Of love, life and the internet

It’s been a while since I blogged - which is good news I guess, as my blogging activity level is inversely proportionate to the activity levels at Gaboli.

Looking back at the last 60 days there’ve been many experiments…

Rechargeitnow.com

Sitting in a campus in Jamshedpur away from the city, I suddenly needed to re-charge/ top-up the pre-pay balance on my phone. I was hesitant to do it on just any random site but I did use rechargeitnow.com and it worked very smooth. Got Rs. 444 on my airtel in 2-3 minutes..

Competition

My emarketing classes ended with a competition between two groups of about 20 people each. The basic brief was that each section had to create a website that was (a) free and (b) would support analytics. In 3 weeks time the groups had to maximise the number of unique visitors on their site.

With the usual ‘free’ tools at hand - word of mouth, email marketing, seo, social media… both teams had around 1400-1500 unique visitors by the end of the competition. As expected SEO had no effect in such a short timeframe. It was mainly email, social media and word of mouth which led to these visitors. This was expected for any ‘web startup’ with initial traffic from friends and family.

One new tool that I discovered through one team was an email address generating tool. You type in a keyword and the tool crawls the web to find email addresses linked to that topic. I don’t know how relevant or effective it was - but it explained how spamming was so easy these days.

More interesting to note was the dynamics amongst the groups. In the final semester, very few people were motivated to put in too much effort as most people were also looking for jobs. Team leaders had very little influence on the teams and communication often broke down. As with most projects in life, it’s more about the people involved than the task at hand.

This leads to the more complex issue - on the web, how do you jump to that next level and get into that ‘growth’ stage.  It’s also an interesting challenge which I’ve been discussiing with Anshul who’s been running youthkiawaaz.com. A journalist driven blogging site with well written content focused on youth in India.

Hiring Interns in a startup

We’re experimenting with interns this summer. Mostly, summer interns for marketing, delivery management etc. One fell sick with jaundice and the others are yet to join… many people advise that it’s probably not worth the effort. Keen to see what our experience will be by August.

Technology

Using a CMS plugin to solve IE6 compatability issues - bad decision. Browser compatability continues to torment most of the web development world. In a country like India, you can’t ignore IE6 and recently safari has started becoming significant enough to warrant attention. The other consistent complaint across all online marketing projects is the ever widening gap between ‘clicks’ and ‘visits’. Analytics reveal only 50% of the paid traffic from adwords and facebook actually turn into ‘visits’. The reasons provided for this are not really sufficient in my mind. They say visits are not recorded for people that have javascript disabled. If that were the case then on average most CMS features would not load for 50% of the people - and that’s not consistent with the recorded bounce rate.

Affiliate networks have long complained that India is not suited for the ‘click’ model anyway… One way around this is to get into a ‘cost per lead’ model - but then the quality of the leads become truly doubtful.
Sanitiser update: Godrej did a free sample sachet sample for Protekt - their hand sanitiser brand. Rs. 2 for the sachet. The radio is full of ads for this product as well. Although I still see the gap in the institutional market, very few companies, buildings have the dispensers so far but at the same time the swine-flu effect is dying.

WYSIWYG is one of my favourite acronyms. In the last few days, we’ve been consulting a private equity company on implementing a Wiki based knowledge platform. On the top of my google apps account, I see a google ad for a rich text editor/ WYSIWYG based platform.

Anyway, if we’ve spoken recently, you’ll agree my entrepreneur journey is constantly full of inspection, introspection, retrospection etc. One change I see is that it’s more important to be decisive on all matters in life and hence, judging where people (read customers, suppliers, partners) stand on the various spectrums in life is a big part of the game. When you’re in a company, you take a person for face value because he/she has a designation - like or not, your relationship is governed to an extent.

As an entrepreneur I’ve come to value genuiness at a whole new level. I’d rather have a potential customer bang the phone down rather than have us work out a consultative 40 page proposal, only to hand it off to their favourite vendor to copy. (Yes, you know who you are!)

So I wonder what kind of people are living life WYSIWYG? Any theories? (Leave a comment below). My theory is that there is something about corporate culture and management education that kills the WYSIWYGness in people. I don’t say that people don’t have moral values but the corporate mask is definitely weird.

- I’m reminded of post MBA interviews when the prescribed body language and tone was ‘I’m amazingly qualified for this job but hey I don’t really need it.’
- Ever asked a MBA alumni on tips for interview and heard them say “Just be yourself”?
- Companies are now faced with this dilemma too. Brands spend billions on their propaganda (read positioning) but lo and behold the wonders of the web. The party’s almost over. Catch Inc’s story on you’ve been yelped! With Yelp, customer feedback is immediate and all pervasive. To paraphrase ex Forrestor Analyst, Jeremiah.. You can’t hide behind the pro-corporate hyperbole for long. Information asymmetry is on it’s way out…. Open yourself to living life - WYSIWYG.

Sabsebolo.com

Discovery of the week. Actually, it’s Feb 2, 2010. I can afford to say, discovery of the decade!

Scenario - it was 20 minutes to a client call. Client wanted it 3 way.. and once again I was shuddering at the thought of paying Rs. 450 to airtel for a conference bridge for 30 mins. So our good friend DB suggested sabsebolo. Signed up in seconds. Immediately you get your permanent telephone bridge, access code and local access numbers for all major metros.

The line was clear. No issues in joining the bridge. You get to hear a message from the sponsor for 5 seconds before the call starts. For this service, I would be willing to hear 5 sponsor messages! I still get nightmares about sales conference calls over the expensive doorsabha conference bridges. Web 2.0 and just works technology.. gotta love it.

Did I forget to mention - it’s free!

Shabaash Sabeer .. this one is seriously hot .. may you make 400 more!

Teaching

It happened sooner in life than I expected. I’ve started teaching. It’s only once a week but nonetheless - it’s probably 10 years earlier than I thought.

The course is on e-marketing and its in the final semester for MBA students. Two sections of 50 students each. Each lecture is about 2 hours long. There’s the prescribed course material which couldn’t possibly be more ‘offline’. So I generally add in snippets of gyaan from real life experience. New experience for me and here are some of the highlights:

- After the first day, wife’s first question “Was one section better than the other?”. I look at her in disbelief “How did you know?”.. Gets back into her Mac with a knowing nod “Always is.. Al-ways is the case”

- Delhi to Gurgaon drive takes half the time at 8:10 in the morning on a Saturday
- Indian students can spend 3-4 hours on the internet every day, but barely a few seconds outside email and orkut
- The next biggest thing on the net is job sites.
- Back benchers seem to make the most interesting contributions to discussions
- Students rattle off definitions of jargon alarmingly well. As soon as I ask for an example.. they’re stumped.

Oh well. I’ve started Bill Gates’ recommended book for teachers Work Hard, Be Nice. Wisely said, the problems of the education sector is rarely about the students and mostly about the capability of the teachers.

I’m sitting here in India now and thought I’d follow up with Part II.

Here were the inspiring moments.

1. Discovery of Shiply.com - (beautiful, poetic, stroke of genius)… basically the funda is that if you want to ship anything (ranging from a small table lamp to a few streets down all the way to all your household belongings to another country) to anywhere then this site rocks. You put the basic information of what you’re sending and where and you will have shipping agencies bid for the project. I shipped a chest of drawers from north west London to South East London for about 15 quid. amazing. once again - simple user interface.. no confusion.. got the best dealer out there.

2. Meeting celebrities - Sold some good furniture and knick knacks to this young lady. As we put the stuff in her car I noticed a cricket helmet.. got chatting and turns out she’s this mega superstar cricketer. Kicking myself for not taking an autograph.

3. Landlady - Long story short, I had to slimey-ly bypass my property agent during the August long weekend to go get my security deposit from the landlady. She was an orphan from WW2 sent to UK from Czechoslovakia. She’s got a broken spine, kidney failure, she can barely walk. When I walked into her house it was almost as if it were a film set from the 1960s. She sat chain smoking as we chatted about her grandkids and my moving woes. She’s being sued by a previous estate agency where we had initially contracted but got acquired in the interim.  Anyway - kind soul.. gave me the whole deposit. God Bless.

Other interesting pieces:

- Barclays bank at first told me that non EU residents can’t have a bank account in the UK and I would need to shut the account or open a ‘high charges’ offshore account with them. On the day I was leaving, a different branch was able to change my address to my new India one and rubbished the earlier advice.

- Seven Seas has yet to tell me the expected date of arrival for my stuff. They had estimated 77 days on their site and it’s been about 45 days already.

- I’m designing creative solutions for vengeance on the property agent. Once I’m a millionaire, I’ll hire a private investigator… etc etc..

- After London, my wife and I went for a holiday in the US on US airways. No major goof-ups, but I have to say that is by far the worst service I have seen. My fears were confirmed when the immigration officer said “It’s not a joke. I will never let any of my family fly that airline”

- British Gas, Virgin Media sent refund cheques to our previous address a few weeks after we left. It’s quite a pain dealing with that sitting far away. Council tax refund took 3 weeks as well.

Hope that helps some poor souls who have to go through moving houses. That over - here’s to a new life back in India!

Hello folks (plural is optimistic, given that the analytics predict all of 0.23 of a person reading this post today)

As the London summer sun’s been kind the last week, I’ve been doing my own wandering around and thought I’d share some bits:

Two new startups that I like

• bookfresh - You know how you like making online reservations for your restaurant online. Well, this allows you to book an appointment for ‘anything’ - your barber, plumber, dance class, psycho- therapist… open APIs, SaaS model…  watch out for these guys.
• aardvark - enabling human touch to online queries through your network of friends. check what pluggdin has to say. Quite a cool bot.

News from the week

• alootechie - games2win getting 13mn visitors a month
• alootechie - komli says CTR is not effective measure for success of online marketing (surprise surprise)
• Google blog - Adsense for mobile launched..
• Tech Crunch - iporn is finally here with iphone 3.0 (maybe now my SEO will kick in and this blog will get more hits!)

Blog of the week - www.gapingvoid.com. Cartoons on the back of business cards. Is this the new Dilbert?

Acronym of the week - HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion)… ever noticed how decisions are taken in a corporate setup?… Ashok would know a thing or two about ’stakeholder management’ in big companies

Take from the week - Wanna be a millionaire? Think of any micro business process that is done by any and every business out there.. from that super set…think of the ones that can be done online…  can you create that process into a service through an open API based model? for e.g. appointy or google calendar offers the calendar process as a service, bookfresh offers reservations and scheduling, hmmm… top of my head here are some ideas… voice mail? employee reference check?

(the author knocks his head back as he visualises the millions pouring in.. and decides to celebrate with strawberry youghurt)

Not one to fill out diaries - what the heck! I’m not one to generally crack bad jokes either.

11:30 pm - finished packing, ready for 6:45a.m. flight to Mumbai

1:00 am - can’t seem to put down ‘bringing down the house’, fascinating book on card counters in Vegas.. better get some shut eye

4:00 am - StumbleUpon the bathroom, geyser on, snooze for 7 mins as water heats

5:20 am - cab is twenty mins late. cab service owner Sardarji has reached home on his scooter and we all wait for the cab that’s supposedly been parked outside the gate for 45 mins. driver Singhji finally arrives, he rubs his eyes while asking  “are you late?”…(£$%^ no I generally wake up angry and cool down by lunch every day!)

7:30 am - all women crew on Indigo. Pilot, co-pilot, air hostesses.. feel extra sensitive to take-0ff, turbulence, landing as well as a small sense of pride on the progress of women in India. quickly distracted by the bhindi sandwiches and chocolate brownies packed by Mummy. book’s engrossing… i’m convinced i was born to gamble

8:45 am - blast of mumbai as i leave the plane… reminiscint of Gregory David Robert’s page 2 description of the smell of Mumbai in Shantaram. 2 hours to go for meeting.. killing time at the airport. the brand new ‘free internet’ machines don’t seem to be connected to the internet. quick survery of the conveyor belts - there are 4 suitcases for every peti of Alphonso mangoes that morning. took a shot and opened laptop to check for free (read unsecured) WiFi.. shot went to a simple catch to silly point.

10:00 am - first auto wallah asks for rs. 300… go looking for the pre pay stand.. apparently no longer exists in mumbai airport. second guy says rs. 200.. third guy seems meek enough so bully him into meter rate.. reach for rs. 51 and tip him rs 9 since his sorry face said “i was going to make a killing by charging triple the fare.. please help!”

3:00 pm - excellent workshop on the legal social network. we know the exact UI.. but where’re we going to find the half Ram Jethmalani half Bill Gates half Mahesh Murthy? (maths mein thora haath tight hai)… usual banter around facebook vs twitter. how facebook UI is still not as good as the previous one and how they may go bankrupt. how tumblr may have cracked the gap between the pull of micro-bloggin vs the intensity of full articles. good humoured sexist jokes about the morning flight. shocked a Canadian intern, freshly arrived in India, by discovering i was born in the same place her folks are from (small mining town.. middle of Ontario)

5:17 pm - just learnt why most of the cabs in mumbai have names of the areas in large bold letters on the back window. it relates to the old licensing regimes where they were only allowed to take fares from their registered area ‘Ghatkopar’ ‘Thane’ etc etc

5:30 pm - Widget distribution and UGC for celebrities… we’ll do a prototype for you… after all we’re faster, better and cheaper and have a crazy sense of humour too!

8:30 pm - demo of OneSchool to alumni council of a premier bschool… “love it.. never seen anything like it”… BUT…. can’t you give it for free?

9:30 pm - just in time for ladies night at firangi paani.. friend from ISB is there - she tries to get two free beers instead of one - always worth a try. big gossip update.. but sworn to secrecy yet again, Deccan Chargers smoothly sailing against Delhi Daredevils till last 3 overs where they throw it away… conversation back to scanning the room, judging anorexic college kids, re-living campus moments from 4 years ago..

12:00 - hit the sack at friends place..

I’m still too fresh into this game to be cribbing. So I won’t mention the 4 attempts it takes for each mobile phone call or the 7th reminder to the lawyer for a second draft of the big contract we signed or the 3rd reminder for the orkut app to be uploaded or the 4th reminder to the customer for the FTP access to their site for SEO.. or the frustration of losing an almost closed deal by personal agendas of two random branding consultants… missed calls… no replies.. too much salt..

maybe next time i’ll unleash

Dear Blogees,

11th May 2009.. my first blog entry - and yeah Happy Birthday Tarun!

Enjoy Maadi!