Thoughts on Business, Marketing and Social Media

Here’s a post I recently wrote for Shack’s blog.

I’ve been into the business of building web applications for a good part of my professional career. During this period(around 3.5 years) I’ve worked for a MNC, two start-ups and also started two companies on my own. A couple days back while thinking about some business it dawned upon  that there are basically two types of businesses (guess you probably know this already) as far as my view point is concerned (Otherwise trading is also a business). If you are not working for someone else (basically a job) and doing your own thing you are either

1. Building a product (A website, a facebook app or something else for Ex: Kwippy)
2. Providing a service ( Social Media Marketing, Website design/development, SEO or something else for ex: Dial-a-Book)
3. Mix of both (for ex: Shack Companis)

These two kinds of businesses (product and service) have almost equal scope when it comes to growing big, becoming popular etc. However what’s interesting is what it takes to get them to that level. I’ve been on both sides of the line that separates a  product business and a services business. I’ve build a product and am now building a service . Kwippy and Dial-a-Book are as different a business as they can get. While Kwippy was all about building a web product from India that had a global appeal, Dial-a-Book is a over the phone service that’s aimed at the local/domestic market(for now at least).

If you think about it product and service based businesses require way different inputs and take way different life forms once they start to grow. I’ll attempt to explore those differences and what we can do to leverage/optimize them

Product Vs Service Based Businesses:

1) Starting Capital: Product based businesses on an average require more capital to startup than the service based businesses due to the raw material and infrastructure needed. While web products don’t require as much starting capital, services will more often than not be relatively cheaper

2) R&D: Irrespective of the line/domain in which you are building a product, you’ll need to spend considerable amount of time as a team or as an individual to understand what’s been done before, what’s not been done, latest technologies involved, costs, maintenance and other issues. While (most) service based businesses don’t need to think as much(it’s a plus if they do) before starting up.

3) Time to go Live: Product based businesses by their sheer nature will take longer time to go live as compared to almost no-time to launch for a service based business. Essentially a service based business is live from the minute the founder(s) decide to start.

4) Business Development/Marketing: How good a services based business will do depends significantly on the founders interpersonal/selling skills the same gets tough for a product based business. For a product based business you need to have the product right, you need to make it easy to find and spread(viral) and market it in a completely different way.

5) Technology/People Balance: I kinda feel that after a while product based businesses are more dependent on the technology than the people as compared to the service ones. For a company that makes diapers for example, the machines, the processes, raw materials are an important bit and once the basics are taken care of it can run without as much involvement  on the founders part. However for a services based business, say a consultancy service started by 5 guys with a finance background the business depends a lot on the people. Even when the organization grows big it will be known/trusted for the few names of smart/senior guys and once they leave for some other company, the clients might just follow them to their new home.

These are some of the differences I could feel and keeping them in mind I feel one might be (slightly)better of choosing the kind of business they want to do depending on their personality/skill set etc.

Guess you know what I mean, if not drop in a comment and we’ll take the discussion forward.

Link to Shack’s post: http://shackcompanis.com/post/1521371790/service-vs-product-business

It happened yet again. Facebook saw yet another meme apparently meant to promote ‘Breast Cancer Awareness‘. When I logged into Facebook day before yesterday I was unpleasantly surprised to see some female friends put statuses like these

I was caught off guard and didn’t realize for a while and it got confirmed when I saw this

If you are a regular user of Facebook you might remember a similar meme that surfaced earlier this year. While this meme is apparently all about places where women would like to keep their *purse* and not where they’d like to *do it*, the last meme was about women sharing their *Bra Colour*. I’ll not get into the discuss if such memes actually help spread awareness about Breast Cancer or not but what interests me more is the the “how & why” of these memes.

One of the first Memes I encountered was during my early days of Blogging a few years back was probably “10 things you don’t know about me” or something similar. The sheer fact that a trend needs to grow viral in order to become a meme is an interesting thing and it is worth exploring what makes a meme a meme.

A meme is in a lot of ways like a viral (forward) email/sms as it has the essential elements required to sustain and grow itself. Going back to the ‘Made To Stick’ check list for an idea to spread, a meme should also have certain features for it to go viral. Ideally a meme should be

• Simple (To ensure maximum participation. For ex: Colour of your Bra, Name of your first Crush)
• Unexpected (One of the parameters for a meme is also how unexpected/weird/double meaning/out-of-the-ordinary it is. For ex: Where would you like to “whatever”)
• Emotional (It should be able to elicit a connect emotionally. For ex: 10 Things you didn’t know about me, 5 Things I can’t live without  etc)
• Direct/In-direct call to action(A direct call like tagging people to do the same on their page/blog etc or an in-direct call to join them in the cause as in the case of Bra Colour meme)

Memes are a win-win situation for most users and the platforms(or the causes?) they spread in with users getting something different to talk/show off and the platform seeing more activity. However as someone interested in marketing I wonder if brands can leverage the meme phenomenon.  Your thoughts?

I’ve been a regular follower of Seth Godin’s blog and like almost all his posts. However there are some posts of Seth that I like way more than others. A couple posts that really caught my attention a few weeks back were on choosing the customer and training your customers respectively.

Posted at an interval of two days these two blog posts taken together offer a nice(different?) perspective of looking at things when it comes to Customer Development. Against the common notion that you should try to attract all kinds of customers Seth suggests that you choose your customers. Yes, you choose your customers for your business by your brand value proposition, pricing, customer experience and other things. All aspects of the way you run your business attracts or repels certain kinds of customers. You might wonder, why is it important to choose your customers?

It is especially important to choose your customers if you have a perspective/vision and you want things to happen according to that and not according to the terms defined by the market. For example sake, consider two product companies, one of which is very choosy when it comes to picking their customers and would rather prefer a smaller set of customers of the kind that they’d like while the other company is not really that choosy and is open to catering to all sorts of customers, the more the merrier. Assuming they both start from the same point, it won’t be difficult to imagine how differently would shape up after an year into the business. Company A which focuses of select customers will emerge out to be almost on the lines of the founder(s)’s vision while Company B which wants to get as much customers as it wants will have significant difficulty living up to the varied expectations and might just give in to the (un)reasonable demands of the majority.

Not only this, Seth suggests that businesses should also train their customers. Yes, training the customers by encouraging certain type of behaviour by rewards etc and discouraging certain type of behaviour. For ex: If you’ve priced your product slightly above the market standard then there’ll be lots of customers complaining about your price and trying to negotiate their way down(in terms of prices). Now there are two ways to go about it, one that you let customers negotiate and other is to don’t bother. Over a period of time if you follow the don’t bother policy you’ll observe how some price sensitive customers will move out and the remaining customers will get used to the higher than market price and stop complaining (This assumes that their is something that the business  offers to offset the high price).

Another interesting effect that this has is that it helps in building a culture among your customers that’s decided to a large extent by your terms and not the markets.

My new startup ‘Dial-a-Book’ has got its first mention in print media today. It’s been almost a year since I started working on Dial-a-Book along with my younger brother and it’s been an absolute fun ride.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Past life

Dial-a-Book is a Delhi-based start-up founded by brothers Mayank and Tarang Dhingra. Tarang, 25, is a final-year student at the University of Delhi. Mayank, 27, is a software engineer who left a corporate job at Fidelity International in 2005 to work for a string of tech start-ups—from SlideShare, an online presentation hosting service, to MPower Mobile, which works with mobile payments. In 2008, before the Twitter bandwagon bulldozed its way across the country’s Internet landscape, he experimented with creating a Twitter-like service for India called Kwippy—which Mayank called a “conversational platform”. The site folded in mid-2009, and subsequent dabbling in ideas on what to do next led to Dial-a-Book

and you can read the complete article here

I know some of you *might* find this surprising and *might* have some questions for me, so feel free to ping me anytime

The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know—and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good. – Jason Fried & DHH in Rework

(Image courtesy: topnews.in)

“Scratching your own itch(SYOI)” is a popular phrase amongst many startup circles. What it essentially means is to build something that solves a problem you face. The case in point cited by many is the fact that when you are solving your own problem you know what exactly the problem is and how it can be addressed while on the other hand if you are scratching someone else’s itch you are sort of taking blind shots at both the problem and the possible solution(s).

Apart from the obvious fact of knowing the problem a bit better what works for SYOI is

1. Immediate & Direct Feedback: You can directly feel the impact that your solution creates. If for example one builds a product to manage his food expenses, the utility/futility of the product can be judged directly and immediately. One doesn’t need to do a long trial run/demo to see if the product works.
2. Extra Incentive: You + Customers > Customers. Working on a problem that benefits oneself directly has additional incentive because of the direct personal impact. Not just this, the beauty of this scenario is that one doesn’t need to think about the customers all the time i.e one can be content by just solving his/her problem. Other customers become secondary and this is a good thing because you don’t have to worry about what they might/might not like and just focus on what works for you, simple.
3. Passion: SYOI also makes one more passionate about the problem they are working on because they can relate a lot more to the problem and the issues that arise because of it. The direct impact of the solution on you also adds to the passion.

However having said all that, Is ‘Scratching your own itch’ the only way out? or Is ‘Scratching your own itch’ better than ‘Scratching someone else’s itch’?

While SYOI might have it’s own benefits, it certainly isn’t the only way out for entrepreneurs and not every invention/business is born out of it. For ex: A closed social networking platform for Chief Executives (CEO’s, CXO’s etc) of Fortune 500 companies built by 24-25 year olds can still work or a dating platform built by a married man is no less likely to work because he’s not scratching his own itch {assuming he’s not interested in finding himself a date through this platform }

Also, not all’s good with SYOI and it also has its fair share of negatives

1. Small Market: What bothers you which might not be bothering others. Thus some SYOI businesses also stand a risk of solving problems for a very small market segment. For ex: A friend of mine hates to wait in queues for getting CNG for his car and is ready to pay someone extra amount to take his car and get CNG filled in it. So if he were to start a service based just on this then it’s quite likely that there might not be a lot of people willing to pay extra money to get CNG/Petrol.
2. Financial Feasibility/Business Model: SYOI might work great for Open source where all developers are constantly writing/modifying code to meet their needs and in the process helping scores of other fellow developers it might not work that well when it comes to doing a business. Not all personal itches and their solutions can have business models. This is not to be confused with the previous point on Small Market as having a solution for small market can still be monetized but monetizing something that appears to be a problem to you but no one else might see it as a problem can be an issue.
3. Domain Knowledge or lack thereof: Needless to say, while starting a business it makes a lot of difference if you have enough domain expertise in your team and it might hurt if you are trying to solve your problem without having enough domain knowledge. For ex: I probably won’t land anywhere if I were to try to solve my itch of building a car that flies instead of crawling on Delhi roads. It’s worth noting that lack of domain knowledge is also likely(a bit more?) to hurt when you are trying to scratch someone else’s itch.

S0 are you scratching your itch or someone else’s? How’s it going?

Links:

1. http://archipreneur.blogspot.com/2010/03/scratch-your-own-itch-rework-by-37.html
2. http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch02_Whats_Your_Problem.php
3. http://www.instigatorblog.com/scratching-your-own-itch/2010/08/12/

Though I’ve been dying to, but it has been quite a while since I blogged. Blogging for me amongst other things is an art, a way to express how I feel about a particular living/non-living thing and It’s the mere fact that I can express myself freely is just  too good.

The first half of the month went by way too quickly. While most of the first week  was spent traveling, the second was spent on bed(down with viral). A lot has been going on both in the mind and off it and I hope to be able to speak here more often. If you happen to read this and there’s something you’d like me to write about (Startups, Business, Product Management, Social Media or anything else) just drop a comment and I’ll try to cover it.

BTW what’s up with you?

Off late I’ve been thinking and reading(a bit) on how to be more productive and efficient while working. Information/Web Workers that we are, run a great risk of diverging from the tasks in hand to doing something completely random(and useless mostly).

It often happens with me that I start working on something(say a presentation) and get a notification on my Tweetdeck or BlackBerry and before I realize I am going through somebody’s twitter profile or reading a blog post somebody shared.

Here are some of the things that I’ve tried and have managed to save some time/productivity loss. To ensure that the post doesn’t stretch long enough I’ve divided into two parts and this is the first part.

1) Not Logging on IM’s: It’s been a few months since I logged into any of the Instant Messengers while working and it’s definitely a time saver. Though I have accounts on almost all the popular IMs I use them sparingly that too only when I need to have a predecided conversation with someone. If you find it tough being offline on IM’s, being invisible is the next best thing

2)  Not Checking Emails Every 2/5 Minutes: Certain professions, job roles and situations expect that you read and reply all incoming mail as soon as possible but for most of us that’s not the case. Therefore clicking refresh button or clicking on that open gmail tab is neither needed nor useful.  I am also practicing this habit of not checking mails every 5 minutes and trying to do it at least after an hour.

3)  Disabling Notifications: Whether you realize it or not, if you are active on Facebook and use a desktop too for Twitter among other things, your chances of getting a comment/invite/tagging/update notification are really high and you’ll end up loosing focus and time quite often. Therefore it’s a good idea to disable email notifications for your Facebook and other tools/services.
Got a productivity tip to share? Post it as a comment and I’ll try to include it in the next post on this topic.

Check out this excellent compilation of 10 Inspiring Ted Talks for Startups http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/07/ten-inspiring-ted-talks-for-st.php

I particularly like the talks # 6,7 and 9

Which ones to do you find most useful?

At any given point of time the number of browser windows and browser tabs open on my laptop is not less than 15. Yes, never less than 15, in fact its about 25-30 on an average. Apart from the fact that it sucks a lot of memory from my Win 7 loaded laptop it also is weird pressure of sorts. The pressure to read every open link and extract most out of it in the least amount of time.Not only this, this situation is like quicksand, the more you try to get out of it, the more you get stuck. The more tabs I want to close, the more I find myself opening.

Web pages have this really good/bad attribute of cross-linking, so one page links to another and that links to another, ad infinitum and a significant part of my working time goes in closing tabs one after the other. I am quite sick of this never ending game and shall try to start afresh tomorrow by closing everything done(almost) and starting afresh and hope to limit myself to a 10 tab window and get more done.

Another post to keep me attuned on blogging and sharing some useful information in the process.

1) Speed of eating “key to obesity” – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7681458.stm

2) How to build one of a kind Facebook Fan Page: http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/28/how-to-build-engaging-one-of-kind-facebook-fan-pages/

3) Stephen Fry: What I Wish I’d Known When I was 18: http://vimeo.com/11414505

and just for the laughs, this Vicks Action 500 AD(by Anurag Kashyap apparently)