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exploring entrepreneurship or whatever it is

Talk Business

I don't feel like "taking on the world" when I wake up and have had chai. I don't want to "win battles" and "annihilate the competition". I have no desire to be a "winner" who must "take it all" or be "cutthroat". 

Sure I want to make a decent living, build a brand, be recognized. But I want to see win-wins, not play zero sum games. I want to feel the satisfaction that comes from having happy smiling people because of what I do. 

Is it a bad fit? Or have businesses reduced to win-lose - and are increasingly asking those who work for/with them for the same attitude?

Social Net ke Side Effects

One thing Facebook, Twitter etc have done is to make it even more important to appear to lead an interesting life than actually leading one.

Applies to entrepreneurship, patriotism, concern-for-causes too - ?

Everyone's marketing - their lives, lifestyles, their relationships, their heartfelt causes, and of course (and maybe most appropriately) their businesses :) Its reverse-voyeurism, in a sense. And surely, our social networks can be for so much more, can they not ?


Groupon and gang : Why hyperlocal still needs solving

I run a small business and have been approached by SnapDeal, Taggle and the likes. Somehow it never made any sense to me.

We're attracting folks on a certain value proposition, and  that is not based on discounting and "cheap". On the contrary, its about a certain kind of experience and discounting as deep as these deal sites would like you to do would actually harm the brand! It tends to portray some sort of desperation,  and calls into question the pricing vs value offered otherwise. We've also not had a very great experience with deal-hunters, and would rather stick to customers who value the whole experience instead. So we've completely avoided it.

I'm guessing this is true, as the second assessment above points out, for a lot of businesses. The deal sites are probably not batting at all for the merchants, and have a suck-them-dry approach. In the medium term, that won't work well for consumers either (I've seen some restaurants create a 'special offering' for the deal, specifically, and am very very suspicious of what they'll serve. I do not want my dinners and experiences 'discounted' along with the price.)

Let's look at what a 'good deal' is. (I started http://dealrater.in as a follow up to this thought process a while ago). 

Its something thats a very good Value-for-Money proposition. It doesn't have to be cheap, or at a discount, for it to be so. Its usually goods or services of good to great quality (remember the low end Chinese bike manufacturers trying to dump cheap bikes in India ? Never took off.) And at a fair price that keeps the VFM high. Alternatively, it could be a low impact (don't know or care much about quality...) and dirt cheap (...but at this price, who cares) offering.

What merchants need from deal sites is probably one of the following
  • Announcement and price discovery (for a new business/products). Just want a lot of people to know about it. Don't want to discount much - and in fact would like to discover price.
  • Tryouts (for new businesses or offerings). The messaging is about "hey you like this category, so we thought wee'd invite you to try this out". Its almost like a select/invited/focus group the site needs to manage. Haven't heard anything like this at all.
  • Stock Clearance.  Have a lot of stuff thats last season/end of line/want to get rid of. Straightforward. Let the consumers know transparently that this is the case. And very very clearly price below real street prices.
  • Last Minute Inventory. Similar to Stock Clearance, but very different in how it'll be done, who it targets etc. The need is to connect those who're potentially looking for that inventory, or may hop on at the 11th hour if the price is right, and the unsold, perishable inventory. at Linger, we sometimes have this need.
None of the deal sites seem to be thinking in terms of what they're solving, really. Everyone seems to be addressing the same set of lowest common denominators, and throwing a lot of money/sales effort at it. 

There will be a shakeout and a deals-2.0 pretty soon!

[ Plug: If you're a deal site looking to change things, talk to me. I'm a Product Strategy/"Storytelling" guy NOT looking at fulltime jobs and help folks with executing this kind of thought process. I'd love to effect deals 2.0 :) ]

Size, profitability etc : How much do you need ?

If agility, nimbleness are important in the marketplace, and if smaller companies are automatically more capable of these, why does every company want to keep growing ? Shouldn't profit-per-employee, and finding an ideal size that lets one retail the ability to quickly react, change course, etc, be goals instead ? 

Of course, profit-per-employee probably means a healthy growth in business, and as little growth in "organization" (people, overheads, etc) as possible - and manageable. But there's probably a theoretical limit to these, and the inevitable desire to scale numbers one sees in every startup thats seen some success is unwarranted at least in some cases - probably comes from trying to stick to a format, or investor pressure (same thing), or insecurity about "being small". 

If the startup, and one of its goals, is truly about making a significant impact to a business (model) or the environment or local economy or some such, of course the need for scaling acquires a different dimension.

Its still always worth a question to ask how much scale you want/need/can live with without giving up the whole idea of starting out on your own.


the 360

desirer. thinker. doer.

dreamer. wisher. trier. fighter.

builder. seller. doubter. surer.

finder. keeper. sharer.

seeker. giver. 

hoper. no-hoper. prayer.

fixer. better. wonderer. wanderer.

scratcher. leaner. happier. meaner.

embracer. connector. explorer.

richer. poorer.

entrepreneur.

The startup space needs some weight gain

On a recent thread on India's startup ecosystem vis-a-vis the idea of the startup visa that's doing the rounds, someone mentioned that in the US they saw a lot of support for the underdog - which is what startups are. This support came in the form of users signing up, the biggies willing to work with startups and angels and VCs more readily putting their weight behind ideas.

In India, its a tougher battle, to put it mildly.

Most users are less than enthusiastic, and even nervous, about signing up for a startup's service. Unless it is purely (small) transactional with very low risk, or comes as a huge deal, or serves a so-far unserved, desperate need. Anything less than this, and we need the weight of a big brand.

Big enterprise doing business with small guys is the same story - except it needs a much lower risk or a much stronger need. Else, no go.

I almost don't blame the VCs for following this trend. Few buyers, few users - would you put your money into it ?

The startups that are working are doing it around transactions. Sell books, tickets. Anything that needs some longer "commitment" falters. It can happen as a grey/white label, or with some smart dealmaking, but else is very very tough. 

How do we solve this, and do it right ?
  • Start with something transactional/low risk. Even if you intend to solve longer term problems, drive stickiness, etc. Tryouts are important.
  • Get a dealmaker or two on your side. Easier said than done, of course :)
  • Do NOT pay users to use stuff. It might give you a spike, but it isn't worth it. Avoid freebies, except for being thankful.
  • Persist :) The curve will take its time. Goes hand in hand with lean-burn too.
These are some things startups can do to work around the problem. The core of it - i.e. making startups feel a little more "secure" and "weighty" in the eyes of the user, investor, big-biz, is still an open problem. 

Ideas ?

Irritation to Go-live in a few hours

A couple of days ago, got yet-another-email in my inbox announcing deals. As is often the case, they were either uninteresting/of unclear value or felt like a trap with layers of well disguised fine print.

My first reaction was the usual irritation - the kind you have when a smrt-ass-wannabe tries to take you for a ride and you just manage to spot it in time. But, over lunch which I had in a few minutes later, it occurred to me that I might possibly not be alone in this sea of deal-noise. And that like me, folks naturally have a nose for good, genuine deals which actually made sense.

And as I thought more, it became obvious that the whole definition of a "deal" as a "discounted" offer was flawed. I'd just bought great tyres for my dad's car - even at no discount they were awesome deals compared to the other choices. And we humans, we just know these things, don't we ? Especially Indians - VFM is part of our DNA.

Of course, we find deals everywhere. And the really interesting ones are those that are around us - those in the neighbourhood mall, or with our usual grocer, or favourite diner. Offline, online. Sometimes just a friend selling something they don't need anymore.

So created the easiest thing I could - a Facebook page for dealrater. And followed up with a WordPress install with a plugin for voting deals up or down. And then added a Google spreadsheet form so folks could add stuff they found VFM, or a great deal they'd go for themselves.

Dealrater_logo_crafty

The site is now up at http://dealrater.in. Its a simple blog with some features now, and will grow if my gut feel of folks being better at this, and interested in cutting down deal-noise is vindicated (them being able to find the site is of course part of the testing so help me please :))

// Pardon the crappy logo - its a 2 minute job to get started. Will get a fancier, designed one later.

All of this took sporadic effort over all of 48 hours. Including some data seeding.

I am in violation of Google's policies! {Shiver}

This is what I saw in the mail this morning:

This message was sent from a notification-only email address that does not
accept incoming email. Please do not reply to this message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello,

While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying
Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For
instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as
Please note that this URL is an example and that the same violations may
exist on other pages of your website.

As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers may not display
Google ads on pages with adult or mature content. While we understand that
it may be challenging to monitor user-generated content, such as comments,
on your site, we require publishers to check that the webpages containing
their ad code complies with our program policies.

Please make any necessary changes to your webpages in the next 72 hours.
We also suggest that you take the time to review our program policies
to ensure that all of your other pages are in compliance.

Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad
serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to
your account within the next three days, your account will remain active
but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note,
however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found
in the future.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Issue ID# 166xxxxx
----------------
For more information regarding this warning email, please visit our Help
Center:

As far as I remembered, I have not cut-pasted or written or even pointed to any adult content on the web, tho yeah, there's lot which indicates maturity on both the readers' and authors part. Obviously, I was a little flabbergasted. On clicking the culprit link, I realized there were some eastern-script (Chinese?) comments that I could not make head or tail of, and had never noticed, or been notified about!

Especially given that this is on Google's own blogging platform, does this sound like its fair ? Not from where I stand. For one, the algos could, and should, easily isolate the offending comments, realize its not author-originated, and maybe hide those? At worst, maybe send me a friendlier note about "Hey we've found some shady material from your commenters, wanna take care of it? Its interfering with our Adsense policies."

But no sir, I have been found in violation for someone else's actions, inaction and clearly no "adult" intent on my part. And if "further violations are found in the future" I will lose the privilege of using Adsense! And the huge riches - all of $36 - that I could accumulate from the same. I am terror-stricken!

Honestly, Big-G, this is a very very lousy approach to managing consumers/customers. There's not even a way of getting back to someone in there and clarifying! You're losing the mojo a bit, and this needs to be part of the reforms if you want that back. If its a "just machines" approach, sure we understand, but first make those machines a little smarter before you send threatening notes to users.

Aside : For the longest time I'd cribbed that most folks had a "we-re wrong, Google's right" if something didn't quite work out with using a Google service. A set of results that left one unsatisfied just meant we'd not framed the query well. People started to, and continue to, rewrite sites for the express purpose of being in Googles good books and ranks. Isn't that a little screwed ? I do see cracks in that mindset, and one hears f the SEO problem etc more often.