Hey, hi there
I had something to share about Spiegel - India poor story. It will require attention and time, so if you are just scrolling around, please carry on to the next post, and have a good day.
See, the problem with Social media is that everyone wants to build an informed, engaging and inclusive community, but those things require much deeper attention than Social media easily facilitates. Due to various inherent features like stories, infinite scrolls, and now even ads in mid-video, that attention is even more difficult to put on a single post for getting informed or engaged. So, I am really glad that you made this far, on the hope that you would have something interesting to read. I admire how you have this positive hope from me, yet lose it a lot of times for someone who’s always been around :)
Anyways, important thing, I was at my peace with infrequent posts, mostly related to nerdy stuff, rather than any opinion, or view about crazy things that happen everyday, cause you know, like everyone else, I got my own challenges each day.
But, this ' India poor story', might be seriously damaging to young entrepreneurs in our country, specially for the 19 year old me.
India is the richest country I know, India is rich with heritage, India is rich with culture, India is rich with diversity, India is rich with humility, and stories of sacrifice. Unfortunately, our current financial state on an aggregate level is disheartening to the core.
On a global scale, our GDP per capita rank is worse than our FIFA Rank. Please wait a second to grasp that. We are a Cricket loving nation, and we systematically curb several other sports to non-market status. Thanks to technology, in recent years others have found a way to monetise it. Coming back to point, we are a bad football team, we recently improved, but a nation of a Billion people should feel some shame on their football performance, its a very beautiful sport, please give it a chance, and to be worse than that in any field, should wake all of us up!
Think about it! For anyone who has no clue how bad we are at both, we are above 100, and it would be difficult for you to name 99 countries in head, so there are countries that are richer than India, but you haven’t even heard name of them, and even if you read all of them, you would see names you would have never seen, or knew to be a country, it happened with me at least.
So, are we Rich or Poor?
We are Rich in a lot of things, but can be in much more, provided we embrace what we have, accept what we are, understand our strengths, and utilise them to achieve what we wish.
But, how does it matter if some young entrepreneur believes India is rich or poor?
Because we are poor as a market. Let me explain this with a simple story.
Once upon a time there was a boy, he loved to make games, so he thought let’s build a great game based on Cricket theme. After all, Cricket is what India loves, and even he shared a passion for it. So, brimming with his idea, he decided to make a web based game, and decided to buy a domain. Oops! he was told by google, ‘Your domain might be a make or break case for your business. It’s serious stuff, you need to be careful with SEO and all.’
So, he learnt all there was to learn about SEO for getting him going, and then proceeded to do the same with Photoshop, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, Hosting, Email subscriptions, Ad networks, and other little nuisances around getting a web-product business going. He worked pretty hard for a couple of straight months. Thankfully, attendance wasn’t compulsory in his department.
He was able to meet his tight deadline to release the website, before the day IPL began. And now, with all his knowledge of minting $$ with all those ad clicks he was going to be so rich, so soon, you wouldn’t even imagine. He even told his room partner,
“I just need this to work enough to make $3,000, and then we both can go to Johannesburg to see the final of IPL Live. By all of my calculations this shouldn’t be difficult at all”.
They both shared a taste of Cricket, his room partner’s was much finer though. He was pretty sure, because even in the below average case, he had read on the internet, click rates were ~$1 a click. His humble targets and calculations seemed enough.
Getting some registrations going, and spreading the word around, he anxiously opened his Komli Dashboard, as Google had rejected his domain for not being old enough. Something was massively wrong! The dashboard reflected rates closer to $1 for ~75 clicks. He frantically called Komli, and shouted on them explaining wildly how his CPC/ CPM rates were not correct. Soon, a bit more studying revealed a secret he had not known, the Internet is not fair my dear friends.
All ad revenues are determined by the quality of traffic on the website.
Unfortunately, Cricket is played and watched heavily by Subcontinent region, and the whole region is kinda poor for those Click Rates, and that is how $3,000 rapidly change to ~$100, barely enough to pay for domain and server costs.
A heart broke that day. He went to drink Daaru(Drinks), after all, he had worked 4-5 months straight on this, day and night, and it took just 1 week for the romance to break.
That boy was me, that year was 2009, and that website was iplcricketgame.com. Just look at that SEO right there. IPL + CRICKET + GAME, boom! :D
I am thankful that it happened, because not only did I learn a lot, but I can also share this story with you today. This is why you have EA Sports making FIFA, NBA, NHL every year, but not Cricket. Maybe times have completely changed. But, in some small sense, maybe this is also a reason why its difficult for local players to fight against behemoths in same industry? I don’t have enough experience to comment on that, but maybe something to ponder when we turn to capital dumping issues, even with same money in bank they would burn less on aggregate if it comes to last mile. Just give it a thought.
Getting an app made similar to Snapchat is not the most difficult thing to do. A couple of crazy engineers with lack of knowledge about markets would have already done it in all probability. But, just ask yourself, do you think if you get it to all of Indian Smartphone population, can you make enough money from paid content views? So much that you can sustain the acquisition, development and running costs? Won’t be easy for sure, but if you believe you can do it, then please go ahead and do it, because then you can turn the game of globalisation on its head. If you can come up with a business model that makes large chunks of profit from India, like Facebook makes from developed world, like Amazon makes from AWS, you can own the world and I wish you good luck for that.
Till then, let’s just accept. It would be difficult to make money for a while in India. Once we do that, we can begin to think ahead like, what can we do best to grab hold of the opportunity that lies ahead? What opportunity does lie ahead? India is a big market, but a tricky one, but it is the one that would give you satisfaction when you win it, and maybe you can help India become not so poor?
With this, I leave you. I have taken super liberty to call various assumptions, about various individuals and organisations, but I just wish somebody would have explained this to me in depth, and now that I believe I can understand it somewhat, I had to share this with budding entrepreneurs. There’s nothing else I wish to judge, neither am I qualified enough.
As a parting note, please invest your time to understand Markets, startups that could absolutely not survive in any other country, but where they did, should be fun to explore, I would also read more on this. I personally believe market is the most important factor for your startup, and wave is not a market my dear friends :D
I also believe it’s not Social media that takes your time, or Smartphone that eats your attention, its the way you use it. Stop blaming the product, but I guess addiction is a topic for another day. Enough gyaan(Useless information) for the day. Have fun and keep spreading smiles :)
Thanks
I originally wrote this on Facebook this morning.