.

Here is the entire rollback of my entrepreneur stint during college.

The Context: June 2020

During my 2nd year of college, the digital landscape shifted overnight. COVID-19 was expanding, social apps were creating new celebrities, and suddenly, TikTok got banned in India.

My friend Ashish came to me with an idea:

"Let’s build something better—more engaging and rewarding than TikTok."

When we started brainstorming, it actually wasn't a bad idea. There were lakhs of creators sitting on hard drives full of content, suddenly "homeless" and waiting for a platform to rebuild their fandom.

The Strategy: Familiarity vs. Innovation

We started building with a specific scope:

  1. 60–70% Familiarity: We mirrored TikTok's core features so users wouldn't feel friction migrating to a new product.
  2. 30-40% Innovation: Based on our observations and talks with creators, we built new features focused on better rewards.

Two months down the line, after endless debates and meetings, we had a product in the Play Store. We were excited to launch... until we looked around. Suddenly, hundreds of apps were doing the same thing—from big players like ShareChat and Times Internet to small freelancer projects.

We said, “No one is a winner yet. Let’s give it our best shot.”

The Launch: Organic Growth

Since we had good connections with local Karnataka creators, we built a Go-To-Market strategy that was 100% organic. We spent 0 on marketing.

1 week post-launch, the stats were incredible:

  • Downloads: 10,000+
  • Total Signups: 8,343
  • Average DAU: 2,898
  • No. Of Creators: 130+
  • Consumer-to-Creator Ratio: 65:1

The Rollback

Despite the traction, we failed to sustain the momentum. The cracks appeared quickly:

  1. Funding & Resources: We had outsourced development outside India and ran out of funds to build critical features for the next release.
  2. Security Issues: We hadn't built strong enough security and started seeing unregulated content flooding in from outside servers.
  3. The Perfection Trap: Mentally, we felt we were lagging behind. We felt we should have shipped a "perfect" product.

So, we made a drastic decision: We pulled the app from the Play Store after just 10 days.

The plan was to make some money, invest it back, and ship the "perfect" version. But that day never came. I slowly learned the hardest lesson in product management: There is no perfect product. It’s all about learning and iterations.

The Aftermath

I don’t know what to call this journey—a failure, foolishness, or a crazy aspiration to build the next TikTok.

But this journey introduced me to Product Management. It ignited a passion to build products that scale, taught me the importance of prioritization, and showed me that user experience is everything.

All thanks to Ashish for introducing me to the world of aspiration. You need a friend who always comes up with crazy ideas, irrespective of the discouraging and unsupportive environment you are surrounded by.