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 ?
"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.
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