Nikunj Jain on Frankly Me, TikTok Before TikTok, and the Blockchain Pivot That Followed

The Founder Who Was Right Too Early

There is a particular kind of failure that has nothing to do with being wrong.

It comes from being right before the world can catch up. 

That is the story Nikunj Jain tells about Frankly Me, the vertical short video app he built in 2014, two full years before TikTok launched in China.

The idea itself wasn't the mistake.

Instagram had already proven what a photo-first platform could do.

Nikunj's read was simple: someone was going to do the same thing for video.

He built Frankly Me around that read, a full-screen, vertical, short-form video app, and it attracted real backing, including Matrix Partners and Airtel's family office. 

For a while, it was fairly popular.

By 2016, two and a half years after launch, it was shut down.

Why Timing Beat the Idea

The first reason was purely infrastructural. In 2014, Airtel's 3G plan offered 1GB of data for Rs 297, at speeds between 40 and 60 kilobits per second, not kilobytes.

 Video, especially video meant to be created and shared casually, simply could not move at that speed.

No amount of product polish changes a hard bandwidth ceiling.

The second reason ran deeper: India wasn't culturally ready to create video content at scale.

YouTube existed and was being consumed, but Indian content on it was minimal, a tiny fraction of what it would eventually become. Content creation in India didn't really take off until after COVID.

Five years before that point, in the mid-2010s, the entire creator ecosystem in the country was closer to 1 percent of what it is today.

There is a more specific insight buried in this that most founders miss.

 Nikunj points out that the early adopters of video social networks are college students, and these platforms spread virally when students are creating together physically, in college grounds, outside classrooms, in hostel corridors.

Not from a laptop on home WiFi. 

That kind of spontaneous, mobile, out-of-home content creation depended entirely on cheap, fast mobile internet, and that infrastructure simply wasn't there yet.

Nikunj had been counting on Jio to change this.

But Jio's launch itself was delayed by roughly a year, in part because it needed Aadhaar's rollout to onboard customers at the scale it wanted, and Aadhaar's rollout was behind schedule too.

None of these dependencies were visible from the outside at the time.

Walking Away Deliberately

Frankly Me had raised close to 2.5 million dollars from investors.

Around 1 million of that was still sitting unused in the bank.

Rather than stretch the runway artificially, Nikunj made the call to shut the company down and return that money to investors. 

He then stepped back from building for two to three quarters, describing it less as a calculated decision and more as simply letting the moment carry him.

Stumbling Into Blockchain

The comeback started in mid-2016 with new co-founders from IIT Kanpur.

The group stumbled onto blockchain as a technology and got hooked on its potential.

What began as a venture studio, building blockchain services and learning as they went, turned into something with real scale: a Bitcoin mining pool, likely the first to come out of India and among the only ones operating outside of China, France, and the US at the time.

At its peak, it accounted for roughly 5 percent of the entire Bitcoin network's hash rate. Nikunj sold it within about six months of building it.

From there came a run of crypto products: two to three exchanges, and a bootstrapped marketing agency that helped US, European, and Canadian companies run ICOs, combining technical and marketing support during the height of the 2017-18 ICO boom.

When the Ground Shifted Overnight

That business ended the way many crypto ventures in India did around that time: abruptly.

Indian regulators grew uncomfortable with crypto-related companies, and within roughly a month, sometimes what felt like a single night, the regulatory environment changed enough that the business could no longer operate.

What the Story Actually Teaches

It would be easy to read this as a story about crypto or about video apps.

 It is really a story about reading two different clocks at once: the clock of where an idea is headed, and the clock of where the infrastructure and the culture around you actually stand today.

Nikunj was right about video. He was right about blockchain's potential.

Being right wasn't the hard part.

Reading the second clock correctly was.

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