Met with Karo
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Abdur Rahman - 12 Mar, 2025
On the 5th of April 2025, I visited the Zoho Chennai Campus to attend the IndeHub X Zoho Apptics IOS Developer Conference. Made it just in the nick of time. There, I was greeted with an incredible speaker lineup:
Mustafa Yusuf (founder of Karo - 600k+ downloads just on IOS)
Asad Sayeed (Building Flavor Vista AI )
Swathi Shree Raja (Senior Content Designer at Zeta)
Rizwan Ahmed (Developer Relations at Zoho Apptics )
There was also the surprise appearance from Mukund Srinivasan, the head of developer relations at Apple, Banglore.
They were open for questions, and I jumped on the chance like a jackal on a rabbit.
Obviously, I wanted the nitty gritty details from someone who had shown tremendous results.
All the prominent speakers at the meetup + me the prominent question asker
Questions asked to Mustafa Yusuf: -
Gets handed a mike
Abdur: Hi Mustafa! I’m Abdur Rahman, a Flutter Consultant from Chennai. My first question is: “How much did product hunt help you while launching your product? And if someone is building for India, does listing on product hunt help?”
Yusuf: Of course, Definitely yes! no one in their right minds would wake up one day or the other just to upvote or downvote a product for fun, right?
I smile and nod
Abdur: I also had another question, have you tried influencer affiliated marketing? But I believe you kind of answered this in response to the previous question as well where you said you don’t spend much on ads, right?
Yusuf: Actually, for tasks, I didn’t go the paid ads route at all. All of the conversions happened organically purely through my social media presence. But we are at the moment, experimenting with UGC (User Generated Content) for karo as both of these apps target a vastly different consumer base and follow different pricing patterns. For Starters, Karo is totally free. Indians do not want to pay for anything at all… We plan on conducting contests on TikTok (and the like). One thing we noticed is that even bad quality videos go viral on countries such as South Africa and India.
furiously takes notes
Abdur: Can I ask a follow up question?
Yusuf: Sure
Abdur: How would one approach the said influencers. Can you walk us through your process of umm… finding and interacting with the said influencers?
Yusuf: We are experimenting with a platform called as post.it? (hope I got that right), where we put up a contest and the influencers compete over who provides the best return. As I said, this is new to us too and we are trying many things and hope to learn.
Later, I also had the chance to shoot some quick questions to Mohammed Asaad, who is building FlavorVista AI at the moment.
Questions asked to Mohammed Asaad: -
Abdur: Signs to the coordinator for a mike
Coordinator: Signs back with a gesture - it’s okay, go ahead
Abdur: Hi Asaad, I have two questions. You mentioned your product was Flavor Vista AI, a food journaling app. Number One, What AI did you use on your backend? Number Two, what is your token economics like if I put in this many tokens, I should net this much return and such?
Asaad: Thanks for asking the question, you asked two questions, right? the Answer for the first question is I use GPT 4o as my LLM for the backend. As for the second question, I applied for a GitHub for startups program from Microsoft as a student and won. So, with tokens, I don’t have much trouble at least for now. But recently, to reduce the usage I have switched to 4o mini. Hope that answers your question.
Abdur: thanks!
Questions asked to Mustafa 1on1: -
Later I got to sit down with Mustafa and ask him more questions directly…
I walk in after lunch
Abdur: Hi Mustafa, Can I pick your brain a little?
Yusuf: Sure. Let me finish replying to this gentleman here for a sec.
Abdur: nods
Talks to the other guy on how to leverage AI to learn IOS development… I chip in as well
turns to me after
Abdur: What do you think about indie hackers such as Marc Louvion or Pieter levels?
Yusuf: What they have achieved on a global scale is incredibly difficult to replicate. Incredibly amazing work.
Abdur: Where do you stand on the whole Digital Nomad Culture?
Yusuf: I am a family man… I prefer to stay in one place. See, we are already in India. It (Cost of Living) is already cheap in here. No need to go for other countries.
Abdur: understood. Some might say that they have created a cult like following purely through their social media following and their monetization mostly happens from that following.
Yusuf: Yes, that is true. But also, recently the other guy Marc, was receiving so much hate as well. (countering the cult like following, point)
Abdur: Yes, I believe it was something to do with GDPR, ha-ha.
Abdur: So, your upcoming app, karo…
Yusuf: it has already been published!
Abdur: Yes, but for the android?
Yusuf: ah yes. For android, its set to publish this month.
Abdur: this month? awesome. So, with karo, I haven’t used it yet, have just read about it… Who are your target audience? Because I feel like you could easily market it as WhatsApp for businesses sort of thing (the concept really does the name justice) are you targeting a b2b audience or b2c?
Yusuf: We are primarily targeting married couples and students as well.
Abdur: Couples? that’s interesting. Why so?
Yusuf: Because, we already have some User Generated Content ideas we want to explore…
Abdur: Oh, is it like? Go buy groceries - the wife sends to the husband and the like?
Yusuf: yes. it is exactly like that
Abdur: Would be having any sort of integrations for apps such as slack in the future?
Yusuf: Too complex… too complex. We aren’t planning to go that route. Those who use sophisticated software such as slack would have no need for karo. In that case, Karo is more suitable for those small teams who just want to delegate tasks and follow up on them.
Also got this awesome merch!!!
A complementary coffee cup, a note and of course lots of stickers
Shoutout to all the indie hackers who showcased their product as well!
Shoutout to the team who orchestrated this event… IndeHub X Zoho Apptics Thanks to you I got to have many fortuitous encounters!