Hemant R. Joshi's Blog, page 10

5 trends that help us predict India’s next decade

Over the past decade, India has seen an explosion in data usage, with almost 300 million rural internet users coming online. Google is dedicating an entire program, called The Next Billion, to an audience who is coming to the Internet for the first time. Several web companies are thriving and showing double-digit growth, all thanks to this huge audience coming online. 

Entertainment products like MXPlayer, Gaana, YouTube, etc. have penetrated the remotest corners of the city, while apps like Sharechat are creating social media businesses focussed on the vernacular audience. New employment opportunities are created through businesses like Zomato, Swiggy, Dunzo, etc. and creators are having a blast with products like Tiktok and YouTube. 

But what we’ve seen so far in the last decade seems to be the tip of the iceberg. Here are some of the articles that could help us predict technological innovation in the next decade.

India 1, India 2 and India 3 by Sajith Pai – 

Sajith Pai did a great job of classifying India into three distinct user types, which he compares with different countries around the world. 

India 1, the affluent group of people, those having the power to spend on expensive brands, represent a market similar to Mexico. By comparing this market with Mexico, Sajith mentions how India’s startups have a market sizing problem. A lot of niche startups have got funded, while the market is not ready for these. Startups like Nykaa, a cosmetics company, are focussing on this audience. 

India 2, the emerging middle class of India, which is the bulk of the market, is being compared to the Philippines by Sajith. To win in this market, Sajith mentions that one has to get rid of their attachment to English and win the vernacular market. There’s a lot of activity happening for this audience right now, with startups like Sharechat, Pratilipi, etc. focussing on building apps that don’t need a user to know English.

India 3, which Sajith compares with Sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa, is an interesting market. To win in this market, founders will have to rethink their knowledge of design and language. I think this market is the ultimate test of user experience, and I am curious to see what Google does with its next billion users initiative.

For most established products, most of the growth is going to come from India 2 and India 3.

You can read the original article, India2, English Tax and Building for the Next Billion Users here. 

Searching for Superman by Inc42

Similar to WeChat in India, the race for finding a super-app in India is on. A super app is an app that people use tens of times every day, to facilitate everything from entertainment, bookings to payments and networking.

With the free market India offers, there are almost a dozen apps that are running in this race, the top two being WhatsApp and PayTM.

Apps like Hike have tried to delve deeper into the super app strategy but decided to move away from it, considering that India is a diverse market that likes choice of different apps for a single purpose.

The race is interesting to monitor, but I think we will never see a clear winner of this race, which is not a bad thing! The more the competition, the better the services for a consumer.

The future for consumer internet in India is bright.

Read the full article, Searching for Superman here.

The time for OTT is here:

Over the top entertainment companies like Netflix, Prime Video, Hotstar, etc. are heavily focusing their efforts on India. The reason is obvious – one of the fastest growing internet market. With traditional television moving online, it will be very interesting to see how our audience adapts to this new form of media.

Hotstar set the world record for the highest number of concurrent streaming users during the Cricket World Cup Semifinal in 2019, with as many as 25.3 million users streaming at the same time. Other sports leagues, such as the Pro Kabaddi League are also getting a higher viewership because of their focus online.

The video OTT market in India is estimated to be INR 21.5 billion with advertising contributing up to 80 percent of the total revenue – of around INR 17.2 billion. To woo the audience who doesn’t pay for its content, Netflix is piloting an India-first mobile-only pricing model, which, if successful, Netflix will try out in other emerging markets too.

Read the full article, The Indian OTT saga gets interesting, by OTT experts here.

UPI hits 1bn transactions and goes global by inc42

Unified Payments Interface, the platform developed by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), a governmental organization, has shown tremendous success in the digitization of financial transactions in India. Just three years after its launch, UPI lodged a billion transactions happening through it. 

The beauty of UPI lies in the common infrastructure it provides to private companies to build apps on top of. All you need to pay someone is their phone number or UPI ID. The transactions are instant, with no lag. For users, this means a simple, secure and free mode of transferring money, paying bills and scheduling payments.

In this aspect, India has leaped ahead of the most advanced countries in the world. 

Earlier this year, the NPCI decided to go global. The NPCI is working with Singapore to enable UPI transactions in the country. 

The UPI is the biggest example of a government-led initiative to provide a common infrastructure on top of which private players could build their businesses. Google, Walmart, Amazon, PayTM, etc. are all heavily investing in this space.

Read the full articles:

UPI hits 1bn transactions here. BHIM UPI goes global here. 



The growth of the gig economy by QZ India:

With technology, employment opportunities are changing. Dunzo, Ola, Uber, Swiggy, and Zomato are leading an organized gig economy, where an individual has total flexibility over their work hours and thus, their earnings. 

At the same time, freelancing is growing in popularity, with as many as 24% of global gig workers coming from India. Startups like TapChief, Frapp, FlexingIt, and Upwork are growing to tap this market.

In the next decade, we will see a rise in unconventional jobs, which could lead to greater incomes for individuals. 

Read the full article, How and why are young Indians looking for white-collar gig jobs here.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get articles like these every Friday.

Apart from these, we have seen several sparse movements, like the EV movement. This is yet to materialize, so I didn’t include it here. 

What else do you think can help us think about what could be next for India?

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Effective transit planning requires high density

Spread out cities don’t work well for effective transit planning. High density is a necessity for effective transit planning in a growing city. It is, in fact, one of the biggest reasons why big cities like New York, London, Singapore, and Tokyo continue to function so efficiently. When you visit one of these for the first time, it seems like the entire world is gathering around you. You can feel the pace of these cities through all of your senses.

This high density facilitates effective transit planning, which is one of the pillars of sustainable growth. If you look at the big cities listed above, efficient public transportation is stressed upon a lot. There are very few cities who have grown without efficient public transit. 

When you know that millions of people would be visiting one train station every day, shopping complexes, small businesses, etc can all come naturally around them. This has the potential to create immense wealth. At the same time, the government doesn’t have to worry about its public transit systems not being used by people. 

Transit-oriented development

With a high density of people, urban planners can use Transit Oriented Development to speed up the growth of the cities while ensuring sustainability over the long term.

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) is a hot topic among urban researchers. TOD means developing cities with transit centres as focal points. Rather than spreading the city out horizontally, TOD believes in growing cities vertically and developing mixed-use spaces. The focus is on keeping buildings as close as possible to transit centres. 

For example, a financial district can be built around a few railway stations, while ensuring that people can walk to any building after getting off a train. 

New York’s financial district instantly comes to mind when I think about this. One of the biggest strengths of New York is an excellent public transit. It is drastically different from many other US cities in this one aspect – it’s excellent subway network. 

Photo by jonathan riley on Unsplash

Advantages of TOD

Because of this railway network, you can plan your travel well, without having to worry about spending hours stuck in traffic. With trains running round the clock and used by a majority of the population, the city functions fast. Planning is much easier and mixed-use of land leads to better revenues for not just the government, but also the small businesses that can flourish around these transit nodes. 

TOD is also better for our environment. Maximum use of public transit is the easiest way to reduce our carbon footprint on the environment. While electric cars are all the rage today, they can do only so much. Studies suggest that the environmental footprint of cities could be reduced by as much as 40 to 50 percent using TOD. TOD emphasizes on increasing walkability and mixed-use land, which has a direct correlation to a reduction in vehicle miles. 

Another benefit that is not often highlighted is the safety of citizens. The denser a city is, the better it is for the safety of the citizens. People feel safer when they are among other people. Police officials can better plan their resource utilization to monitor denser cities. 

But despite these benefits of TOD, which are being highlighted for at least the past decade, cities across the US are slow to adapt to such a radical change. 

Consider cities like Los Angeles, which are the best examples of spread-out cities. These cities are primarily built with a “car-first” mindset, which mandates enough parking spaces and an excellent road network over a top-notch public transit system. Because of this expectation, the cities are spread horizontally. Roads can span tens of lanes, which seems like a good thing, but it is not. Urban researchers have time and again pointed out that building more lanes is never a solution for our expanding cities. More lanes lead to what is called induced traffic. This study found out that for every 1 percent increase in highway capacity, traffic can increase up to 1.1 percent in the long term.

As a result, the road networks across cities in the US are showing signs of tremendous strain. In LA, drivers spent more than a hundred hours in traffic in 2018. This leads to a loss of billions of dollars, because of lost productivity. 

To control traffic, several cities are nowadays starting to implement congestion pricing – during the peak hours of morning and evening, cars are required to pay a higher toll tax. For example, Singapore restricts use by charging vehicles S$3.0 for entering its central business area between 7:30 and 9:30 am. 

Disadvantages of TOD

One argument that is made against higher density is that it leads to higher property prices. For most people, it is hard to think of buying property in the big cities in the world. Yet, it is not an unsolvable problem. 

Government interventions to ensure enough affordable housing schemes are entirely possible. We shouldn’t rule out the benefits of TOD because of rising property prices. For example, Denver has used a number of financing tools to provide TOD, despite the concerns that housing would become expensive because of a new light rail.

The time is running out!

Cities today are under immense pressure. With the world’s urban population growing every year by more than 1.5%, a lot of new cities are coming up, and existing cities will have to grow. Cities like Seattle, where I live, have already been topping the “Fastest-growing city” charts in the US.

If we don’t plan our cities well, density can lead to its biggest weakness. For example, drivers in Bangkok spend an average of 64.1 hours a year stuck in congested traffic. The traffic situation in big, spread out cities like Los Angeles is not getting any better. As stated above, this has a tremendous effect on productivity and the environment.

To avoid a disaster, we need to plan our cities better, which begins by embracing density.

After all, high density is the biggest gift modern transit planners and researchers could ask for. 

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Why did I choose to self publish my second book?

The traditional publishing industry is a really slow-moving one. From the day I signed an agreement to get my first book published, it took more than a year to see the book alive and available on Amazon. I quickly realized that after signing the rights to my book, my publisher had to focus on other genres of books and my book was not the top priority.

At the same time, because I had signed a long-term agreement with the publisher, I couldn’t do much.

My publisher didn’t even share regular sales reports with me. Every month, I had to ask them for sales numbers, rather than them informing me. Initially, I was happy with numbers, but after the third month, there was no increase in numbers. This made me wonder if there was any effort put in by the publisher in the distribution and marketing of the book. 

Books are author-centric – meaning the author has to be the best salesman for the book, but I expected some guidance from my publisher around how to market it. 

I hated the lack of control. My publisher was controlling the pricing, distribution and marketing. They plainly refused when I asked whether the book would be available through a premium book retail chain in India, which would have been a big boost to the book’s brand.

All these reasons made me very unhappy with my publishing journey. At one point, I wanted to give up my book for free on the internet, but couldn’t do so, since my publisher has the rights to the book. 

Thus, with my second book, I wanted to fix these mistakes. 

One way to fix this was to find another publisher. 

I approached more than 50 publishers in India for publishing my second book, most of them traditional publishers. I was talking to a few literary agencies as well, but nothing worked out. No one showed an interest in the book, after almost a year of scouting publishers. 

This led me to think that the path of self-publishing might not be that bad. 

After all, I had a chance of correcting the mistakes I made with my first book. 

Self-publishing has its own advantages. 

It gives you complete control and flexibility around what happens with your book. For example, right from pricing to the book cover to marketing materials, I have to look into every aspect and ensure that things look good. Though there is a lot more work to do, at least things are as expected. There is also the side benefit of learning about the publishing industry, which helps if you’re an author. 

My job as a Product Manager helps. I work at Indeed’s internal incubator, where we have internal startups that focus on finding new business opportunities for Indeed. Treating my book as a product, I get to use a lot of the fundamentals of starting a company here. 

For example – for consumer products, it is very important to form a community around a product. Getting customers involved in creating and improving the product is important. With my book, my goal is to form a community that thinks and cares for taxi drivers. My book, The Advisory Board, explains how cab drivers are some of the best advisors in the world. 

But self-publishing comes with a lot of headaches too. For a person who doesn’t like to be on social media, maintaining a presence across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn might be too much. Even though I hate it, I have to be active on Instagram, because my audience is there. I need to send a lot more cold emails, be a scout on LinkedIn and Twitter while carving out a growth strategy for the book.

The audience doesn’t care if a book is self-published or traditionally published, unless it is published by a big publisher. Not a single person I’ve spoken to looks at the publisher of a book before buying it. They look at the cover, the book blurb, and the author. If the content is good, people will share the book with others. 

In fact, if enough people like the book, a traditional publisher would definitely approach me to acquire the rights. There are enough examples online that state how self-published books went on to be acquired by big publishing houses. 

But this time, I am not going to rush this process. I will wait to find the right publisher and not the first publisher. 

Right now, my goal is to get as many people as I know to read the book and provide feedback on the story. After that, I’ll focus on growing sales using online and digital marketing. 

I don’t want to restrict myself to think like a traditional publisher, but expand my horizon to think of many ways in which the book could go viral. For example, usually, book tours and festivals help increase the reach of a book. In my case, book tours are logistically not possible because of my full-time job. My focus is going to be getting visibility online, instead.

I am planning to do virtual book tours, by going live in book groups on Facebook, thus connecting directly with different audiences. 

I am happy to provide guidance around self-publishing or traditional publishing. Both have their benefits, and there is no right answer.

Wish me luck with the book.

Is the death of the Mumbai taxi nigh?

As we start heading
into the next decade, one thing that is slowly receding from our lives is the
black-n-yellow Mumbai taxi. Iconic, stylish and distinguished once upon a time,
the kaali-peeli has lost its charm.

Ubers, Olas and what not have improved the ride-hailing services so much, that the old taxis struggle to find space on the roads today. Passengers are more likely to sit in a cab that tells them the fare upfront rather than sit in traffic and keep the meter running. This is a trend not only affecting Mumbai but the entire world. The story of city taxis and how they are seeing slow death is not new to New York, London, Tokyo or any major city in the world.

But is the death of
the kaali-peeli taxis imminent?

I don’t think so.

A brief history

Across the world, government authorized taxis, Kaali-peelis in Mumbai, the Yellow Taxi in New York, etc. were all standardized to avoid fraud. All the taxis were painted in standard colours, and drivers had to wear uniforms indicating they are trusted by the government.

The government also
gave out only a limited number of permits to control the supply of taxis.

These specifics were needed in the last century- when riders had no way to identify who was good and who was bad. All these measures of standardization were to ensure the safety of riders.

The world has changed

In today’s world,
however, the situation is very different. Our phones can ensure our safety.
Life is much easier now.  

You don’t need a driver to wear a uniform. The driver ratings on your phone are enough for verification. You don’t need to wait in the crowd and search for a kaali-peeli. Your phone does the work for you while you sit at home. Your phone does the searching and matching. As a result, the time delay is almost zero.

The black-n-yellow
cabs need to go through a massive change. Though these cabs are now slowly
adapting to the ridesharing culture spearheaded by Ola and Uber, there is a
long way to go.

Trams in Mumbai went extinct because they couldn’t adapt to the changing times. In recent times, BEST buses have started to lose their importance because of auto-rickshaws and shared cabs.

Get my book about taxi drivers

For any product or
service to stay relevant, it needs to provide value. Cabs need to serve people.
If they keep rejecting rides, why would people bother using them? Drivers need
to understand this and start adapting themselves.

While researching this
topic, I came across apps like Aamchi
Drive, which are a welcome step.

To stay relevant, black and yellow cabs need to adapt to these changes. Drivers shouldn’t resist Olas and Ubers, but welcome them. Technology is not their enemy, but an ally that can help them do their jobs much better.

Some of the benefits
of technology include getting matched to a passenger faster, getting paid on
time and the flexibility of working whenever they want. Drivers need to embrace
these benefits, rather than resist them.

Conclusion

Let’s hope that the tradition of a kaali-peeli stays relevant. Cabs shouldn’t just be props in movies and books, but be a mode of transportation first and foremost.

Cabs will not die if they adapt to the changing commuters.

The Advisory Board

My second book, The Advisory Board, is a tribute to taxi drivers. Inspired by my personal conversations with taxi drivers, I explain how they can be some of the best advisors in the world.

Get your copy now!

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Why write about taxi drivers?

“What do you want to
be in life?”

Almost all of us have
been hammered with this question growing up.

My answer, for the
initial 5-6 years of life, used to be “Vikram Tempo Driver.” For those who are
unfamiliar with them, Vikram Tempos used to be a common public transport system
in the nineties in Lucknow.

While life had different plans for me, my fascination with drivers never went down. I firmly believe that drivers have the most interesting and inspiring stories in the world. Drivers don’t just drive vehicles; they help people travel.

For most people,
travel brings new opportunities that change their lives.

The Advisory Board is my tribute to this wonderful tribe – drivers.

If you’ve been in a situation when you needed advice but did not have anyone, next time, think about jumping in a taxi. This helped Shekhar Tripathi regain his life, it might help you as well!

Buy the book here.

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Education is free! You pay for credentials.

Before we get started with the post, I have a request to make.

If you like reading these e-mails, please share them with your friends.

Also, a quick announcement – my second book, The Advisory Board, will be out this December! If you ask people to subscribe to my email list, I will give them an exclusive look before the book’s release. More to come in the coming days

Privacy Concerns around WhatsApp

“WhatsApp is the root cause of all this fake news!”

“WhatsApp is the reason why we’re seeing all this happen!”

“People spend entire days just messaging on WhatsApp!”

I’m sure all of you have heard these from time to time. With the severe impact WhatsApp has on our lives, it is obvious that it would have to face some malign.

Let’s look at how all this started and how we can act to prevent fake news from spreading.

The fake news menace

Over the last couple of years, every so often, we see WhatsApp in the news for the wrong reasons. The most horrific of them were the lynchings that happened after fake news went viral on WhatsApp. Several people were critically injured in these lynchings.

Not just these major events, but even in our personal chats, we tend to respond to a message before verifying the contents of an image. It is very easy to see a message, build an opinion around it, and share it with fellow friends.

The creators of fake messages are smart. These people tweak messages so that they’re believable and make it very tempting for you to share them. Most of the messages have a real background to them. The creators slyly tweak some of the facts, giving events a ‘real’ appearance which you’ll very likely believe. Since the general audience doesn’t care to verify facts, such messages spread across the country.

The government has asked WhatsApp to step up and stop the fake news menace. But the problem is not as easy as merely telling WhatsApp to stop the spread of fake news.

WhatsApp is an end-to-end encrypted system. What this means is no one apart from the sender and receiver can see a message. While other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. are not fully encrypted, WhatsApp has always highlighted how it respects users’ privacy by providing end-to-end encryption. This is clearly reflected in their terms of service.

If WhatsApp starts to read your messages to verify what is fake and what is not, that would be violating their terms of service. If WhatsApp doesn’t read your messages, determining fake messages is extremely hard.

As a result, the company’s choices are very limited. It cannot make a change one day and expect it to solve the fake news problem right away.

But WhatsApp is taking measures to solve this problem.

What is WhatsApp doing?

Earlier this year, the company started limiting the ‘virality’ of a message on WhatsApp. They cut down the number of times you can forward a message to your contacts to 5. This means, even if you have a group of 256 people (which is the maximum number of people in a group), your message could reach at most 1280 people.

Now you might say that this doesn’t solve the problem. These 1280 people can still forward the messages to their contacts, thus increasing the likelihood of spreading a fake message.

But let’s compare that number with what was previously possible. In 2018, each person could forward a message to 256 contacts, and each group could have 256 people in it. This meant that one person’s messages could reach 65536 people.

Comparing the numbers, it becomes evident that limiting the virality would help reduce the spread of messages in general. This makes sense for the long-term health of WhatsApp too, since it is primarily a private messaging service. It is not meant to be used as a viral sharing platform, like Twitter and Facebook.

What can we do to curb fake news?

There is no one answer that will solve all the problems. We as users could do a few things to curb the spread of fake news. Some simple things that come to mind –

Verify the information you get in a forwarded message before forwarding it. The easiest way to do this is by searching the same information on Google and viewing some of the first few links.There are new fact-checking websites coming up these days, which can be used to verify the information. For example, Boomlive runs fact checks around social media content.Do not share content if you don’t have to. Simply thinking if something is valuable to the recipient will help you think.

What do you think are good ways to curb fake news? Please subscribe to my email list to read similar stories.

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How did WhatsApp survive the competition?

On my last post regarding WhatsApp, I got great feedback! 9 people suggested writing more about WhatsApp. So, here I am.

This week, I’m writing about how WhatsApp grew so fast despite severe competition.

Online communication

Online messaging is not a new concept. Mature chat systems have existed since the late 90s. Systems like Yahoo Chat have been mature enough to scale to the internet. Apps like Skype revolutionized audio and video communication with the emergence of technologies like Voice over IP.

But around 2005, something else was happening that meant the communication market was available for disruption once again. Can you guess what?

Mobile phones.

With cellular connectivity becoming cheaper and companies like Nokia and Samsung starting to rule the mobile phone market, mobile phones started appearing in everyone’s palms slowly. In India’s case too, an explosion of cellular connections happened in the first decade of this century. Though the costs of communicating were decreasing, they were still very high as compared to today.

Then, another revolution happened, which created an immense opportunity.

With the iPhone getting released in 2008, a new era in computing was born. Thousands of apps and companies leveraged the new technology available with Android and iPhone.

The founders of WhatsApp wanted to jump in on the opportunity. As a result, WhatsApp was born in 2009.

But why did it grow so fast? Why not others?

The technology that powers WhatsApp is not non-replicable. Many of the global messaging apps, like Line, WeChat, Hike, etc. were using similar technology for providing communication capabilities.

To understand where other companies couldn’t sustain, especially in India, I would like to take the case of WeChat. This is not an attack on WeChat, but an honest examination of where they failed. Also, I am not saying WhatsApp is the only messaging app in India. Others, like Hike, were also growing.

WeChat

WeChat is China’s ‘super’ app. It started as a chat application similar to WhatsApp but has integrated payments and social commerce in its app.

WeChat launched in India in 2012 and launched a marketing blitzkrieg soon after. Their strategy, for the entire time, was to focus on localizing their existing app while pumping in a lot of money on marketing. But the consumer preferences in India were very different. This Factordaily article is a fantastic article about the rise and fall of WeChat.

Reading the article, you could see how they fell down. But what was it that made WhatsApp so successful, given that it was not an Indian app as well?

A few major things.

First, the ability to work with slower connections. For a 2G only market, WhatsApp offered the perfect way to send and receive messages.

Second, from the ground up, WhatsApp was built to work with emerging markets. This meant working on slower phones, requiring less memory on phones and consuming less battery. At the same time, it compressed photos and videos to enable sharing on slower networks. These features got people hooked on WhatsApp.

Then, it was the network effects that helped WhatsApp grow. If your friend was on WhatsApp, you had to be on WhatsApp. This was enough for an app that did the job without offering many features at the start.

As the market matured to 3G and now 4G connectivity, WhatsApp matured as well. Today, if you share a video on WhatsApp, chances are high that the videos might be shared in their original format. Add audio calling, video calling, and several other features that are hidden within the plain-looking WhatsApp app.

The result is more than 400 million users in India using the app every month.

Global growth of WhatsApp. Source: Statista

Conclusion

So, the lesson that we can learn from this story is that merely copying apps is not going to lead to long-term sustenance of a product. Venture capitalists have learned this lesson, and foreign companies are being more careful about just translating their existing apps.

What do you think are some good international products that have adapted well to India?

Next week, I’ll write about the fake news menace associated with WhatsApp. If you want to know more about any new products, please comment and let me know! I’d be happy to research and write about them.

Please share this article with your friends & coworkers! It’d be great to see a discussion going around WhatsApp.

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The growth of WhatsApp in India

In recent times, WhatsApp is gaining a lot of negative publicity because of the fake news that is spread through it. The overall narrative from government agencies is trying to vilify WhatsApp and Facebook to take action against the perpetrators of fake news. They are complaining that the company is not doing enough to curb fake news.

In this e-mail, I want to focus on another aspect of WhatsApp. India has seen a large shift in communication patterns because of WhatsApp. Let’s zoom out and take a high-level view of WhatsApp.

At a high level

WhatsApp globally has about 1.5 billion monthly active users worldwide, of which about 400 million are in India. Let’s think about that number in depth. Experts estimate that India’s internet population was about 500 million at the end of 2018. 80% of that population uses WhatsApp every month. If you are an internet user in India, chances are high that you started using the Internet because of WhatsApp. Though there are competitors to WhatsApp that have some share of the market, it will be safe to say that you use WhatsApp for communication.

For a company like Facebook, this means that it has a very strong influence on how communication works in a country that is as diverse as India.

How did WhatsApp get there?

WhatsApp was launched in India in 2010. At the time, the market for text messaging was owned by phone carriers, who used to charge money for each message that was sent. WhatsApp came in, and said, “Hey, you don’t have to pay to send messages. You only need an internet connection.”

Another reason why WhatsApp grew so fast was how less data it needed to send messages. A stable 2G connection, whose prices had reduced by 2010, was good enough to communicate with your friends and family. In as little as ₹ 10, someone could send hundreds of messages. The founders of WhatsApp had made a sincere effort to make the app one of the lowest users of data, allowing it to work very well on slower connections.

The app was truly designed for emerging markets like India.

That was the hook a price-sensitive market like India needed. Primarily, the younger generation, which was looking for ways to save money on mobile phones, got hooked to using WhatsApp, and soon, India became WhatsApp’s biggest market.

Once people started using it, network effects kicked in. If your friend was on WhatsApp, you wanted to use WhatsApp. In fact, many people even switched to a new phone just because they could use WhatsApp.

This was how the WhatsApp story started, and in many ways, India’s internet explosion started as well. This brilliant article details the important years of WhatsApp’s journey.

So, what does that mean for WhatsApp

One thing that WhatsApp has done exceptionally well, despite its growth, is that it hasn’t lost its essence. There are a limited set of features when the company could spend millions of dollars on making new features to try and make it more attractive.

Because of this, WhatsApp still is looking for a clear-cut way to monetize itself. Currently, the product is free to use for users, and Facebook has not put in any ads on the product. There are talks of putting ads in WhatsApp or asking companies to pay for using WhatsApp to communicate with users. Facebook has a lot of options to monetize WhatsApp.

The most logical answer seems to be to ask companies to pay WhatsApp to send messages to their consumers. But, we’ll have to wait and watch to see how monetization on WhatsApp happens.

The WhatsApp revolution

Today, businesses like Meesho are being built completely on WhatsApp. Companies are recognizing of reaching out to customers on WhatsApp. Small businesses frequently conduct business solely through WhatsApp. Families and friends stay connected through WhatsApp, of course, offering ways to build micro-communities that can create opportunities for selling and buying.

This said, WhatsApp only has a bright future. What the e-mail revolution did in the nineties, WhatsApp has done in the past decade. For anyone looking to start a business, I’d encourage looking at WhatsApp as a mechanism to sell and grow.

This is just the start.

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Read my article about the YouTube revolution too!

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5 Benefits of staycations

Once upon a time, explorers sailed their ships to go find new land. Traveling for them was about curiosity to find something unexpected. This was the one reason that travelers were considered daredevils – people who lived their lives on the edge.

Today, travel has become a way for people to escape from their routine struggles. Be it the two-hour road trip that you make on a weekend to a lake-facing resort or a camping trip near the forest, you look forward to traveling.

As tourism is becoming accessible, the number of tourists taking trips has been on the rise. The global tourism industry grew by 3.4% in 2018, amidst a slowdown in several industries across the globe. Fueled by easier transportation and better vacation policies, travel is becoming easier every year.

For Millenials, apps like Instagram have increased the feeling of missing out. You see so many people traveling around you every weekend. Everyone is going to someplace new. Sometimes, if you open Instagram after days, it feels overwhelming. So many people doing so many things with their lives. Everyone is trying to make the most of it.

How do you travel without spending a lot of money? Without planning trips? Without taking long breaks from work?

The answers to these questions lie in Staycation – a concept getting popular in recent days. According to Wikipedia, Staycation is a vacation at home where a person does activities that are within the driving distances of their homes.

I would argue that with the advent of YouTube, you can do more. You can travel to the corners of the world while sitting on your couch. Just find a few good YouTube videos (of course, this is still time-consuming). But once you find good ones…

Let’s look at some benefits of Staycations:

Monetary savings: Of course, the biggest reason is saving money. By taking these short vacations, you can save up your annual travel budget. While I could not find an exact number that could be saved, but people spend thousands of dollars per year on vacation.Time savings: Think about all the time you spend booking flights, trains or buses, hotels, tours and finding food options. If sightseeing is the primary purpose of traveling, then watching videos on YouTube is good to get a perspective.The ability to turn off anytime: Sometimes, the excitement of a vacation wears off after a while. There is a sense of getting back to normalcy. This feeling can be entirely avoided – you only have to shut down the television.No packing: Packing stuff for travel consumes a lot of time. At least an hour or so. By staying at home, you will be saving this time, which you could use to rest or to watch more videos on YouTube.Go solo: No need to coordinate travel with friends, adjust your schedule with others’, find food that they like but you may not, among other things. Staycations are completely flexible. Whether you stay alone at home or want to stay alone, there is enough content on the web today to keep you engaged.

I am convinced that staycation is going to become a popular word in the next decade. In fact, I even think there would be new products coming out specifically around staycations. Do you know of any? Let me know in the comments section.

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