3 IIT Kanpur graduates put their brains but it did not work. Their honest confession wins over netizens
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About OkCredit
In the high-stakes world of startups, where founders often scramble to project perfection, a rare moment of vulnerability has captured the internet's attention. Harsh Pokharna, co-founder and CEO of OkCredit , recently took to Instagram to share a refreshingly honest confession: launching their fintech app in 14 Indian languages was a costly mistake. Instead of hiding the misstep, he broke down why it failed and what others can learn from it.OkCredit, a digital ledger app designed to simplify receivables and payables for small businesses, was built by three IIT Kanpur alumni—Harsh Pokharna, Gaurav Kunwar (CPO), and Aditya Prasad (CTO). To scale quickly, the team decided to go vernacular, translating the app into 14 Indian languages, including Tamil, Marathi, Bengali, and Punjabi. But in a candid post, Pokharna revealed that the effort didn't pay off.According to him, only English and Hindi have remained active. The rest were shut down after the team realised that most smartphone users understood at least basic English or Hindi, and the ones who didn't were rarely the paying customers. The result? Months of effort, hiring regional support teams, customizing user flows, and burning resources, without a significant impact on growth.He wrapped up the post with a hard-earned insight: unless you're in the entertainment space, vernacular content might not be worth the hype. For most consumer apps, focusing on two or three widely understood languages is more than enough.Netizens lauded the post for its clarity, humility, and relevance. Many entrepreneurs commented that the insight was timely and echoed their internal debates about whether to offer regional language options. Others praised the courage it took to publicly share a failure and turn it into a lesson for the startup ecosystem OkCredit, as listed on the Google Play Store, allows users to manage collections, send payment reminders via SMS and WhatsApp, and access reports across devices. Though the app scaled rapidly in its early days, this linguistic reset proves the team isn't afraid to pivot—and own up to what didn't work.
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