Tamil Flash News
2015 · Product manager at Vikatan Group, with the newsroom and engineering teams
Made for
Tamil readers tired of clickbait news.
What happened
Born in a hackathon at Vikatan, my first all-hands product, with a team that built something Tamil Nadu trusted for short daily news. It was making decent money and helped a lot of people during the Chennai floods, and we shut it down anyway, for reasons that were internal and not ours.
The bet was simple and unproven at the time: that a Tamil reader wanted the news in 30 words, fast, on a phone, the way they already read everything else. It shipped on iOS and Android in November 2015. It was built for 2G phones, and a missed call to one number got you the download link. The team was a secret inside the company; I named it Skunkworks India, which is the developer name the Play Store listed. I shaped the product, the editorial format, and the launch. It became the first Tamil short-form news app in South India and passed 100,000 downloads.
It was also my first product with reader contributions: readers sent local news from the app, and the team moderated and published it. During the Chennai floods it became a lifeline, with people using it to ask for help and to offer it. It was selected for Facebook's FbStart and Google's Made for India programs.
The launch record
Launched in November 2015 by the Vikatan Group on iOS and Android; on Android the developer was listed as Skunkworks India. Google Play showed 100,000+ installs.
The app stores' listings, archived
