Mayank Sharma

Startup landscape in local space

Local_business_listing_perspec

A couple of days ago a friend showed me pluggdin forums. He suggested I start a discussion and being in the Local space for so long, decided to explore the Hyper-Local space. I started the discussion, but then got too busy to come back to it. Yesterday came back to it and was quite surprised to see the number of discussions. Now Local and Hyper-Local are two different terms and I don't claim to know the difference between them, But I felt it was a good opportunity to see what is happening in the Local space. Rest of the discussion is copied verbatim from there. 


Local Shopping : Yes this is one big opportunity, and after failing (in one sense) with Local listing, people are looking at this niche as well (nudge nudge zopnow). But I am not really convinced about the size of this market to warrant a startup. A number of them (fabmall now IndiaPlaza) tried earlier and failed quite miserably (in all senses). But yes if Flipkart can know IndiaPlaza off, I am open to surprises. But personally will not bet my money (Do I have any?)

Local Info : As CitizenMatters has shown there is definitely a demand for this. Maybe niche. May not be online (as the target audience is not online). Some are approaching it from a philanthropic front (CitizenMatters), some are actually treating this as a niche but don't have a big budget (CityPlus of Dainik Jagaran) and some obviously are trying to solve it from technology perspective. There needs to be some alignment with the above three seemingly orthogonal viewpoints to converge and make a larger impact. I have closely monitored CityPlus execution and knowing that they are maybe breaking even, I am quite bullish on this aspect. Self generated Content (citizenmatters), with a razor sharp offline circulation(cityplus) and using technology to reduce all other costs will make you win this game.

Local Listing : Clearly tonnes of companies have embarked on this train hoping to replicate JustDial's success and not one has succeeded. To borrow Ashish's words here, it's not the technology that you need here. A lot of people have dissected this space, so I will just ignore and move on.

Local Directions : We at ONZE provide directions on SMS. When people hear about it first they brush it off saying who needs them? Google is there for online. Does it work? Not really. What about offline? SMS is too cumbersome. The fact is that we have an awesome location aware local search and directions service on SMS. But even today the requests for directions surpasses local search on our platform. Believe me, this is one big space. We have just scratched the surface and are quite excited as we are digging deeper.

Local Advertisement : A TV commercial in one barometer to measure your arrival as a brand/product/service. Only the rich can afford it and masses can only see them. But what if a Local business wants to advertise on TV, and that too only for his city? Big opportunity right? Look what Amagi is doing.

Local Ad platform : Millions of apps being made today but there are just handful of them (like angry birds) who are making money. Next are the mobile ad platform like inmobi who would be making the next big buck just by sitting between the advertisers and publishers. Taking a cue from Amagi, I personally feel that the moment these Ad platforms (or maybe a new one) focuses exclusively on providing the ability to the advertisers to advertise hyper-locally (show only to jayanagar folks), it will provide a huge benefit to the advertisers. Not only the conversion will be higher, both the advertisers and consumers will be happy.

So do watch out this space. That's it and let me know your views.

Image credit [http://www.smartfindslocallisting.com/articles/local_business_listings_are_not_about_getting_listed.php]
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Startup's out of Impulsesoft and SiRF

Reading about the Burrp mafia by my friend Avlesh took me back to the time when I started my own startup journey. One of the awesome thing that a startup does to (most) of us is that it implants the seed (keeda) of entrepreneurship in you. Be it a large company like Google, Yahoo or even Infosys, or small companies like Burrp. They give birth to even more startups.

Implulsesoft did not become as famous as Burrp, but it had a decent exit when SiRF acquired it. SiRF also acquired another company in Bangalore called  Truespan and within 3 years was forced to close down it's Bangalore office(That actually is a very interesting story. maybe some other time). As a result of which most of us ventured out to start stuff we had always dreamed of. Here are those crazy guys.
Impulsesoft
Amagi : Baskar, Vidhya and Kas. Original founders of Impulseoft left SiRF early on and started Amagi. An unheard of and a daring proposition of bringing local advertisements on your national cable channels. They have gone through two rounds of funding and are growing at an exponential pace.

Zebu : Inspired by Small Giants Sri (Founder and CEO of Impulsesoft) along with Raja and Bikash started Zebu. I along with Kausik joined them after SiRF closed down. We worked briefly on a nifty application we called dog-earz

Althea : I met Vinod, Sagar and Kishore in SiRF after it acquired their company TrueSpan. SiRF had planned to close down the ex-Truespan division couple of months before they closed down the whole bangalore office. These guys started Althea soon afterwards. Raised one round of investment, got Techcrunched and created quite a flutter in the valley with their cool social video browsing tool called Shufflr.

Amberroot : Sudhakar is a master of hardware board designs. Yogesh an awesome coder only next to our great Sala coder. And Karthik, well don't go on his looks or sweet talk. He could fool you by his knowledge of his products that he is not the sales guy. These guys ventured out to make solar energy efficient to generate and economical to make it mainstream.

Muddyboots : If you thought TV advertisements, Business consulting, Video browsing and discovery, Solar energy was as orthogonal people could get coming out of a single startup, wait till you hear about Roby. He abandoned more than 20 years of being in IT and setup a travel company organizing bike trips and treks in unexplored territories of Nilgiris and other places.  

ActWitty : Sudhanshu, who just calls himself a coder, worked with Amagi for some time before venturing out into ActWitty. He is building a cool product to help you connect with people with common interest in the noise that social browsing has become. 

That brings me to the end of the list, except obviously for myself :-). You may have, but I have not forgotten about myself. I started with Sri and others in Zebu. Left within 6 months to be a solo-entrepreneur. Experimented with lots of ideas (Smstweet, mCoupons, mLoyalty, Revu). Worked as a consultant for a friend. Met a bunch of people over coffee and made some quite interesting and new friends. And finally settled at ONZE (More of that later).

I am sure there are a bunch of others who left early and started on their own. And some in the valley itself coming out after SiRF's acquisition by CSR (Lytro being one of them).

After learning about Burrp, and telling my own story about Impulsesoft+SiRF, would love to know more such stories of startups being born out of startups. Do share if you come across any.
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You TRAI we Double TRAI

Necessity is mother of all innovation they say. I agree, But innovating in a highly constrained manner is what really amazes me. And so after a much delay TRAI finally got around to forcing it's draconian NCPR guidelines on us. Bulk SMS industry almost got wiped out and all the other innovative companies who were using SMS as a primary channel of communication suffered a major blow. We (ONZE) were also in some sense on the receiving end of this enforcement. We (SMS Pull based services) paid the price for the nuisance created by UCC over SMS.

Double-cross

But if the recent developments are true, Bulk SMS will be back with a bang. With the Diwali around the corner, every retailer is pushing big time to somehow get their messages delivered (unsolicited) to the consumers. And so some of the SMS Providers have come up with a way to work around NCPR guidelines. Use an international SMS Gateway. 

NCPR restrictions (or guidelines to be precise, because there is no physical restrictions) are only for Indian mobile operators. Not for the international one. Yes using an international SMS gateway will indeed be costlier, but if retailers are ready to pump in that money, sms providers will definitely oblige. And you know very well where this money will go. If the demand only from India rises so much, the price itself will no doubt come down making Bulk SMS accessible to every one.

This shoot first and ask later attitude of the government (especially with NCPR) is hurting a lot of nascent mobile VAS company. Not only does it not solve the core issue (UCC SMS) it kills a lot of good innovation.

Doesn't this remind you of a 80's Bollywood movie, the Police (TRAI) laid a trap for the smugglers(Bulk SMS), but it was not long before Police realized they have been double crossed. oops double trai'ed?

What do you think the government should do about this? And fast.
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Bubbles, startup fundings and poor Flipkart

Eer kahein chalo Flipkart ki maare, Bir kahein chalo Flipkart ki maare, Hamao kahein chalo ham'o Flipkart ki maare. 

Jokes apart. There have been a flurry of blogs predicting the bubble and how insane the whole valuation of flipkart is. Insane or not, someone with a deep pocket and insights into the company which you and me are not privy to has made the bold decision to invest in Flipkart. That is the only bottomline. The rest that you read in public blogs is mere speculations. Some even appearing to me as sour grapes.

When it comes to the general financial marketing (primary as well as secondary included), I am a big fan of Nicholas Taleb. His rule of thumb is you just cannot predict anything (event the bubble). The market is so volatile and complex that the experts themselves are taking a calculated risk. The market just won't perform according to your's or mine prediction. Who are we fooling, when randomness is already here to fool us (shuks bad PJ. sorry Nicholas).

Recent bursts in the bubble, both the dot com and the financial meltdown have provided good insight into the creation and eventual bursts of these bubbles. But on the flip side, now everyone claims that they can now predict these bubbles, and have been predicting since about a year starting with Groupon. Both inside and outside the country. What they fail to understand that the same insight that was provided by earlier meltdowns have made the investors wiser as well. And the collective wisdom of all these 'smart' folks is unlikely to create a bubble on the same lines as the last one. 

The dotcom bubble was preceded with a flurry of dotcom companies going IPO. Is this the same story today? No. We are not doing the same mistakes as last time, but yes we are making some mistakes. These mistakes may burst the bubble tomorrow, a year later or even 10 year later. NO ONE CAN PREDICT THAT.

The pattern of risk taking over multiple rounds of funding resembles an inverted bell curve to me.
Bell
At the beginning the founders taking the biggest leap of faith in starting their company following their vision and passion. They are the ones taking the biggest risks. Subsequent rounds of funding are taken at a somewhat reduced risk when a company starts to show a good growth and cash flow. Investors look at this growing company and genuinely want to help it grow further. The company then becomes a coffee table discussion amongst everyone and the founders the poster boys. Whoever invested in the company around this time possibly took the lowest risk. The company now is on a meteoric rise. Whoever invests now is taking the biggest risk on betting a sustained meteoric rise. Is it not fair then that the equity that they get for their investment is valued at an insane figure?

The bubble will burst in one year, or 10 year or 20 year later. No one knows. What we can do is, be cautious in our investment and let others manage their own investment. You don't know their risk profile and are not entitled to comment on it. Period.
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From DINKs to DKNI

Roma made this observation the other day. When we got married, both of us were earning more than we could spend. Had no kids. And no responsibilities as such. Fast forward by six years, and here we are with two lovely princess (Raina and Trisha). Roma has left her job and is taking care of the kids and pursuing her interest in cooking and photography. And myself, taken the plunge in entrepreneurship.

Basically with Double Income and No Kids to Double kids and No Income :)

As soon as I tweeted about it, a good friend of mine responded.

Screenshot


Battling entrepreneurship is quite challenging. More so when middle age starts bothering you and you realize you are not half as efficient or predictable that you used to be. Your kids take up a significant portion of your time. And your savings starts drying up.

I could be working in a regular job and earning more than I could spend. Go for a holiday to Singapore/Mauritius or where not. I would have bought my favourite Jazz I've been meaning to buy and turn by den into a home theater.

But Entrepreneurship is such a nasty bug. Once it bites you, there is no escaping to the real world.

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Hasta La Vista Revu

Exactly a year ago I bounced off this idea with Jai about being able to review any restaurant by sending a SMS, and that review getting published on the users twitter page, facebook page and a dedicated page for that restaurant if it had one. Well that was just the start of the idea. Jai, Ishwar and myself thought we could pull something out of it and we just jumped.

6 months down the line we realized, that the vision that we individually had about Revu was quite different. A standalone consumer centric Review platform is fundamentally different from Mobile loyalty. We could not come to a consensus due to vision mismatch, risk appetite, and fundamentally on how to grow the company. And so I move on.

But how can you quit a company that you co-founded?


A good friend of mine asked that question. It's painful, but I guess I will leave that question unanswered. Jai and Ishwar are good friends of mine, and I sincerely hope they are able to pull it off.

Hasta La Vista Revu

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Roma and Mona in gauri's ladies sangeet

(download)
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Hiring in Startups

Startup ecosystem in India is almost growing like a hockey stick curve. The number of startup events happening here in Bangalore in a month and the number of incubator (companies) mushrooming is a clear indication of that. Though a lot of companies are starting, a lot of people are becoming entrepreneurs, a lot of people are willing to be angels, one aspect of this ecosystem which is not growing at the same rate is hiring. For a successful startup besides good entrepreneurs, execution and money, you also need a good set of guys who give shape to the product.

Enteringstartup

 

Almost every entrepreneur I have met in last couple of months have voiced this exact concern. Coincidence? Essentially with regards to Hiring in startups it is a buyers market. I was amazed to see in a recent startup camp I attended, almost everyone I bumped into was looking to hire. A lot of startups want to hire, but too little talent out there. Traditional HR firms and sites like monster and naukri fail miserably in connecting startups with the motivated guys. Some sites which I think help to such extent are linkedin, pluggdin and hasgeek (there may be others). But all these sites are at best facilitators. We need a lot of motivated guys who are willing to let go of their lucrative salaries and take the so called plunge.

To present things from a personal perspective, I know a number of startups who have the potential to be successful if only they could find right guys to help build their product. One is a VC funded company and can match market salaries to the hires. Another is tinkering with an integrated Sales & Distribution product in retail space who have already bagged a proto with a top retail company looking for partner as a CTO. Another bunch of guys who have signed Dropbox as one of their beta customer for their SaaS offering. Couple of enthu guys in micro-finance space who have already run a successful pilot with a leading MFI. And of-course at Onze where I work we are looking for people to execute our product roadmap. Given different circumstances or time in life, I would have loved to be part of one of these startups. I personally believe all these guys will be successful. All of them are at an advanced stage and have done customer-validations. But still all suffer from inability to hire good guys.

There are many reasons why it is so difficult to hire in India. some of them (not necessarily mine) being

  • The very good guys taken up by MNC's and a salary no startup can match
  • Indian services companies hire in herd and have difficult clauses (read bond) making them leave the company within a year.
  • Not too many successes in India where average joe (not the founder) have stuck gold in a startup.
  • Finally those who get filtered from above and land up at your door have unreasonable expectations (Any interviewee who mentions the word 'opportunity cost', just show him the door).

There seems to be a lot more guys taking the proverbial plunge at the higher end of the risk spectrum (starting a startup) than at the lower end (joining a startup). Not really a bad thing, but it may take some time for the balance to strike.

There may be a lot of pessimism around hiring, but if you look at it in totality you will see it as a sign of evolution. We are at the cusp of having a startup revolution in one sense. Silicon valley has shown that it takes almost a generation (25 years) for a startup ecosystem to fully evolve. Expecting to replicate that in a decade or so in India would be asking for too much. 

So if you are an entrepreneur facing this pain, ease out. It's a sign of better days to come. And if you are happily working in a high paying job, jump the ship now. This is your time and opportunities are huge to chose from.

[Image source : http://gbgames.com/blog/]

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Mobile Loyalty is here to stay

I am becoming a fan of Zoomin. Every other week they come up with a fab discount on some nice prints. Moreover when you have a 3 year old and a 2 month old kid in the house, you feel like printing photos every other day. I have already got a collage printed, missed the customized mug by a day and now just ordered a flip book for just 99/-.

But what stuck me, was soon after completing my order I see this on their sidebar.

Screenshot


Notice that they are now taking my mobile number and can link my purchase directly to my number. No more plastic card or 16 digit cryptic loyalty card number to remember. Isn't that awesome? Well yes, that is the reason we started Revu

 

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Airtel Rebranding - A case of fine execution

Airtel

Rebranding an existing brand for any reason is one of the toughest thing a business goes through. Airtel recently  spent obscene amount of money to rebrand itself with a different logo and tune. There was a huge uproar in the blogger community regarding this move(here). Various tweets were floating around about how AR Rehman has lost it, and how funny and stupid the logo looks. But all said and done there is a lesson of fine execution to be learnt from Airtel.

Today morning as I picked up the newspaper, TimesofIndia's first and second page was Airtel's ad with their new logo. Good. As I walked out of the house to buy some bread I was actually surprised to see the new Logo already up in the local Kirana store. Excellent. In the afternoon I had to take my daughter across the town (from uttarahalli to ITPL, for those familiar with Bangalore) for a birthday party. Decided to take the Volvo bus. What I saw across the city was quite unbelievable. From large hoardings, to banners to small kirana store in the nooks and corner of the city, every Airtel Ad had the new logo. I don't remember seeing it yesterday (or it did not impress on me yesterday). Unbelievable.

I am in sheer awe with the way Airtel executed this exercise. Rebranding is not just changing the logo or the tune. It is doing at the right time and doing it such finesse that new logo is imprinted on everyone's mind immediately. If this exercise (changing the billboards, and advertisements in all stores) was not done overnight imagine the confusion Airtel would have had to deal with displaying both the logos simultaneously.

Hats off to whoever in Airtel executed this re-branding. Your thoughts?

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