The Third Web 2.0 Startup

 

Learnings from the first and second mobile startup, is that I tend to look at things differently, where my boss directly said "There are three types of people in school, those who score the highest because they are very focussed on what they have to create, then those who score medium, because they get distracted and then those who get the lowest, because they are very focussed, on something else."

Oh and lets talk about a few ups and downs.

The first startup closed up in two months after me joining back at college after summer training.

The second startup first tried a merger with a US based firm, then found that SOX compliance was too hard, so hard in fact that I heard that companies had shifted from USA to UK because it's that tough.

Then finally merged with an Indian company, which got bought by another company, a few months after I left.

So that's the real shark tank. And your passion will help you navigate through it.

Technology, we first started with apps which get downloaded on your phone, via a computer, or as a service via the operator. Or they get shipped with your phone.

Either way, you had no choice, you either used it or ignored it.

Most ignored.

So this was Web 1.0, where things like content and systems got pushed to the user, and they either used it or used something else.

Communities were being formed, as interest areas, first geographically, then around long tail interests, so there were chatrooms in Yahoo around specific interests like music.

Oh, and blogs had just started, so people started expressing themselves, like Russell Beattie, and then getting battered down for controversy.

Oh, there was Giga Om, a great guy covering the startup space.

So, I was sure about moving to Mumbai and looking at companies interested in using mobile as the next step, so I spoke to my friend who was the creative head in a company working in Web2.0 and he was telling me how his CEO loves mobile, so that was it.

The first few days were about looking at the plans that companies who had already built Web 2.0 properties, were looking at how to move to mobile.

The first option was someone who already had a huge community for girls, nearly 700,000, at a time when Facebook was yet to emerge.

They had ads on their product packages, which brought subscribers to their community, where there was constant effort on growing the community.

So the first concepts at that time, was how do we enable mobile messaging, over SMS, as at that time mobile internet was just starting, so we created an app, which worked over SMS.

The next concept was about an app on the website which needed to be changed to an app on the phone.

Mobile websites at the time, were pure text, so the next concept was to create a mobile website for a car company, with images.

A company making products for mothers in the -9 months to + 9 years range, wanted a website where mothers get emails regarding the state of their pregnancy or motherhood, with information on what's coming up. It starts with the mother entering the first date of the last period. For me the interesting part in hindsight, was that the majority of visitors to the website, were men. So the main thing in every campaign,is to start with who you think you are targetting and then focus on who the data tells you is the real target group.

Mumbai had a Barcamp scene too, just that this was focussed more on business, while Bengaluru was focussed more on technology.

We also did a campaign for one of the most innovative telecom companies in the world, working on the MVNO concept, who I considered one of the most interesting founders, who always did an interesting launch for his brands. At every stage, right from the pitch, to the many different deliverables, including a comic strip, there was a lot of review and understanding, where we too had expectations that this would be big, seeing how they had kickstarted the mobile internet space in USA.

But they started with feature phones, the phones without internet. And wanted people to log online to buy one.

One of the most interesting campaigns was to "Get paid for incoming!" where the leading nightclub brand in Goa, actually used this to get his bills paid without spending a pie.

Converted the team from a TV campaign into an online video, but realised that the TV ad actor, has a few typical faces, so very difficult to get him to act for online, unlike theatre actors.

What did better, was to convert the TV campaign into online ads, where the guy in one corner, looks at the other guy in the other corner.

Cracking the client brief, is very important, especially online, launched a few campaigns in a fortnight.

Oh, and I got to play God, for a kid powder video.

Claymation is interesting, but a lot of work.

The 29/11 Mumbai attack happened, where people I knew lost their lives. Twitter was new then, but it came to life when the government decided to cut cable, especially when the journalists were trying to cover everything. So if someone was stranded and looking for a blood bank, Twitter was the place to look. The foreign media were literally following whatever they could get off social media.

Selling digital advertising was difficult, especially to a room of senior people who never went online.

The next difficult part, was when a client asks you for the most Wow experience, and then starts grilling you about the compliances. Video was a big thing then, with internet speeds still really slow.

At that time, we were using servers from companies like Netmagic, which is now NTT Data, the leaders in data centres, so from servers that time, to the cloud and then back to servers today, things have come full circle.

SEO as a service was one such service and then intranets, since we had the server for the brand, we could use it for internal services as well.

Being in media, was almost like being royalty, where places specially welcome media guys.

Creating communities, means actually knowing what your community wants and being the custodian in giving them what they want.