Skip to main content

How Indian Entrepreneurs can build for the Mass Indian User: Ankur Singla, Helpchat

Image
By

In a ET article, Ankur Singla, CEO of Helpchat shares where Indian Entrepreneurs are failing at building for Indian masses:
"My hypothesis is that most Indian entrepreneurs and product managers build products for people like themselves - elite and westernized Indians who think and speak in English. This is also why almost all Internet companies fight it out for the first 10-20 million internet users.
However, the honest truth of the Indian internet market is that to build a large Internet business, you need find a way to build for the 200 million common Indians."

How can Indian Entrepreneurs build for Indian masses ?


1. Go out, talk and relate to the COMMON MAN.
"One weekend, I took all product managers in our team to Church Street in Bengaluru and we spent four hours talking to security guards, waitresses and small business owners. You need to see their phones, their home screens and understand their behaviour. All of them mooch off the Starbucks internet; a guard uses Uber to pick up his family from railway station, a waitress wants news about her hometown and a business owner needs more content around jobs."
2.  Stop Westernizing the product/service and Embrace the Indianess
"think about Maslow's hierarchy of mobile needs. Think about basic aspects of the phone - battery, data usage, phone space, balance on their phone." 
He shares about Chinese company UC Browser - "most readers of ET would think that Chrome is a great mobile browser until they see how UC Browser has built a download manager, optimised for Facebook messages and reduced data usage (all features super important for the common Indian)."
Click here to read more.


Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financials, Transactions (private equity, venture capital and M&A) & their Valuations in India.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

How I Raised Funding - Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry

By
You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this  interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more arti...
Read more

How Vinod Khosla created Sun Microsystems

By
While I knew the one line description "Vinod Khosla was the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and was earlier part of the founding team at Daisy Systems", I hadn't come across a more detailed version of Khosla's pre-KPCB exploits before Joe Kraus talked about it on his blog . Here are some extracts from the Harvard Business School case study (by Dr. Amir Bhide) that I found interesting: How a Stanford secretary "linked up" SUN's co-founders: I'm probably more of a conceptual engineer, and I can draw block diagrams for almost anything I can think of, but I can almost never implement them. So I started looking for someone who had done this kind of stuff before. I heard of a project at Stanford called the Stanford University Network, or Sun.workstation project. I called the computer science department, and some secretary who did not want to bother a professor gave me the uame of a graduate student from Germany, Andy Bechtolsheim. Apparently,...
Read more