Can you recognize what the above two boxes are?
Given the new generation of smart mobiles & the mobile revolution in India, you may have forgotten those old days (or may have completely bypassed) the most important “connectivity” equipment – the PCO – Public Call Office.
The one in yellow is the PCO.
Can you guess what the one in orange is?
If you have not guessed it, I am not surprised. It was a limited edition product that we had launched as part of our startup, dMobili Technodesigns.
The orange one is not a PCO. It was supposed to have been a ‘spoke’ in the grand vision of ‘ a distributed iStore’ in India – the service that we desired to launch as part of our startup and ‘change the way India will listen to music & consume other digital content.
It is a juke-box, with a difference.
You can pre-view listen in to music and decide to download the content into your memory card – for use in your mobile phones.
It had a simple user interface – one that small towners knew how to use!
Just insert the coins, punch a few numbers to select the digital content they needed and voila ! The songs were transferred into their memory card for their private consumption on their mobile phones.
Our vision as entrepreneurs was to provide digital content [music, videos, educational content like ‘Speak English Easily’] to small towns & villages in India. Remember, circa 2008 – internet was not easily available in small towns, and cheap Chinese smart phones (less than Rs.3000 a pop) flooded the market along with Micromax, Onida, Spice and other local ‘desi’ brands – giving Nokia, the ‘undisputed’ (hic!) leader in mobile a run for money.
Consumers suddenly had a great gadget in hand – but they did not have the content to consume. That is what our juke-box (or dabba – as we code-named it) was supposed to do!
Check out the proud ‘kirana’ shop owner – one of our partners to distribute digital content & bring entertainment & education to rural towns. We got prominent shelf space for a truly promising service (yes, it bombed – we did not succeed in our business – but that’s another story)
The juke-box went through many iterations – in terms of the user interface design – all because we started asking one single question – for whom are we designing this product? Is it for the consumer or is it for the retailer who will help the consumer? Or is it the distributor who will install & service these juke boxes for the retailer?
By asking these hard questions & understanding the consumer, user behaviour as well as the retailer behaviour & commercial expectations, our product underwent changes. Over a period of time, the juke-box morphed in shape & functionality.
This is how the final ‘product’ looked like when we started mass-producing [a grand total of about 100 boxes in all]. See below for a picture of ‘in production’ dabbas here
Well, if our vision had panned out the way we imagined, we probably would have built a significant retail digital infrastructure in small towns & villages – mirroring the distribution network of an operator in India or an FMCG company serving small towns & villages. This infrastructure could have been used to not only consume content, but also to do several things – book train tickets, bus tickets, print out land documents, print out birth /death certificates, stream out educational content and so on & so forth.
Sadly though, our grand vision of a ‘distributed iStore’ scuttled by prevalent piracy & p*rn*graphy in India. Not to mention our pig-headedness and not being able to recognize the market signals – of a failing product /service. Not to mention the greed of the small town retailer, who short-changed us to give away all the licensed legal content for free and was encouraging the villagers to buy p*rn content for a huge fee!
Yes, our startup bombed. We will never be sought after in the startup world to speak about our experience and motivate others. Yet, we have learnt several valuable lessons – right from how to do consumer research the cheap way, usability design, user experience, product design, how to negotiate content rights with biggies like T-Series, Hungama & others, how to get meetings with the Mirchandanis & Dhoots and Jains of the world to showcase what we can do and how we can work together to create a “mobile-digital ecosystem”.
While we were plodding away in the small towns, little did we realize that iStore & Spotify were gaining huge, huge traction in the developed world, while the Indian wireless infrastructure was getting upgraded to offer higher bandwidths in the remote towns & villages. Today, consumers in these towns download digital content directly on their mobiles, thanks to the cheaper data packs offered by Indian operators and ofcourse the cheaper & cheaper smart phones in their hands.
