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.

Courtesy Aditya ‘Dean’ Dikshit and Rajat Maaker, I’ve found the inspiration to overcome inertia and come back to my blog. Rajat says I need to write down my predictions so that one day I can say ‘I told you so’. But the tipping factor on this lazy, second saturday of the month, afternoon was the movie ‘The Crupier’. It’s about a writer who gets a job with a casino - takes part in a robbery scheme but still manages to place his bets well enough to pull it off.

So here’s my piece today on taking bets in life or more specifically - in business.

Latest Opportunity Obsession:
To make a short story long, during our visit to the US in September, I noticed the prevelance of hand sanitiser gel dispensers in almost every public facility - airports, hotels, public bathrooms, lounges, corporte offices etc. etc. Not to forget, the small travel size bottles in almost every lady’s purse. Then you think about the convenience factor and that once someone starts using it, it’s hard to stop. Think about the scare factor - Mothers concerned for their kids. Lifebuoy soap sales are up 30-40% since they linked their advertisements to prevention of H1N1. Swines…

Now in India, within the last 45 days I’ve seen 3 new big brands entering in the space and the radio in Pune and Bangalore (at least) are constantly playing ads. However, the market is huge and still in the nascent to growth stage. Plenty of bucks to be made. Hotels, Offices, Schools, Restaurants are still open fields. Heck - Let me go ahead and make my audacious bets.

- I predict the market will grow significantly for the next 5-7 years.
- The urban institutional sales will peak in about 18-24 months.
- Once that has happened, some ‘chik shampoo’ dude will come along and introduce sachet size packets for sanitiser gel and sell them for Rs. 1 (or thereabout) to consumers. Middle Class Mother’s will start putting a packet in lunch boxes for the kids. The rich kid’s schools will have dispensers anyway
- A new player will emerge through a quick gain in market share. This player will either be bought out or will diversify heavily within its first 3 years.
- In 2015, free packets will be distributed to the poor (ok ok…too much)

Quoting the line from Rocket Singh - ‘Risk to spiderman bhi leta hai… main to sirf salesman hoon.’ Ok - that didn’t really make sense (…In the movie or in real life)

My other prediction is the boom for Single Malt Whiskey in India: No Brainer!

To conclude the post, my biggest bet is now on context based social networks. Large - small, generic - branded, public - private… Every single trusted relationship or network will be moving some parts of their interactions and transactions online. With the diversity in consumer tastes, preferences, needs and desires there’s place for a quite a few people to help provide those platforms and tools.

People say ‘there can only be one Facebook, one Twitter, one Google Wave’. My only answer is that large corporations by definition are ‘feature focused’ to cater to mass markets. Small startups find opportunities in being ‘customer focused’. A few marquee customers, some references and you’re ready to roll.

3 years from now, I could be eating sour humble pie .. but then the bet’s worth it