Praja Know.Care.Participate

I am glad to introduce to you to praja.in a citizen portal for Bangalore. I have been involved in the development of the site and hope you will find the site very meaningful and useful. I will be brief here and just present the introduction mail I wrote for the site here. I would be thankful if you pick the following piece and run it on your blog or mail it to friends.

Dear friend,

I am glad to invite you to join a new website a few like minded folks have developed.Take a moment to visit Praja Bangalore now.

Praja, starting from its name, is a citizen's website. Its however not one of those things like Orkut or Facebook though. Praja is a place for responsible citizens to meet, interact and discuss ideas. Praja provides a platform for citizens to know more about their city, care towards the city and participate in their city's development. See 'about' page to know more and read a more passionate introduction. Or read the intro in Kannada.

As India progresses into a developing nation, it would face its own unique problems. Many of the cities are already facing problems with basic amenities, infrastructure etc. These problems are being compounded by lack of dialogue between authorities and responsible citizens. We believe that you as a responsible citizen will come forward to discuss the issues and offer solutions.Being associated with Bangalore, it was only logical to start with Bangalore site. But if we have enough interested folks, we will have other sites up soon to.

Do take a moment to register yourself and look around the site. There are several features like Blogs, forums, galleries and most importantly, project tracking pages (where you can monitor the progress of Bangalore Metro, International Airport etc). You can post in Kannada too if you wish. Visit this page to know what features are available for users and content creators.

• If you are in Bangalore, we need you to tell us your view from ground zero.
• If you are associated with Bangalore but not staying there, we would love to hear your experiences with other places and how Bangalore can implement the best you have seen.
• If you are from other city, do join and start the discussion. If there are enough folks from your place you can start your city-specific praja site too!

In a nutshell, you have no reason not to join, unless you really dont really care for your city and its problems.

See you there!

-Praja team

Coming soon

Very soon, you will see my posts related to Bangalore traffic and infrastructure on a new site. A site that is dedicated to connect people who care about their cities.

A local, passionate and knowledgeable group of citizens, voicing their opinions and getting heard in the right way from those who are responsible. Finally its time for all of us to do more than just cribbing.

Know.Care.Participate.

Watch this space tomorrow.

How to sell books online in India

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

There are plenty of online bookstores in India but unfortunately there aren't any that come to your mind when you really want to buy books online. For people who wonder why Amazon has not entered India yet, Bazee co-founder Avnish Bajaj says in this interview that the market is not big enough yet. But the good news is that the market is the correct size now for your favourite offline bookstore to go online and when the market finally grows, they will be in a very good shape to encash their 'first-comer' advantage.

With this in thinking, I gave a few suggestions to folks at www.sapnaonline.com the only online store from which I have bought books and happy with their services. I am reproducing the chain of mails in which I shared my ideas about how they can capture the market better. This is not an idea to help someone open a business but to improve the existing one so it is in a different format than the rest of my business ideas.

To start with, I did not have anyone's id at Sapna so I sent the mail to customer care hoping that they would notice. I must say I did not have too much hope that they will.

from:Narasimha Shastri
to: customercare@sapnaonline.com
date:Apr 16, 2007 2:16 PM

subject:Contact details enquiry

Hello,I am an old
customer of Sapna (both online and offline) and I amwriting to make some suggestions.The nature of suggestiosn I want to make are of very high impact on the business and hence I would like to get in touch with the personincharge of making top-level decisions for Sapna Infoway.I would be glad if you could give me the e-mail address of the personwith whom I can discuss how to make Sapnaonline.com a better website and make it India's best and most popular online book store.
Thanks,
Shastri

But they did indeed reply. They have a very responsive customer care (which was also my experience from them during my purchases from them).

From: "Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
To: "Narasimha Shastri"
Sent: Wednesday, April 18, 2007 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: Contact details enquiry

Hello Mr.Shastri
Greetings! Thankyou for your interest for Sapnaonline.com .We welcome your suggestions .kindly feel free to mail me.

thanking you
Jayshree
Batavia - Buss Devp

I was pretty encouraged so I sent this mail out.

from:Narasimha Shastri
to:"Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
date : Apr 18, 2007 9:28 AM
subject:Suggestions for your business

Jayashree,
I am glad to obtain a response from you. About me, I am an Engineer by education who works mostly in R&D sector. However I have a strong interest in Indian businesses prominently the new-economy ones. I have no formal education in business. In the attached document I am also explaining why I am offering these suggestions. I have no idea of the background of people who will read it so I have not made the document too technical. Technicalities can be discussed later if you like the theme. I am attaching a PDF file that contains a write up about my suggestions and ideas for you.
I want you to read this document with the following things in mind.

* I have no idea of how big or small you are and how your sales numbers look.
* I dont have a very good understanding of traditional publishing/book selling businessI might hence be wrong in my thinking.

I would be glad if you could comment on my ideas and tell me if at all they are feasible. My only strong point is that the sooner you can reinvent yourself, the better. Because if you dont, someone else will and in online businesses, second place is not good enough. Will look forward for your reply.
Shastri

Here is what that PDF contained:

I start with the presumption that you want to be India’s most famous, biggest and successful online bookstore. I wish to give you my opinion on what things need to be done for you to get there. There are several things that you are doing right and there are several things that are already in place for you to achieve that goal. I want to talk about what more need to be done to set yourself apart from the other in the field.

Sapnaonline is a fairly well designed site with very customer friendly features. It also
has a large collection of books and ships fast and cheap. The customer support through mail and phone is above average too. I however dare to say that over the last 4 years that I have been observing Sapnaonline, there has not been a growth that it deserved.

I have been thinking about Indian Online businesses for sometime and I want to share my thoughts with you. (Please see the end of this document to know why I am doing this). Here are my suggestions for your website.

Start a affiliate program
Firstly as an online bookstore, your customer base is mostly the generation that uses internet for day-to-day lives. These are the people who use e-mail every day, run blogs and interact with people with similar interests. While you want to cover all the book reading population of India to as your customers, its physically impossible to advertise so much that you can reach all of them by buying advertisements in websites/newspapers.

The best way to reach this audience is to use viral marketing strategies. Your best customers should become the people who will advertise for you, without you having to pay anything. If you have a happy customer, make him your brand ambassador. Let all your happy customers speak for you on their websites, e-mails and blogs.

In an ideal world you would expect all your customers to do the marketing for you automatically, but in the real world, everyone needs some incentive to overcome the inertia. You can give an incentive to your existing customers with an affiliate program. With an affiliate program, if I get a user to go to sapnaonline from my website and buy a book, I get a 2-5% commission. I can get it as cash or buy books with the money earned by this.

Let me explain the use of affiliate program with an example. Consider an existing customer. He buys a book from you, is happy because you gave him a 10% discount, did not charge him a lot for postage and offered many payment methods. Now, he is very happy and goes and tells a few friends who might or might not remember your website after a day or a week when they really want to buy a book. That’s the end of it. You had a happy customer, but you could not convert that asset into many more happy customers. Instead, suppose you have an affiliate program. With the affiliate plan, each happy customer will put a link on his website/blog, which will help him earn a little revenue, and you don’t have to spend anything for advertising. If you could get very popular book review blogs to include your affiliates program, that should increase your market share by many times. Once you get this system in place, invite a set of most popular blog authors and websites to try it out. This makes a lot of people to ‘talk’ about Sapnaonline and that’s the best advertisement you can get. More your name is on the top of your customers, more likely they will be to buy from you.
Sooner or later, people will figure out that even for buying books for themselves, they should use the links from their own website to get some more discount. This is encouraging that they will keep links on their website and continue giving you advertisement, for free.

You can implement affiliate program in several ways. Enable users to easily get banners of their favourite books and post it on their website (like Flickr badge). Make people to include Sapna’s link in their e-mail signatures. Let people build a list of their favourite books and post it on their website. Let people take pride in being your customers. Also put a list of highest earners of affiliate program on the front page and tell them how much each of the successful people are making. This will let others take the trouble of signing up for affiliate program.

I hope you appreciate the importance of this kind of marketing in this competitive world. Everyone is fighting to get customer’s attention and while some companies still believe advertising is the way, you can make your name the obvious choice for buying books online.

Get rid of shipping charges
I understand that there is at least 20-30% margin on most books. Get rid of shipping charges at least for orders more than say 500 or 1000 Rs. This helps in several ways. People who would otherwise buy about 400 Rs worth of books will now buy 500 Rs worth. But more importantly, shipping charges are a mental block for a buyer. ‘No shipping charge’ will help lot more customers to buy goods from you. If this is financially too costly, you can reduce the discount to make up for it. You are fine as long as you are giving some discount.

Make use of existing customer database
I have signed up for the Sapna newsletter and have got only one mail in last 2 years or so. What are you wasting such a precious resource for? Every fortnight or so send newsletters telling about the new releases, offers, and more importantly the top-10 or top-50 books. People who signed up have voluntarily asked you to send update so that they can buy from you. You don’t get such chances always; use that option. You might have noticed in your retail book-store that people buy best sellers just because they are best sellers in the first place. Use this fact to sell more books online too. The
Top-50 chart will make people buy more. Give exclusive offers to regular customers. Use some kind of loyalty program so that people who bought from you, will buy again.

Make customers come to you not only for buying the book
Design your website so that people can write reviews on books they have read and rate the books. If its needed, place a reward for writing good reviews too. That way your site will become a place to come for anything related to books. Once people start coming, sooner or later they will start buying things from you. At present I cant come to sapnaonline and do anything other than buying books.

Redesign the website
The current website needs major changes. If you cant get the user interface right, you wont get anything else right. Get rid of all that excessive flash graphics on the home page. Use sober colours like light and dark blue, grey etc. Not everyone likes a bright green website. Flashy websites put off users much more quickly. Nice static graphics with farther spacing and better layout. Consult a user interface specialist if needed. Make it very clutter free and pleasing to mind. Moreover, the site does not render well in various browsers and looks awkward in several window sizes and resolutions. This needs to be fixed.
The Subject/Publisher category menus on the left side are totally useless. When I scroll into a category I am faced with tens of pages full of books. What should I do next? That does not serve any purpose at all. Instead, make the search better. Give more options in the search. For the people who still want to browse by category, make it easier by giving options like ‘latest additions’, ‘highest user ratings’ , ‘Best selling’ etc. Of course, you will have to invest some money in getting the affiliate program part in the website too.

Let people buy through SMS
I don’t know how feasible it is, but let people order by SMS. For example, if I want a book, I SMS the title and/or author. You call me back, get my address, confirm my order, take my payment options etc. Next time I send an SMS, you just confirm my order by SMS because you already know my address and payment details. If there is a significant financial burden, charge people some amount for this. People love convenience and the latest generation wont mind paying 10 Rs for the convenience of getting books/CDs through SMS. In this process you also get a bid database of phone
numbers to which you can send marketing offers.

Keep it simple
I might sound over-emphasizing this fact but user experience and convenience is everything. Keep it simple for the user. All the complexities should be for you, not for the user. Ideally, if a user comes, he should be able to search for a book, click buy, enter payment details, all this with less than 5 clicks. That is possible. But if the user wants to do other things like set up his affiliate account, get a affiliate banner/signature, buy books regularly, read or write reviews, he should be able to do so with few more clicks, again as easily as he can.

Please note that I have used the word ‘books’ extensively the in above paragraphs. I
actually mean ‘books, Music, CDs, Movies and gifts’.

It is one thing to have a very good website but if you are not able to connect to your customers, you cant sell much. The whole purpose of this write-up is to help you better connect to your customers. I might have sounded rude sometimes, but that’s only because I feel that a very good chance is being wasted. I have also tried to retain this write-up as short as possible so that you can quickly see the merits of these ideas. Once you like the ideas, its much easier to work out the minor details.

Why I am offering these suggestions
While I have no formal education or experience in business, I am very interested in understanding and thinking about businesses. I am planning to start a company in future. I can not start it now due to personal reasons but I want to use this time to build my experience of doing business. By offering these suggestions to you, I want to see the effect of my thinking on a businesses. If my suggestions are accepted by you and do work well, I will have the satisfaction with my thinking and confidence with my abilities. I have contacted you first because I grew up reading books bought at Sapna and feel emotionally attached to the brand. If you think you need more details on any of the suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I would appreciate if you can acknowledge this by a week and let me know your initial reaction. Else I would assume you are not interested.

-Narasimha Shastri

Here is the reply

from :"Jayashree, Sapna Book House"
to :Narasimha Shastri
date : Apr 19, 2007 8:50 AM
subject : Re: Suggestions for your business

Hello Shastri

Thankyou for your valuable Time ,suggestions & interest in sapnaonline. It has always been a pleasure to receive mails from customers about their views & experiences on the site .

We appreciate your ideas & below is our response to them :

We intially started the webiste with an intention of a very simple website just to buy our merchandise . Cross links mostly increases the hits on your site and very negligible amount has been converted to orders , we had intially did an cross links & affiliate programms with a couple of well known sites , but prefered other tools of marketing .

The Shipping Amount charged is a minimum amount considering the cost incurred to door deliver the merchandise , along with offering an 10% flat discount on books & 5% on Multimedias & music . This has proved more attractive for customers who would primarily calculate how much discount they are getting which is the more significance then nominal shipping fee , Travelling to the store would actually prove more expensive . There is an bulkorder link on the right hand side of the homepage where the custoemrs request for bulk orders quotes where many more facilities have been extended to the customers .

We are sending a newsletter / promotional letters / every 15 days , the latest was for the harry potter pre order promotions which has been mailed to all . We would request youto mail us your mail id to check why you are not receiveing mailers we prefer increasing more product line to offer customers & are shortly going live selling kannada books , Ebooks. etc..

We have recently changed the color to the existing Blue green from the Light blue grey color we had previously. We have changed keeping in mind to give the store more vibrant & cheerful look to serious formal look , which most of our customers have appreciated & prefered

Sms would be surely most convenient way & is in our think tank . we are not quiet sure of how soon we can incorporate this but assure will be incorporated .

We appreciate your views and would welcome more suggestions from you

Thanking you
Jayshree - Buss Devp

I finally sent this reply.

from :Narasimha Shastri
to : "Jayashree,
Sapna Book House"
date:Apr 19, 2007 11:55 AM

subject : Re: Suggestions for your business

Jayashree,

thanks for taking time to respond. I am glad to know that you are continuously working to improve your services.

I wish to offer some clarifications in response to your comments.

* I was not aware that you had tried an affiliate program. I am surprised that it did not generate significant sales improvements. I am not sure how it was implemented. I however suppose that it was not like the one I have in mind. I am suggesting that its worth a reconsideration. Amazon has had one since 1996 and apparently they are making significant part of their sales from affiliate program. My suggestions has been inspired by Seth Godin's free online book which you might want to download and read from http://www.ideavirus.com/ .
Currently I dont see any initiative from you that helps a happy customer spread information about you other than orally telling his friends.

* You said cross linking increased hits but not sales. I think you should investigate 'why' people who came to you went away without buying. My theory is that when you get something recommended by a person, you have more chances of buying than being recommended by an ad banner on rediff or indiatimes.

* I very well appreciate shipping fee you charge is very very reasonable. I was suggesting that you jsut get rid of shipping fee even if you have to reduce your discounts to say 8%. Alternatively, you might be able to afford free shipping for orders above 1000 Rs with 10% discount also. I just mean to say 'free shipping' and '10% discount' combined might be the biggest incentive for new customers to start buying from you. Everyone loves a free lunch.

* I dont know why I have only received the recent newsletter with Harry Potter offer. I have not received one earlier. It might be my spam filter. But glad to know that you are sending newsletters periodically. You might want to include the 'best selling' list in that too.

* Its good to know you are expanding product base. I have been awaiting availability of Kannada books ever since the new site came up. Eager to see new product lines.

* I preferred the old colour combination, but may be its only me. I would still prefer if the site layout is little more less-cluttered and the categories menu more useful.

* SMS shopping might be a very exciting thing for both the customers and you. I will
look forward for that too.

I am glad to know that you at least gave my suggestions a considerable thought.

Wish you and your team the best!
Shastri

Now, what do you think? I am sure people at Sapna know more about their business than I do. But do you think the suggestions I made make sense even partially?

Next post on 14th May because I am travelling next monday.

Feeding the hotel

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

Idea: Supply chain for hotels and food industry

Story: With the urban population growing, there will be a significant growth of catering industry. This includes hotels, caterers who cater to the needs of corporate customers to name a few. There is currently no established industries to supply this sector with agricultural produce (perishable or otherwise). This is a straightforward idea which is essentially a traditional business but some insights from my thinking.

What will you do:
You sign contracts with catering businesses to provide them with items they need at a 'pre-agreed rate'. You develop a supply chain network to ensure the supply, prices and your profits.

Some notes:

* Currently the catering industry is being served by small resellers who buy goods at local market and deliver them to caterers. Some hotels even manage the purchases themselves through the local wholesaler. The idea is to bypass as many middlemen as possible. Ideally there will be only three people in the picture: Farmer, you and the caterer. (More ideally, there should be only farmer and caterer but then, you will be out of business).

* The biggest rule of the game is economy. You HAVE to be able to pay the highest price to the farmer and ask the lowest price from the caterer. A delayed delivery might be acceptable, so is a consignment of slightly inferior quality. But the moment you charge the caterer more than you should, you are out of business.

* Establish contract farming. That way you will have an easier way to predict prices for future. This will also keep you in good books of farmers. If you cut all the middlemen, you should also be able to give a very good price to your farmers. Here is a success story to inspire you.

* Be nice to both your suppliers and customers. Take neither for granted. Ensure quality, price and reliability for your customers. Ensure good experience, good prices and social incentives for your farmers. Dont be a leacher. Bad publicity can spoil you more than anything. Try to share your profits with everyone involved. Mean no evil and do no evil.

* Reinvest most of your profit to expanding your network. Create a transportation infrastructure, warehousing/coldstorage infrastructure etc as you go along. The bigger you get, the easier the going will be. Dont rest till you handle a significant percentage of supply for catering industry.

* After completing above stage, start thinking of ways to expand your customer base. Think of supplying to food processing industries. Think of exports. The biggest challenge for agricultural exporters from India is that the goods are not traceable to source (Read this interview). With your supply chain, you already have the onshore part for exports working well. think of offshore part now.

* I strongly believe that you can start from very modest investments. You can start with selling only one product (say potatoes for example). Give good quality, ensure delivery and price and you are in business. Build trust and expand rapidly into everything else.

* Hire good people. If there is anything lacking in Indian agriculture industry, its good people. All the people at APMCs, Middlemen, Transporters, Wholesalers, Retailers are inadequately talented to think. Most dont bother about anything other than money. If you can hire people who mean business and are willing to develop their communities into better places in the process, you can stand out of the crowd and win markets and hearts.


Hurdles:
There are many. Otherwise someone else would have done it already. But the silver lining is that its the best time for you to get started. Given the socio-economic state of India now, most of your hurdles can be overcome.

* Agricultural sales in India are governed by APMC laws which make it illegal to buy directly from the farmer. You might be forced to buy directly at APMCs to start with. However with companies like Reliance, Metro etc trying to lobby for more direct access to farmers and you should benefit too.

* There will be an entry of giants like Reliance into this sector sooner or later. Competition is expected but might or might not affect you directly because they might concentrate more on retail and exports. The risk of competition only means that you are doing things which others also think is feasible.

* One more significant factor is that most of these middlemen currently operate beyond the income/corporate tax network. They pay almost no tax. You as a 'proper' business will be forced to pay the tax that might make it much more difficult to compete in terms of price. This is a challenge you can overcome with clear and sufficient planning, accounting and vision.

Having said that, I must say I have a strong belief in this model. I have seen such businesses do fairly well abroad and cant see why cant they work for India.
Wish you all the best!

Next week (30th April): How to sell books online in India

Setting Hire Standards

Please read my post 'about' Business Ideas before you do anything with this idea.

Idea: Renting house made easy
Gist: Provide user friendly 'real estate agent' services for urban Indian population

Story:
Irrespective of who you are, chances are that you have let or rented a house at least once. If you have done so in any of the Indian cities, you know how messy this can get. This idea proposes a business that replaces the unprofessional real estate agents.

How it will work:
You will contact the owners of the house and get permission to rent out. You can take digital photos etc and maintain a serachable 'user friendly' website. You can also run the traditional news-paper ads etc. After the customer contacts you, you take care of everything, starting from arranging a visit to the property to getting all the papers signed. You get a brokerage.

The difference:
Above paragraph might sound like a typical real estate business to you. It is. But what will make you stand apart is not WHAT you do it but HOW you do it. Here are few things that make you stand out in the existing crowd.

* Never charge the landlord. Not a single penny. Landlords agreeing to let you rent out their house is key factor for your success. If they dont want you, you have no business. Keep in mind that landlord owns the property not you. Landlord is making a favor by letting you do business; not the other way round. This point also serves the purpose that there is a clear value proposition for the landlord compared to the existing system of one-month rent to be given as commission. That will attract more landlords to your system and hence you gain control over more houses.

* Make sure you have a very good if not perfect legal contract system with the tenant. Tenant pays the rent in advance for the month and pays it preferably through a standing instruction to his bank. Tenant pays for whatever the things he broke. Tenant leaves the house exactly as it was when he occupied it; else he pays. These should not stop a normal tenant from coming to you since these are more or less existing terms and conditions and they wont bother a customer who knows for sure that he can take care of the property well. This is one more reason why you could be the owners' pet boy.

* Make it hassle free. Totally. You should not require more than two meetings of your staff with the owner; one for giving the house to you for renting, one for signing the contract between tenant and landlord. The tenant should not be bothered for anything other than seeing the house and signing the contract and giving the payment details. Give them peace of mind. Dont do anything like what those credit card guys do. Have you recommended a credit card to anyone ever? Me neither.

* Very good customer service. No compromise on this. Create a call and mail support system and put your best people in there. Make the phone number Toll free. Things can go wrong and will go wrong. What you do when things do go wrong will set you apart from others.

* Charge the tenant one month's rent or less. You should never ever exceed the existing commission rates, whatever additional value you give. Money speaks and there is a significant fraction of people who buy things based on absolute price of the product rather than its value.

* Device viral marketing strategies. Make it a policy that you will accept customers only by introduction by existing customers. Limit the number of new customers that an existing customer can introduce. Make it sound like its a privilege to be your customer. People will take pride in introducing their friends. Remember the pride you had when you first sent a gmail invitation to your friend? [As a related strategy, you can offer small commissions to 'introducers' making it sound interesting. But I have not yet been able to think if its worth it at all. For now, I think if you are good enough, people will talk about you to friends any way]. Read Seth Godin's free e-book on this to get some ideas.

* Make your name a synonym for renting a house. Choose an appropriate name. In case of India, make sure your name makes sense in most languages. To popularise yourself, place a board 1' x 1' at every property that is let by you or is to let. Make sure that this board is designed by a professional, not your next door painting guy. This will be your trademark and this will the image people will remember you by. Some people remember words (your name) and some the images (your 1' x 1') board. Make sure both types of people can easily recollect you.

* As time progresses, keep updating the standards and make sure that everyone knows. For example, one fine day you say an existing phone line is a minimum requirement for a house to be offered by you (see next point to know how to do this). After about a quarter, announce that you are giving furnished house as an option. Then one fine day say you are going to give free broadband to all your houses. You get the drift. The whole point is to sound (and be) like you are really interested in helping the customer and you consistently set higher standards. That will make you a favourite company that people love to love. The challenge is how you do this without hitting your landlords or your bottomline. See below.

* You dont have to spend money to set higher standards. And no, you cant make the landlord pay. Here is where your partners come in. Go to a telecom supplier, say Bharti, and tell them you want to give phone lines to all your houses. Tell them you wont pay them any installation charges, nor your landlord/tenants will. But tell them they will have exclusive rights over that household for two years. Any telecom company with right mind will accept this. Believe me, the installation charges are not that big. They can easily recover the money if you ensure loyalty. Similarly make someone renting furniture (like Saleh Ahmed in Bangalore) a partner. Ask him to give a discount to your customers. Then after an year convince the telecom provider to give three month free broadband trial to all your houses. [I am sure you can figure out rest of the things here]. The warning here is you should never expect any financial gain from your partners either. You are making an investment to gain goodwill among tenants and they are the only ones from whom your money should come from.

I am sure you can come up with more things to do but in my opinion, you should always stick to these values
* Never charge the landlord
* Give quality service and improve them constantly
* Never let any party feel they are tied up. Be very flexible to meet everyone's needs. In the long term this would pay off.
The moment you compromise on this, you will not be different from anyone else and you lose.

Why this will work:


If you have read this far, you already have a feeling that this will work. It will work because in India the customer as well as the landlords are better aware and want the best of the services to be offered to them. There is none currently. This wont work in US or UK or Europe because there are already too many people doing this. The way India is progressing, urban housing will be a very huge opportunity and there is lot to be done as a middleman. I dont have the numbers but I think you can easily grow as big as a rental agency can get and then to much more. Think of the ways you can expand your services to selling etc.


Why this might fail:
The biggest reason this can fail is the real estate lobby. There is a big number of people with shady connections with underworld in this business. The moment you start hitting their bottomline, they might want to settle it off with you. But the brighter part is that these sharks are usually out of domestic lettings because of the relatively smaller money involved. The people who might give you headache are the local gundas who till now used to own their respective ares' renting business. One way I think of overcoming this is to try to bring them in your network too. While I am yet to come up with a value proposition to convince someone who has been getting two months rent for every house let to accept a job as a 'business development manager', I am pleasantly titillated by imagining a rowdy wearing a necktie and calling everyone sir and madam and trying to be polite. On a serious note, I think a decent job might be more inviting than a higher income rowdying for most such people. They went to that road because they had no other choice available. I feel they can change. Seen the number of eve-teasing cases dropping in Bangalore lately? Thats because BPO industry employed all those who were otherwise unemployable and spent their energy on things like eve-teasing, or so I think.

Some ball-park numbers:
To create a software system that can handle your requirements and organise all your transactions: 1 500 000 INR
Setting up office infrastructure and hiring people: 1 000 000 INR
Typical commission on letting a house: 6 000 INR
Typical expense for letting a house: 2 000 INR
(The numbers are off my mind but should help you do the math).

And what did I think right and what did I think wrong? Please tell me in comments. Lets all learn.

Next Monday: Feeding the Hotel! 23rd Apr 2007

Business Ideas

This is about the ideas I am going to share through posts on this blog.

If you liked the idea and want to develop it, ask me nicely and I will give it to you, for free. Yes free. (although I would not mind a profit share if you succeed). I am a nice guy otherwise so ask me nicely and I will oblige. If I find out that you stole my idea, I will sue you. Seriously. If you want to send an idea to someone, include the original link. That way I remain as the connecting point for all these ideas and can warn you if someone has started working on the idea before you sink in your savings.

Sorry that was rude but I had to make myself clear.

Now, whats in it for me? Why do I write these? Because I want to use this space as a colouring book for ideas that are close to my heart. A place where I can think about ideas that would otherwise die off and see the merit and demerit of each. I have a few ideas that I want to work on. I wont reveal them here for obvious reasons. This is a sandbox for me to learn from you the things that are missing in my thinking. Thats what is in it for me.

Most of these are ideas relevant to India and to an urban population. Some might be internationally feasible. These are not the kind of ideas that would make you a Google overnight. Some might not be suitable for attracting a VC fund while some may be. Some might need a lot of investment while some might be happy with your garage to start with. Some are cutting edge and some might be age old trades with a 'O Henry' twist in the tale. The idea will like you based on what kind of a person you are.

I plan to write about all the ideas that come to my mind and which I think I can share. This means that I cant assure you how often I can write. I am aiming for atleast two ideas a month to start with but dont know if it will grow or diminish as we go later. Let me give it a shot anyway.

Excuse me for my use of relatively non-business language. I am neither formally educated in business nor have read as much as I should.

If you want to share your idea here, drop me a note.

And finally, dont send me an e-mail asking me to introduce you to Sequoia or Ambanis. I dont know them either.

Bad and the good news

Bad news.

BBC says wind blew away a Chinese Train! We all have a grouse or two about the build quality of Chinese products, but if you ask me, this goes little too far. I can imagine a wife telling her commuter husband "go little easy on baked beans Xanzou, dont you want to reach office in an un-burst railway coach" ?

I wonder what next? Flying buildings? Come to think of it, the only thing they built strong enough was the wall. Good they stopped short of building the roof. Or we could be reading headlines like 'earthquake in china causes roof to collapse, killing trillion people' or 'collapsed roof causes stampede at Pearly gates; 2000 people die again'.

Die again? they say sometimes dying once is once too many.

Well, talking of baked beans, scientist have recently discovered that (surprise surprise!!) they cause.. errr.. intestinal gases. I wonder what took them so long. Did they have dead rat stuck up their nose all these years?

The gases are apparently so inflammable that several people have had third degree burns when the previous guy left a burning stub in the toilet. Have you ever seen a Hollywood movie where they show a giant fireball behind the Hero and wondered why is it always BEHIND the hero? Because, according to the Matrix, 'he is the one'.Now they even hire pyrotechnic experts who can run on baked beans after California imposed strict laws on polluting air with lead compounds.

When I first read up about lead compounds, I thought they must be terribly important on the lines of lead actor or lead actress. Later did I realise that lead actors were not all that important thanks to Malashri who claimed that even if a monkey was cast opposite her, the film would be a success.

Monkeys are all not that dumb considering that there are a billions of them running the show on the Internet with one keyboard each. I am just waiting for them to churn out Macbeth.

I love Shakespeare the same way camels love igloos. Igloos are neat little houses that help you keep warm, as long as you can get a camel to arctic to appreciate that. Several people have tried, in vain, not to airlift the camel, but to help me appreciate Shakespeare but they lost me after "Gregory, on my word, we'll not carry coals". Shame on me.. for letting the wrong people help me.

It might be just coincidental, but I somehow see a strong correlation between a man's ability to understand poetry and the length of his beard. Blame it on my profession, but the last engineers I saw with a long beard were Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Some say that they created the poetry of C but I am no better in C than with poetry. Some more weird people chose the easy way out and have started writing poems in Perl! See here to believe it.

I wanted to write a poem one day titled 'God is dead'. But I would not know for sure till someone opened the box. Now that someone did, you might soon be hearing the 4th worst poetry in the galaxy.

Well, thats what I think is good news!

[The first three places are already taken. Ref:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker

Vogon poetry is the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning", four of his audience members died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. The absolute worst poetry in the universe was written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Sussex. Luckily, it was destroyed when the Earth was.

]

Being an Engineer

When I was young and impressionable, people told me how great it is being an engineer. They told me I can build things that make lives easier for so many people, make our nation proud and what not. Suffice to say that was enough brainwashing material for me to be tricked into becoming an Engineer. Little did I know that being an engineer is such a miserable thing to do with your life.

Take that laser show in Sentosa Island for example. When everyone around was enjoying the more-real-than-real images of Kiki the monkey and the fairy, I was left wondering how can they project 3D images on water mist using Lasers. Then there was this magic show where the magician was yanking bright balls from nowhere and the crowd was applauding. Of course, I was wondering what sort material can make balls that can be compressed to a small size then be popped up.In the end I was a more educated man knowing how to project laser beams and that you can compress sponge to real small sizes. But I missed all the fun. I missed the moments to marvel at something just because I was trained to 'find out how it works'.

We engineers are like that. We cant move on without wondering (and finding out) how does the damn thing work. I have been in all those situations a normal person will never be in. Like trying to look underneath an aircraft toilet just to find out how does the vacuum flush work. And yeah, I took great joy in repeatedly flushing and listening to the 'whoosh'. (This is surely not bad considering that the average passenger flushes less than once per use of toilet).

We also spend a significant of time worrying about alternatives. The whole life for us engineers consists of blocks of things and methods, where each block can have any number of alternatives. We wonder whether to buy a diesel car or a petrol one. We worry if we should travel during the night or day. I once wondered if we could 'blow' and candle out, why cant we 'suck' the candle in? I learnt that it is very much possible, at the cost of severely burnt lips!

Related to above point, we want to think before spending. Its not about money really. Its about optimising the use of it. This is good when you are buying alloys to build an aircraft but most of us engineers cant take it out of our brains even when we are buying grocery. We wonder if it is worth all the money spent on petrol to go to the discount shop. To put it in 'engineerese' every buying decision is a multi-variant optimisation problem.

We are really geeky and we really miss a lot of fun due to that. I bet 90% of us will first pick up the technical catalogue of a new Pirelli tyre and only the remaining 10% of us would have even noticed the Pirelli http://www.pirellical.com calender lying next to it. I rest my case.

Another significant part of our useful life goes into reading the manual for things that we buy and doing exactly the same things the manual warns us against. No engineer got a gadget that has enough features and we always feel the need to tweak the turn the knobs that are beyond access to the lesser mortals. That is another few thousands lost on void warranties, chipped nails and cut fingers.

We spend a lot of effort in getting smart and lot more effort in showing off that we are. Its a high standard to keep up to you see! We have huge egos and when someone says something is impossible, we want to try it just for the heck of it. I am sure we all engineers should be thankful to Alexander the great for cutting the Gordian knot and finishing it once for all. Else all of us would be trying to outsmart each other with our own non-linear Finite Element based spatial analysis tools to untie the knot. We show off and act smarter than we actually are. See the above sentence and use of extensive links all through this post. You get the drift don't you? That again is too much effort going into nothing useful.

And we are the kind that assume everyone is equally geeky. I have heard of instances where engineers were hit with saucepans and other assorted kitchen equipment for being too geeky at home. We always use a language that takes a higher degree in engineering to understand and we feel proud about it. I presume most readers of this post will be engineers.

So what I am saying is my Engineering education robbed us off a lot of pleasurable moments in life and we are wasting a lot of time doing things that are no fun just because we have been programed to do those things by our education.

But then, there is a brighter side for everything you see. You don't have to worry about what to gift us for our birthdays. A good screwdriver kit is always appreciated!

False sense of pride

Why are we so keen on taking pride? Sometimes even when it does not belong to us?

Ask any Indian about Haragobind Khorana. The most probable answer is that he is an Indian Scientist who got a Nobel Prize. When I read a chapter about him in my 4th Standard text book I kept wondering how exactly Dr. Khorana is an Indian. After all, he was born in present day Pakistan and migrated out of the country before Independence. As far as I know, he is even an American citizen. I wonder what justifies the claim that he is an Indian.

And now, don’t get me started about Kalpana Chawla. I truly respect her achievement to become an astronaut. But that’s what she was. An astronaut. Why don’t we stop it at that? Just because she died in a shuttle mis-hap does not make her an icon of Indian woman. I heard some 'beauty queen' talking reverently about Kalpana and how she is a role model for Indian women. I wish her speech-writers had thought of someone better, like Lalita Gupte . In my personal opinion Kalpana Chawla's achievements did not make India any better than it already was. She chased a personal dream and succeeded in it (well, partially). And yes, she left India long ago and was an American citizen too. Oh I am digressing, yeah, what I was saying is we should not be 'very' proud of Kalpana Chawla.

Of course we have double standards for that too. We want a share of fame of Dr.Khorana as well as Mother Theresa. I wonder how many of us know Mother Theresa was born in Macedonia. I am not saying she is not an Indian. She very much is. But why on this earth do we want to bask in her glory? I think our only 'greatness' is that we provided her with many poor people to serve in the first place.

Dr.Khorana or Kalpana Chawla was only an example. Don’t we read in the newspapers everyday about an Indian scientist making a breakthrough elsewhere? What about all those spelling-bee and Math Olympiad champs of Indian origin? Agreed, they were born here. But that’s where our claim on their fame ends. Whatever is their achievement, that should be duly credited to the country that provided them opportunity. We (in some cases) helped nourish the talent but that’s it. In face I would personally feel sorry that we could not recognize the talent and let some other country benefit from it.

Funniest of all these is a claim that Aishwarya Rai is a Kannadiga. Her parents are from Mangalore and hence she has a Kannadiga ancestry (not much choice you see). Of course she grew up, schooled and went to build a career all in Mumbai. What is our basis for claiming she is a Kannadiga? That’s is like saying Pakistani's are Mongols. See this (page-2)

Lets be happy that someone, among us, went to make it big. Lets ponder what is it that made them go elsewhere and what can we do to prevent that from happening again. Lets stop claiming ownership on the bird that once nested on our roof.

Which one is your favorite case of pride in the wrong place? Let me know in comments.

PS: While we are at it, making Kalpana Chawla a heroine was a lot better than making Princess Diana one. She was just a high profile woman who died early. I know she fought against land mines and AIDS but we all know that’s not the reason her death was mourned so much.

Messenger angels

I must give it to them. Their unyielding optimism, dedication and experiments with human psychology. They have been going full steam despite all the wars that have been waged against them. They have been trying for ages to cure all the miseries of human race but still are faced with tremendous resistance from their fellow human beings. I pity them.

I am talking about none other than the spammers who so often try to give you one last chance through your mailbox, blog, phone, whatever.

First of all, I commend them on their altruistic nature. I keep hearing from the Nigerian guy whose rich relative died and how he can help me make some quick money. I really appreciate his willingness to share wealth with some stranger. You would appreciate it more when you realise that he and I can not even pronounce each others names. I wonder what it would take me to offer half of my fortune to some Eskimo guy.

Then there are some of them who tell me how to meet your dream partner. They tell me all about dating/matrimony sites. I think they know life can be easier when you have a soul mate. They just want to make sure I don't suffer due to my ignorance. But then, what if you are happily married with your soul mate (like I am)? No problems, just click that small link at the bottom of the mail and they wont send you dating mails ever again. May be divorce lawyer links but no more dating links. I guess that's fair.

Now tell me what causes global wars? Rage of course. And studies have shown that sex helps people calm down. So more sex means more peace. This is the operating mantra of all those spammers who can provide various contraptions, snake-oil lotions and other mystery medicines that help you grow relevant body parts and have more carnal pleasure. What a noble thought I would say. Do you think they send mail indiscriminately? They don't. They always send me the stuff that is relevant to a male homo sapien so I can assure you that they took troubles to find out my gender. Yes, there is a 50% statistical chance that they can be accurate no matter what, but that's a different story altogether.

The next biggest thing that's troubling humanity is poverty. There is a simple solutions spammers found for that. Make everyone buy stocks that are sure to sky-rocket. That's the reason they send me so much info about buying penny stock. If you just listen to them, everyone can be a millionaire. See, everyone in Zimbabwe is now so rich that they use currency notes instead of toilet tissue. If a mere inflation rate of 1000+% can make people so rich, picking good stock early can beat it any day. Its a different matter that I could not buy any stocks because 1. I did not have enough money 2. the mails actually contained gibberish. May be if I was smart enough to understand that gibberish, I could pick good stock myself. But its the intention that counts.

Overall, I feel very bad that the human race overall misinterprets the true intention of a spammer. What more, companies like Google are devicing programs that claim to stop spammers for ever. Talk about shooting the messenger dove.

I almost thought I will take that 'word verification' thingy from my comments but I know all you guys who don't appreciate spam will spam me.