Until last year, if we had to share digital versions of our documents online, most of us would rely on an app named CamScanner that used our phone cameras to capture images of those docs and frame it in a way that would make it appear as if they were put in a real scanner.?
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But due to looming security concerns, CamScanner was pulled down from the app stores in India. However, one app named Kaagaz, made by Indian software engineers, ha tried to bridge this gap and it did so with several unique features making it one of the most downloaded apps on Google Play Store and Apple¡¯s App Store.?
Kaagaz Scanner was created by Snehanshu Gandhi, Gaurav Shrishrimal and Tamanjit Bindra. Today, the app has seen over one million downloads. We got a chance to interact with Snehanshu to learn more about their journey while creating this app.
Snehanshu shared how until June last year, they had been working on a complex productivity app dubbed Sorted AI, which had been in development for almost a year.?
However, when they saw a massive spike in Indian users looking for basic tools to start their digital life, they decided to shift their focus, ¡°Over 500 million users have come to the internet and?to digital life in the last few years through their smartphones. All these users have?leapfrogged the desktop generation and are mobile-only users.¡±
He added, ¡°They are looking for tools that are built for them, while the market today offers them global products that were built for desktop (& adapted to mobile) & built for the first-generation internet users. Hence, we decided to focus on that and built Kaagaz with a vision of building mobile-first productivity tools for the Bharat users to become part of the mainstream digital economy.¡±
Snehanshu revealed how their app got a chance to shine after the Government of India pulled CamScanner out of the app stores in the country, ¡°We had launched Kaagaz on Play Store on 12th Jun¡¯20 and 2 weeks later the Government of India put a ban on a few Chinese apps. This ban led to a huge surge in users looking for an Indian scanning app.¡±
He added, ¡°Kaagaz being obviously Indian due to its name started getting a lot of traction overnight and within 24 hrs we had gone from practically zero downloads to 100,000 downloads. The next 10 days were crazy with lots of sleepless nights, at the same time very exciting with the hyper growth.¡±
Snehanshu shared how Kaagaz Scanner stands out from the rest of the bunch, ¡°One of the key differentiators of Kaagaz, as compared to other products, is the simplicity?of its user interface & user experience. Kaagaz has no ads & no watermark which makes?it is a preferred product for the users.?
He added, ¡°By default, Kaagaz is an offline app and doesn¡¯t require any login. This makes it very easy to use at the same time it makes it highly secure since Kaagaz doesn¡¯t take the users documents to the cloud. Users have complete control over the security of their documents as the documents are stored on their phone itself. As we offer Cloud storage also, users can decide to back up their documents on the cloud too. In this case, the documents are stored completely encrypted on highly secure servers in India making sure that the documents are safe.¡±
Snehanshu shared his experience on crafting a solution for Indian users, ¡°Building an India-centric solution requires a conscious effort to understand the Bharat users. It becomes even more important because most of the people developing the products are not Bharat users themselves. Hence, user feedback, user interactions & analysing user behaviour become very important to build the right solutions.¡±
He added, ¡°Another important aspect is to understand that the users are not well versed with the design language that is commonly used in a lot of products. For example, a lot of users write a review on Play Store saying they like the app a lot but rate it 1 star instead of 5 star. On further interaction with them we realized that they thought they were giving 1st rank to our app because they liked it. This is just an example of how building an India-centric solution requires a deeper user behaviour study & a lot of hand-holding for the users.¡±
Snehanshu revealed that the ability to build an easy-to-use app for smartphones that is helping millions of people be part of a digital ecosystem is their biggest motivation.?
He shared how positive it makes them feel when they see people from a small village or town use Kaagaz and ease their life, ¡°The biggest satisfaction comes when a user sitting in some small town/village of the country tells us how Kaagaz helped them in doing an activity which they didn¡¯t know how to do or were finding it difficult to do otherwise.¡±
When asked what they would have done differently, if they got to do it all over again, Snehanshu says they¡¯d not like to change anything about their journey, ¡°Building a product or a company is a journey of how an idea evolves & takes shape over time and this is dependent on the decisions that we take during that journey. We believe that whatever we have achieved has turned out the way it has because of the decisions we took on the way, hence at this point we would not like to change anything.¡±