Category Archives: Enterpreneurship

Five point someone – learnings so far..

1 Reply

Last four months journey has been exciting, full of impatience, worry, happiness and all kinds of feeling one ever experiences…

As I am working on building one of the best Internet Media company, I am learning as I am failing, experiencing and observing.. Here are some of my learnings so far.

34620165_31620

1. Don’t ever under-estimate the impatience of internet audience: You can keep on mulling over on what is the product feature you are lacking and how you should make it more useful for the end consumer, but the problem might lie somewhere else.  Don’t assume that Internet audience has the patience to see what lies beneath. They are an impatient lot and want results quick, real quick!!

 2.  Hire Hungry,  Not Experienced Sales People:  When you are battling with so many things – product, marketing, operations, sales – you would think that hiring the experienced sales guys is the best thing to do as they would have least learning curve. My experience tells me that it might go wrong in a harsh startup environment where power of brand is not behind the sales guy. Experienced sales guys, working in large companies are like courier boys collecting cheques on the power of brand.  They struggle, or rather are not willing to work extra hard when power of brand is not behind them.

Therefore, look of hungry sales guys who have never say die attitude and can withstand the pressure and harsh environment.

3.  Invest Early in Brand Building: In the internet business, Search engine marketing is like a necessary evil. Sooner you reduce your dependence on it, better it is.   Bids only increase over the years and starts pinching you.  SEM is like putting an ad in classified where every ad is competing for attention from the user.. Display is like a insert in main line newspaper.

Invest in Display ads with powerful communication. Be patient in terms of results as brand recall takes time to build.  Be happy seeing more and more people searching you on google via brand keyword.  Have your TG well defined and have targeted publishers for Display ad.

4.Don’t invest early on on Design – fix the UX first: While undoubtedly design is super important in Web 2.0 world, but not more than UX.   And UX is not an elixir which somebody can tell you in 1 day. You need to rigorously experiment, measure and evaluate to fine tune your UX.  While this is a never ending process, spending heavily on Design makes sense when you have a good handle on UX, or atleast you have a good sense of what does not work, otherwise you might up end up in a beautiful UI but a crappy UX.

5. Every employee is an integral part of the success story: As you build the business, you will hire lot of people in operations and seemingly mundane jobs. I can’t stress on it more that it is important to keep every employee engaged and involved. If mundane tasks are not executed properly, a well thought strategic move will not result into anything.. As is rightly said, every brick in the house is important!!

Chief Marketing Officer,

http://www.realtycompass.com

 

Related articles

How Google Glass, 3D Printing and drone delivery will change the world!

Leave a reply

Amazon is working on a delivery mode, where goods will be delivered by drones. Unbelievable it might seem, it might soon be a reality !!

It seems nothing short of fairy tale to imagine a world where goods will be printed by a 3D Printer, shipping by drone and one would need nothing more than a pair of glass to search just about anything, order anything and picture anything!

Let us look at each one of them and see potentially how can they change the way we interact, communicate, create and transact in world, and also the impact on business ecosystem.

Delivery of goods by Drone: Termed as Amazon Prime Air, Amazon is claiming that it will be ready technically by 2015-16.  Can it really happen? I already see lot of people questioning it from the perspective of technical feasibility, security aspects and logistical difficulties.  What I understand from the excerpts that drones can be imagined as  programmed courier person who has been programmed to deliver at 5-6 places before it returns to the source.

Undoubtedly, if it happens, it will change the world of e-commerce delivery. Nothing can beat the joy of having instant delivery.. That is one thing which still keeps offline shopping experience kicking and alive.  This post gives a lot of interesting ideas in which the world might change with drone delivery.  I like this one.. the diaper’s are finished..mother orders the diapers on amazon and within seconds it is delivered by a drone. WOW! 🙂

Well looks like it might take couple of decades even after the technology is established for the service to be commercially viable for delivering just about anything. So will it mean the consumption pattern would change JIT.. so people will not stock goods.. needs to be seen what impact it will have on the whole production cycle of goods?

Amazon testing drones © Amazon.com

Google glasses: This ofcourse competes with 6th sense technology made popular with Indian – Pranav Mistry. Well, I am not an expert in claiming which one will win. But one of the, whichever achieves the end objective of merging the digital experience with offline world will win. In the current avatar, Google glass is just a fancy bluetooth connector, but Google is working on the 6th sense experience everybody expects it to deliver.

When that happens, the world will be a hyper-connected and hyper-transparent place, where consumer can at any point of time check the authenticity of the claim/product etc. by going online and dig all information relevant to decision making in minutes. It will completely change the way people shop offline by helping them compare and review items in real time.  Will it be an end of brand, as information transparency will even make a new good product stand out, letting it compete against big brand ?  In this respect, here is an interesting article which says retailers already hate people who use them as showrooms. Google glass will only accentuate it.  Here is another interesting article which mentions what will be the impact on 5 Industries.

Google Glass: 5 Industries It Will Change Forever

3D Printing:  This seems to be most advanced out of the three technologies and might again radically change the world.  Also what appears is that it will first be adopted large scale for industrial use before it gets common for domestic use.

Without getting in-depth of technology which I don’t understand, 3D Printing helps in creating mass customization which today is unviable for most products. From a consumer perspective, consumers will get umpteen choices and customizable goods. From the perspective of industry – it will give birth to lot of small scale industries / entrepreneurs who will run this 3D Printer to customize a mass produced item by a factory.  This article from HBR also says that it will help industries move closer to consumption centre, rather than being near the source of raw material.

This is a very interesting story of a person who tried making christmas gifts using 3D Printing and gave up. So when it evolves for consumer, it will be radical but it is still long way to go.

So what will 3D printing change. With every customer wanting a customized product, how will the production value chain be altered?  Future shops might look like a catalogue with some products on display and based on customer requirement it can be easily customized.. Will it lead to lesser SKUs by brands, with every SKU having customization permutations & combinations defined?  It will SKT ( Stock keeping template) rather than SKU.

With all these technologies becoming a reality, we would be living in a world of instant search, instant customization, instant production, instant delivery and instant sharing.

Imagine, you see a beautiful T-shirt in M&S store, you instantly google and find out the competitive price in online stores of similar design T-shirt, go to Amazon, customize the item, which gets instantly printed by a 3D Printer and get it delivered instantly by drone… WOW!!

So what it did?   You like a M&S T-shirt but are instantly to get a similar T-shirt from a store which you customize based on your needs and get it delivered instantly at half the price of the T-shirt from M&S.

So the brand becomes powerless….

New set of entrepreneurs emerge who can customize the items…

production is instant based on demand..so is very efficient…

Mind Boggling!!

Related articles

Car Pooling vs Pooling on Public Transport

Leave a reply

Car Pooling is one are where lot of startups have tried to create product but none of them have really worked.. As an Idea, it definitely looks very promising and one which has great potential..

A car pooling marketplace would ideally create a marketplace where car-poolers can instantly look for available cars for pooling and take a ride. For the marketplace to work effectively, the car pool supply has to be scale up very rapidly so that availability to the last mile (where the rider) wants to ride the car.  That is a like a chasm which none of the startups have been able to cross.  Culture might be another issue as highlighted in  this article, but I think it is more to do with scarcity of supply to the last mile.

Let us look at the practical difficulty which I think is quite detrimental for the supply to bulge. A car owner would typically need to go out of his regular route in order to pick / drop the rider – Who likes it when you are late from the office and are facing huge traffic.

Pooling of resources in public transport like Taxi, Auto or even chartered buses on the other hand can work in India.

1. Autos ply everywhere in India ( sans Gurgaon).  So last mile is not an issue. It is much easier to find another rider who is going the same way

2. Even if auto/taxi has to take a detour to pick/drop anybody – Taxi guy earns for that, Riders save money… so everybody gains..

3. People who own car in India – are not looking at earning money through car pool. For them  it is a platform where they can share and in return be carried by another car pooler sometime. Now that is difficult as the rules of the marketplace are not between a supplier and a vendor, but are more around sharing and benefiting..

On the other hand, people who are riding the auto/taxi are looking to save money and doing that they also help the economy/environment save fuel…

Some of the interesting startups in this space

GetJugaad.com, Taxi.to ,Sharedcab , Smart Mumbaikar, NTL Shared Taxi

 

Make your own Desert Online

Leave a reply

With reference to my earlier blog mentioning that there is an opportunity for Online FMCG brand, Online Only FMCG Brand, looks like that there are some early stage companies already trying that….

Custom Made Chocolates: Happiness Bars , LovelyChocos

Custom Made Icecreams: HokeyPokey. They are a premium ice-cream shop, now graduating to e-commerce.

Time is not far, when we will have e-commerce portals enabling consumers to…

Make your own soap , Make your own cookie, Make your own Namkeen, Make your own Shampoo, Make your own Jam etc..

 

 

Thrillophilia claims 3 crores of revenue but raises paltry funding…

Leave a reply

Thrillophilia seems to have decent traction as per this report from Techcircle….Thrillophila doing 3 crores of revenue

The site indeed looks very well done and they have fantastic collection of short and long excursions.. But why did then only raise 1.25  crores of funding…. At a revenue of 3 crores, it should be valued at 15-20 crores atleast.. What is the interest of investor in holding less than 10%…??… Or is the valuation very less because bulk of revenues is coming from B2B…??

If Entrepreneurs are kids, why kids are not entrepreneurs?

Leave a reply

This is a very interesting post on Entrepreneur magazine which says that Entrepreneur feels like kids and are inquisitive.  Here is the complete link

The article says….”Entrepreneurs tend to act like kids in a candy store. Nothing is off limits, everything is for the taking, and their inquisitiveness is as infuriating as it is contagious. When I asked Guide’s COO, Leslie Bradshaw, to describe how she thinks, and why she prefers the entrepreneurial approach to life, she responded without skipping a beat”

That made be think, if that is the case why we do not see too many Kidpreneur.

What I googled post that is interesting..

Kids Turned Enterpreneur

Couple of organizations working towards making Kidpreneurs..

KidPreneurs – It is a training organization and had books and shows for kids

8 Kid Entrepreneur to watch out for – There is an Indian also in the list

Kidpreneur Respurce Guide – How to make child into an entrepreneur

Forbes Article on Kidpreneur – Covers Kidworth

Kidworth claims to be able to allow kids to start a business in just minutes.  This timeframe doesn’t seem to take product development into account, but the company’s platform streamlines the organizational requirements of running a business and leaves the burgeoning CEOs to focus on their products and services.

Kidworth has over 24,000 users, according to the company.  It was founded by Rudy DeFelice, a former corporate lawyer turned tech start-up entrepreneur.