Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Solving a Real Indian Problem

So I read Fred Wilson's blog yesterday where he starts his post with "So I was having lunch with (insert name of powerful but private startup person here) last week and the conversation veered towards (insert topic of blog here)...

I am proud to say that taking this awesome style desi, I was discussing VC attitudes towards tech-enabled startups in India with Pravin Jadhav and Kulin Shah of Social Discovery Website, Wishberg yesterday. In an animated conversation about the kind of problems tech startups are facing while raising funds, Kulin said that one of the key problems in India, while raising VC is having an offline component to your business. If you have even a small offline fulfillment component to the business, VC / Seed funds are loath to touch you, citing "execution" issues and / or "IP problems".

This, I feel points to a much larger problem, and one that deals with both scale and profitability. In truth, a true "tech" startup is one that invites you on a communications network to test, use and buy it's service online (whether on a phone or a tab or the WWW) and fulfills it's deliverables online itself, entailing no physical touchpoints.

*Incidentally Wishberg is such a startup which creates, constructs and delivers a purely online user experience and leverages your user habits to create virality.

However, in INDIA, if you must think about true global scale, your aim must be to create a Billion Dollar Company (by Revenues). However, Most of the problems that can yield these billion dollar opportunities are dirty, disorganised, fragmented offline markets that have traditionally thrived since over 200 years using paper, trust, and recently telephones to generate, negotiate, close and fulfill business - both on a B2B and a B2C level.

To scale to that level in India, you need to take your eye off that pitiful variable number of Indian Internet Users that varies as per convenience, and focus on the larger picture: Almost 1.1 billion people that are not online yet.

Most of these people have not used technology in any meaningful way (Owning a smartphone is far different from using it effectively). To reach those people, you need to use technology as a bridge, not a delivery mechanism. This makes your startup "tech-enabled" not "proprietory tech". Using tech to enable your business gives you scale, speed, distribution, lowered costs of access and a scalable method to handle 100,000 customers.

Some of the most successful startups today are solving real Indian bottlenecks that have eased up people's lives considerably - Startups like RedBus, MeraDoctor, Practo, Mirakle, PayTM, Freecharge and Suvidhaa have done it at awesome to middling scale.

***Any other Indian Startups that you feel are creating completely new value chains in otherwise fragmented markets, please let me know, I will add them here***

There are still many markets / sectors / industries that are ripe for disruption of traditional practices, where technology can provide that killer edge / advantage over entrenched systems and allow for cheaper, more efficient, completely revolutionary methods of scaling and solving business problems.

utekkare,
Pranay

**Plug Alert: At eVitaran, we are attempting to solve the Tier-2 and Tier-3 apparel / textiles distribution problem for low cost unbranded apparel. **


Sunday, March 24, 2013

Community, Not Numbers.

The problem with everything digital is that ultimately all that seems to matter is the numbers. No thoughts, No words, No feelings, No intelligence. Just numbers. Spew out stats, Reel off metrics, Measure the tapelength of your subscriber base, and voila, you have a PPT. There's relative safety in inane numbers.

Last week, we read about the State of the Indian Startup Union. We read the report, then we read feedback on the report. Then we read feedback on feedback on the report. If you want to read my take, it is here on Quora.

But there is more to life than 41% of Startups in Bangalore and 33% of Startups in eCommerce. There is a network. There is a community. There are interwebs that hold and bind and cement our friendships, our relationships and make us become safety nets for one another. There is a trust, a faith that we will ask for nothing materialistic. We will give of ourselves. We will joke and banter and make complete fools of ourselves. But we will also do our best to be there for the next founder. 
 
When I need help with my company or my finances, I will ask Mehul.
When I need some tech advice I will ask Tushar.
Like when I want to buy a mobile phone or meet other founders, I ask Annkur.
When I want to know whether or not to buy a Financial Product, I ask Ronak.
When I need help on cutting through the bullshit on selling a SAAS to SMBs, I ask Avlesh or Sahil. When I'll need to get a phone service, I won't go to Airtel. or Vodafone. I'll ask Vijay.
When I want to attend or plan an event and colllect money for tickets, I will ping Santosh.
When I will need feedback on what I've built, I will harass Pravin or Noel.
When I need an insight into how a VC *really* thinks, I will ask Kulin or Ajeet.
If I need to go backpacking into the Indian hinterland, I will ask SoumPaul for advice.
If I need to go SkyDiving, I will bully Talvinder into giving me a discount.
If I want to know whats going on in Mumbai, I will go visit Garima.
If I want help with studies, I'll message Samudra.  or Rajeev
If I want my home redecorated, I will visit Shubh.
If I need protection from Mafia, I will go to Kris
If I need help organising a Startup Event, I will ask Deven.
If I want to sell my songs or my articles or my time, I will bother Sampad or Akaash
If I need business cards, I will ask Milap. Or even if I want IceCream.
If I want to hustle for customers on my website, I will bargain with Sameer.
If I ever need to serenade my wife with a singing greeting card, I will ask Divyanshu.
If I need help with just anything fantastically techie, I will bug Anirudh or Siddharth or Sushrut.
When I want to sell to Mobile Companies, I will understand their mindset from Sameer Shah.
If I want to hitch a ride in Mumbai, I will ping Raxit.
If I'm hungry, I will ask Ankita to send me some food.
If I want to listen to Music, I will ask Brijesh or Aditya.
If I need stuff for my pets, I will ask Rana
When I need to get information about MBAs, I ask Kartik or Sameer 
If I need a place to work from for a few days, I will ask Shekhar or Gargi
If I want to sell stuff on the internet, I will speak to Nameet or Nitin
If I have lost my phone, I will implore Sarang to restore them.
If I want to know who followed / unfollowed me on any Social Network (soon), I will ask Nischal.
If I need to share news about me or my Startup, or I need some inputs on a sector, I can talk to Jubin or to Ashish or to Srinivas.

These guys have their hands full, running their own Startups and dealing with their demons. They mostly don't have time to think about mundane numbers and/or statistics.

But we try to make each other's lives easier. Not with numbers. But with faith, advice, connections, and honesty.

utekkare,
Pranay