Hemant R. Joshi's Blog, page 7

Technology for senior citizens

A few weeks ago, I helped my dad create a Google doc rather than creating a document on a computer locally. The process was revealing. Even the simplest questions like, “How do you save this?” required me to think of a good explanation. “It saves automatically,” was not good enough. To add to that, the benefits of sharing the document, live collaboration, etc. were all tough to explain. “How do you access this document later on? I can’t find it on the desktop.” I ended up creating a bookmark link on the browser.

This process was revealing. The most obvious things for our generation are not that obvious. To learn more, over the past three weeks, I’ve been interacting with a few of my father’s friends. Answering their questions about technology and apps has been a revealing journey. Questions like, “How does YouTube handle copyright issues?” to “How does WhatsApp make money?” have all forced me to explore answers that I would not have otherwise thought of.

Image source

As I’m having these conversations, I’ve realized something.

Technology has such amazing solutions available, yet, these solutions are not easy to get started with. Awareness and Onboarding are problems that Product Managers optimize for every day, yet, there is a sect of population that is often ignored.

All of us are going to grow old one day. As such, the need for technology to adapt will become obvious in a few years. The world is ageing and we need technology to adapt to the ageing population. India’s elderly population is expected to grow to 173 million by 2026. Some states in India will start transitioning to an ageing population by as soon as 2030s.

Globally, too, a similar phenomenon is being observed. More than 20 percent of people are expected to become senior citizens by 2030.

What are the challenges?

This population finds it hard to complete the basic tasks of life using technology. Technology is finding its way to everything from grocery to shopping to payments. As such, doing the basic jobs of life is becoming harder. Usually, seniors rely on other people to help with using new technology.

Amidst the fast pace of technology, this population wants you to explain them things slowly, wait for them to make note before moving to the next step. Rushing through technology doesn’t help.

[image error]

Let’s look at some of the obvious challenges:

Changing User Interfaces (UIs) can create confusion

The product designers decided to switch to a material layout since that allows for a ‘cleaner’ interface. During the process, they decided to move one of the less-used features to a menu in a corner. Earlier, this feature was available on the home screen. What happened next?

For the most people, there was no effect in terms of usage. But for the few people who used this feature, the added dimension of the product led to so much confusion that they could no longer use the product at all.

Though I took it to an extreme with this story a little bit, but being cognizant of rapid changes to UIs can create a massive impact, even though it is for a smaller population. Losing out a few customers for better retention of others might be fine, but why hamper the experience for these few in the first place?

Once stuck to a product, switching to a new one is hard

This can be a boon for creators. When someone is familiar to a product, switching to a new one could be extremely hard, especially for seniors. For people who created e-mail addresses on Yahoo decades ago, switching to Gmail for the convenience it offers might not be compelling enough. Using the same e-mail client serves their purpose.

I’m not saying product teams shouldn’t make these changes or upgrades. But it is their responsibility to ensure that the users on previous versions get enough guidance to adapt to the new. If you want people to switch to a new technology, you need to be patient.

Too many things happening on the UI:

A popup appears asking you to avail a new discount offer. A window slides from the bottom asking you to accept the cookie policy of the company. A menu has more than thirty items listed in different sections. The search icon is hidden in the top right corner of the page. Some features need side-scrolling to be discovered.

These are all examples of places where designing for inclusivity of seniors could use some additional thought. For Product Managers and designers, the focus should be on having at most a few features on a page on mobile, and cutting down any extraneous features that could confuse the users.

Not enough onboarding guidance

Some products can seem simple to use, but unless you show people the features of your product in a guided tour, they are not likely to discover them. Keyboard shortcuts, for example, are not going to help you unless you explain to the users what they are and how to use them.

Nudging people towards the usage of features depending on their existing patterns might be helpful to avoid confusion and provide an easy-to-use product.

Text comprehension

If there’s a wall of small text, you would not expect the millennials to use your product, let alone seniors. Simplifying text as much as possible and using icons and images to explain the text should help.

This also helps foreign language speakers comprehend information on sites not in their language. It sounds simple, but simplifying text is one of the hardest challenges.

Things to keep in mind

If you’re building products for seniors, here are some things to consider:

Usage growth will be slow: You can’t expect people to adopt a new technology at once. Give people some time to try out the product and get their reactions to it. Timely onboarding tips could help in helping people get their job done through the product, but don’t bombard people with onboarding material. If growth is slow, let it be.It’s better to go with existing designs: Make incremental improvements to existing design patterns rather than re-thinking design patterns. Use the standard icons to represent the common actions. Do not create a new icon for “log out” – use one that is standardized.Restrict the usage of popups and fancy menus: Though these can lead to an increase in signups or conversions, popups can disturb the user’s frame of mind. It is best to use them in a limited capacity. Do not add a popup for every action that you want to take. But if you are bound to, it please make dismissing the popup easy.Hold events and webinars to provide training: People need a lot of hand-holding when getting started on a new product. It is like a new subject in school. It is easy to provide personalized assistance to people through webinars and events if that is possible.



Conclusion

The American Disabilities Act states that all the roads in the cities in US have to adhere to certain rules to be accessible to people with disabilities. Wheel-chair ramps, blind markers etc. are common across the country.

This happened because of the government setting the policy. Why can we not do the same for the internet? What would it take for a service that could adapt any product on the internet to the needs of the elderly? Product teams would then no longer need to worry about ensuring their products are accessible.

Subscribe to my newsletter, Zoom In, Zoom Out, where I explore how technology is changing us and creating opportunities for new businesses to spin up.

I’d love to get in touch with you! Please reach out on Twitter or send me an email at hemantrjoshi[at]outlook[dot]com.

The business of e-sports

This article was originally published on SportsKeeda.

With the increasing focus on building and popularizing leagues for Football, Kabaddi, Hockey, Badminton and other sports, India is growing as a sporting nation. Viewership and revenue for domestic leagues are growing year over year, with different sports starting to pick up steam with diverse audiences. The performance at the International level is also improving in some sports – for example, the Indian Soccer team moved up from rank 173 in March 2015 to 97 in December 2018. That speaks volumes for a nation that has always grappled with scams and politics ruling most of the sports landscape.

With more investments coming in the next years, we can expect that by the end of the next decade, we can be among the most powerful sporting nations, both in terms of performance and revenue. By 2023, analysts predict that the Indian sports and fitness goods market would be worth $5.5 Billion. Thus, it will be one of the biggest industries that are yet to be tapped by domestic businessmen. There will be several opportunities to build businesses around sports other than cricket.

But there is also an opportunity to grow in sports that do not take place on fields but on screens. E-sports, as they are called, are basically online gaming tournaments, where participants sitting in different parts of the world could be competing against one another. Games such as League of Legends, Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, etc. form the bulk of these gaming tournaments. These are all virtual games that don’t check your physical fitness, but your ability to think on the spot and response times. Both of these skills need years of training to compete at a global level.

[image error]Photo by Alex Haney on Unsplash

On the viewership front, there is an entire parallel industry for watching professional gamers play games, started by twitch.tv. During the last year’s League of Legends Championship held in South Korea, 200 million viewers tuned in concurrently to watch the championship’s final match. For perspective, the tenth most popular sport, Golf, has a viewership of 450 million. Which means the esports industry is already half as big as Golf. At the same time, Twitch has 140 million unique monthly viewers on its site. Seeing the business value, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million in 2014.

Yet, the involvement of India in E-sports remains small. India ranks in the 16th spot in terms of revenues earned from E-sports, far behind China, USA, and South Korea.

Our lagging behind in this sporting phenomenon can be attributed to the lack of good infrastructure. Tier 1 cities such as Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru may have good Internet speeds required for streaming, but much of the country still remains disconnected from high-speed broadband services that are essential to streaming.

We have also grown with this mentality of how computer games are always bad – they don’t even challenge someone physically. Going to play a game of cricket has a higher chance of approval from parents than going to play a game of Counter-Strike.

But things are improving.

India got its first major e-sports league in 2017 with U-Cypher. Organizers gave out 51 lakhs in prize money and partnered with MTV India to put the league on national television. By showing it on national television, the sport was able to reach Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities of the country, thus popularizing it. We can expect more variants of this league as it gets popular across the country.

As the sport grows, it brings tremendous opportunities to start new businesses. Let’s look at a few of them here:

1.      Gaming cafes: Remember Cyber Cafes? The places where people used to pay money to use the internet? Gaming cafes are similar to Cyber Cafes in that they offer people the chance to access high-end equipment at small costs. While we already have several Gaming Cafes today, a lot of cafes need to upgrade their equipment. Providing the right environment for gaming is necessary. Though we have some startups working in this space, the market is huge and can easily absorb more startups.

2.      Vernacular Games: Looking at the increasing prominence of games like Grand Theft Auto, more people playing games means more opportunity for creating original Indian games that are relevant to Indian contexts. In comparison, Sharechat, a Twitter-like app that was started in 2015 grew to be one of the most popular apps in India. Sharechat allows Indians to share content in 14 different Indian languages, making it usable by even the non-English speaking population. This has been one of the biggest reasons for the growth of the company.

3.      Regional level competitions: Arranging competitions in colleges and schools across the country would lead to increased participation, which means more prize money can be doled out. E-sports competitions need gaming equipment, unlike sports that need fields. If companies master the management of conducting regional level competitions, it would create a growing revenue stream. We’ve already started to see this with local cricket leagues which are now streamed on YouTube channels like tenniscricket.in. There’s an opportunity for doing similar things for other sports, including e-sports.

[image error]As a big league grows, several small ones spawn up.

4.      Online leagues: Similar to Cricket and Football Fantasy Leagues, a fantasy league for e-sports could be a great business opportunity. People could create their teams based on their intuition of professional players’ future performance. Depending on the actual performance of players, participants could be rewarded. This is already happening with apps like Dream11 and the opportunity is perfect for doing something for other sports.

5.      Online gaming platforms: Platforms such as Twitch and YouTube Gaming already provide people with a steady income. Both these platforms are currently restricted to only English-speaking audiences. While most of the gaming audience in India adapt to the English games today, the scene could be different in five to ten years from now. Vernacular apps and platforms will provide us with an opportunity to reach a larger audience.

One of the biggest concerns with e-sports is that playing games on phones and computers are not good for health. I imagine similar concerns came up when televisions were introduced, but televisions have revolutionized the entertainment industry. Because of them, we have seen several more businesses created in the entertainment, media and journalism industries.

Instead of painting e-sports as entirely evil, we should aim to find the right balance between indoor and outdoor games. We need to allow children to experiment with different sports and let them find for themselves what they are good at. With a growing global e-sports culture, we would get better internationally only if we allow children to explore this domain.

While it might take us years to be dominant in the Olympics, it might be much easier to encourage people to play games on computers. Providing someone with a good computer is much easier than providing someone with access to swimming pools.

Business opportunities in e-sports are aplenty. Who knows, we might even have entire new untapped markets. Who knew that Twitch would be such a big company a decade ago? Today, an entire generation of gamers depends on Twitch for earning their monthly income.

The opportunity to get involved in e-sports is rife. Let’s not waste it thinking if we should be allowing children to play computer games or not. 

Thanks for reading! If you liked reading this article, please subscribe to my newsletter here and share it with your friends.

Audio – the next channel for content creators

Over the past decade, one thing that has come up clearly is that people can make money through their passion. This has been proven with thousands of YouTubers, Instagrammers, bloggers, etc. The internet offers more tools than ever before to earn money through your passion, be it photography, writing, editing or merely assisting others with their work.

In the near future, I think everyone will have a side income apart from their normal day-job. If you take a look at this fantastic piece by Li Jin, you’ll find a lot of startups already coming up with tools to provide independent creators with tools to make themselves successful. Distribution has never been cheaper.

Because it is so easy to create new content, for a while I’ve wondered if we’ve reached a saturation point in terms of content creation and consumption. After all, there are only 24 hours in a day and a finite lifespan. We can spend only so much time watching videos or connecting with people on social media. In such a case, I wonder if anyone will ever be able to reach the scale that someone could have 5 or 10 years ago?

Let’s take the case of YouTube. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched every day. These are staggering numbers, which speak to the excellent infrastructure created by YouTube. But as a new creator, they make you wonder whether you will be able to find your space in the YouTube world? Will you be able to get even a thousand subscribers, as opposed to millions of subscribers on your favourite YouTube channels?

The answer is – yes, you can find your space in the creator economy. The key lies in looking at new platforms that are currently under-utilized but are poised to grow. This will help you differentiate yourself from the other creators. If you follow the existing creators and keep using the same tactic they used to grow, you are likely not going to be successful, especially if the other creators are hugely successful.

Finding your space

Creators naturally benefit from the growth of the user base of a content platform. For example, as YouTube’s reach kept growing over the past five years, we saw a lot more content creators in India cross a million subscribers. In 2015, the number of YouTube channels with a million subscribers was 16, that same number in 2019 was past 1200. Over the past couple of years, Tiktok has grown tremendously, to reach more than 500 million monthly active users worldwide.

As a new creator, you should take a bet on a new platform and grow with it. If the platform grows and your content is good, you will grow. And there are plenty of new platforms that have a huge potential for growth. For example, for writing online Substack is trying to make a mark; for selling online courses, you can use Podia; for audio content creation, there are tools like Anchor. These tools help creators not just create, but also make money while creating.

If you’re in India and like reading in your local languages, platforms like ShareChat, Helo, Aawaz.com, etc. are allowing you to share vernacular content. Depending on the kind of content you want to make, you can start using these platforms right away.

But apart from these individual platforms, I think there is a bigger channel that’s going to explode soon – audio.

[image error]

Photo by Namroud Gorguis on Unsplash

Betting big on Audio

India is already the third-largest market for audio consumption on the internet, but the number of monthly podcast listeners is only 40 million, which is less than 10% of India’s internet-using population. In the US, more than 60 million people listen to podcasts every week. The opportunity is much bigger for India, though, because of two reasons – one, the growing internet population, and two, the natural reach of audio content to other languages. English is limiting in its reach, but not vernacular audio content.

We have always spoken to other people on the phone. Creating audio for mass consumption is a natural step in this evolution. Apps like WhatsApp have already created it very easy to send audio messages to our contacts.

The next question we need to answer – how do you find out what content to create?

Finding audio opportunities

Blogging became very popular in the first decade of the century. Later, the same content that you once saw on a blog started to appear in the form of videos on YouTube and other places. News started appearing in the text, audio, and video formats, short stories grew from online publications to short films online, etc. We saw a huge shift in how consumption changed.

I think translating the same or similar content to a different medium is an excellent way to gain traction. Just like ‘video blogs’, or vlogs grew popular through YouTube last decade, ‘audio blogs,’ will be popular very soon (I don’t know what will be the cool word for it, though).

But you need to be slightly careful since some kind of content is better suited for a video setting only. For example, in a car review, you would expect to see pictures or a video of the car. This won’t be suited for audio production. However, there is a lot of content that is much better suited for an audio-only format, for example – talk shows, comedy shows, story narrations, etc.

The effort is not huge

The creation of audio content doesn’t need a huge amount of effort too. Unlike video, where you need a camera, a location, nice costumes to make the video look good; audio needs much less equipment. Basic recording can happen over your phone itself. For the more sophisticated recordings, you need a good microphone and audio editing software, which is not very expensive.

The opportunity is here

Humans began to communicate with each other by telling stories to one another. A natural evolution of communication was creating shared languages with other individuals, then came pictorial scripts allowing us to draw pictures and document our life, which later evolved into the further development of written scripts.

As content transmission diversifies into different channels, as it has over the course of human history, we have now been able to go back to where it all began – telling people through our voice, not requiring us to write or draw. We are natural storytellers, and we now have the tools to tell stories to many people over the internet.

Hang tight! I might start working on an audio content project soon

Cold contacts are the ultimate skill

Over the past couple of months, with my book, The Advisory Board being published, I’ve been heavily invested in ensuring that the book reaches the right people. For books, ‘word-of-mouth’ is the ultimate way to spread a word about the book. But until a book starts to spread itself, it is the author’s and publisher’s responsibility to ensure that the book reaches the target audience.

My book is a collection of short stories with taxi drivers. It’s a story based in Mumbai, where the protagonist meets with taxi drivers whose advice revolutionizes his company. A few taxi rides take him from the lowest point in his life to a rising graph, where he is content with what he is doing. The premise of the story and the setting have helped me arrive at a few types of people who I think are the primary audience for the book. Looking them up is easier than ever, thanks to Instagram, Twitter and social media in general.

As a result, I have been contacting a lot of people who I don’t know. Through Instagram, Twitter, E-mail and WhatsApp, I am reaching out to book clubs, colleges, libraries, YouTubers, Bloggers, Book reviewers, etc. The goal is to maximize the visibility of the book so that people can start referring the book to their friends and family. Once this starts to happen, I will say that people are liking the book. In the traditional terms of marketing, once organic sales start to happen, I will know that people are appreciating the story.

Last month, on a random whim, I contacted the Entrepreneurship Cell of IIT Kharagpur to see if they would be interested in having a few copies of the book. I got a response from one of their student members, who then suggested that I give a book talk at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit happening on January 31st and February 1st. Though I will be in the US, the team agreed to let me talk to the crowd through a video call.

This was probably the best cold contact I’ve ever had in my life. There have been several others so far, but none of them has materialized so quickly and to such an amazing result. This has raised my hopes from cold calls, even though most of them are not replied to. For example, a couple of months ago, I had contacted the marketing teams of Ola and Uber to partner with me on marketing the book, since the book is a natural fit in taxis. None of them heeded my request. As a result, I went ahead and contacted ten other cab companies.

But none of them have responded yet.

After sending over two hundred cold emails over the last two months and contacting several more people on social media, I’ve learned a few things. These are my learnings on cold contacting –

1.       Get to the point. While messaging on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, it is even more important to keep your message short. People usually are tolerant of slightly longer e-mails, but while messaging, get to the point.

2.       If you can find the person on social media, prefer to message them there vs. writing an e-mail. There’s a high chance that e-mails end up in their junk folder, but not a message sent directly on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

3.       To get over anxiety, be prolific in contacting people. Instead of contacting one person and waiting for fifteen days to get a response, contact several people. That way, you don’t wait for the anxiety. As long as you keep contacting people, you will find someone who responds to you.

4.       Don’t contact for the sake of contacting. Build relationships. Try to learn more about their life, their work and appreciate the good things. But be careful, don’t adulate people. This is very well explained in the book, How to Make Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

5.       Have your personal website up to date. People look you up if they read your message – so you better have your online presence sorted out. It doesn’t necessarily have to be through a website, but websites are like your online home. They allow you to make things personal to suit your taste.

6.       Do not hesitate in asking for help. Over the past couple of years, it has become more and more clear to me that asking for help is not as bad as it sounds. In the case of cold contacts, don’t say “Do you want to work for me…”, but rather, “It would be great if you could help me do…”

7.       Add value. I’ve developed this habit of asking people to let me know how I can help. So far, I haven’t seen people ask for a lot, but it feels like a good first step to build long-term connections rather than mere transactional ones.

Talking to strangers can be awkward.

In the world of social media, if we post a tweet, it feels like we’ve done everything we can to reach an audience of millions. It isn’t. Reaching out to one person at a time is much harder, but it is a sure-shot way of finding like-minded people in the world.

Giving things a personal touch is the future of content creation. In writing, there is a rule to be specific. If you try to write for too many people at the same time, it obfuscates your writing and it shows on your writing (I admit that I’ve failed this rule on a number of occasions, though).

If you find a few like-minded people, it is much better than finding none.

Talking to strangers

That brings me to something that we’ve started to forget with time. The art of talking to strangers. When was the last time you spoke to a stranger while riding the bus or the train? The last time you spoke to the cashier at the grocery store? The last time you spoke to your Uber driver?

Our previous generations used to do this without thinking twice. Today, it feels awkward to talk to someone standing next to you at the bus stop. If you talk to someone, you don’t know if they’ll be receptive to you.

I’ve always struggled to bring up new topics to speak about with people I don’t know. But I noticed a sea of change in my life after I started speaking with taxi drivers and hearing their stories. In fact, this was the inspiration behind writing The Advisory Board.

Don’t be afraid of contacting people upfront. Ask specific questions and see how they respond to you.

If they don’t, what’s the harm? Move on, contact someone else.

If you liked reading this article, subscribe to my weekly newsletter to receive my articles. I send one e-mail every Friday.

Which Social Media platform should you choose?

In today’s world, social media has become an extremely necessary tool to grow for anyone who needs an audience. Social media has created business opportunities and provided a source of income for several freelancers. Influencers on social media are now using their following to advertise brands and businesses.

Instagram influencers, Twitter celebrities, Facebook pages with a huge following are all sought after by big companies.

But one question that comes up again and again among budding creators is how to grow their social media following, and which is the right platform for them. All social media channels offer different advantages for different types of creators.

Using all social media platforms at the same time can lead to social media fatigue very soon.

Image source — https://diamedia.net/2015/03/09/social-media-fatigue/

While there are several articles that explain how to grow your social media presence, in this article, I highlight some key aspects that one should consider while getting started building their brand on a social media platform.

While comparing different social media platforms, I take into consideration three main factors: Discovery, Reach and Effort. I’ll define Discovery as the ability to find your target audience. Reach can be defined as how much of your target audience you can get to. I’ll say the effort is the amount of time and money investment required to reach your target audience.

I think the most important thing for a creator in early phases is testing your creation with a target audience. Once you see something is hit with a very specific audience, you need to think about how you can grow your reach to other people. Hence, thinking about your target audience, which social media platform they are on and reaching out to them is important. You should spend time on finding your target audience in the early phases of your career as a creator.

Let’s break down these factors for different social media networks –

Facebook:

With 2.32 bn monthly active users, Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social media platform in the world. It is likely that you have a Facebook account already. If you do, starting to build your brand on Facebook would be easy with your friends and family already connected to you.

If you don’t have a Facebook account, it still can be assumed that a lot of your friends are on Facebook, so connecting with them on Facebook would be as easy as sending a Friend Request.

For building your brand, it is important that you start by creating a Facebook Page. A Facebook Page is like your website but restricted to Facebook. Think of it as a way to showcase what you do to your target audience.

There are several online resources that can help you set up excellent Facebook pages. To start, you can take a look at differences between pages and profiles, as stated by Facebook here.

Let’s look at how Facebook performs on our comparison metrics:

1. Discovery: In terms of discovering your target audience, the Facebook search bar is your first friend. Putting in keywords revolving around your content will help you discover groups that are similar to what you are already doing. By joining similar Facebook groups or following pages, you can understand what people are doing in these communities. However, groups can be restricted, and not all groups will be spam-free. So, getting access to the groups’ content might have roadblocks, thus taking a lot of time to access and research.

2. Reach: With Facebook, once you set up your Facebook Page and make it public, you can invite all your friends to like and follow the page. Depending on how many friends you have on Facebook, you can target your reach. If you have 500 friends, you can get 500 followers with a few simple clicks. If you have a wider network, you can get more followers through this network. At the same time, since 30% of the world is already using Facebook, with a single Facebook page, your page is available to this audience.

3. Effort: To build an initial following on Facebook is easy, but to maintain the growth seems to be the hard part. Getting the first 100 followers for your Facebook page can be easily done by sending requests to all your friends. However, once you get to this point, it becomes really hard to grow, because you don’t know how to reach out to a larger audience. The only way to grow your audience would be to promote your page in related groups, personally asking people to share your page with others and grow over time. This is a painful growth process, which will take at least a couple of years to build a good number of followers.

Instagram:

With a billion monthly active users, Instagram is probably the next biggest social network platform you want to look at. Considering its appeal among the younger audiences and its features geared towards creators, it is worth trying out and seeing if it helps you engage with your audience.

Let’s take a look at Instagram based on our three parameters:

1. Discovery: With pictures and videos as the core piece of engagement, Instagram attracts the younger audiences (ages 15–30). With a bigger focus on hashtags, once you start populating your Instagram account with photos, suggestions for similar photos and profiles become more relevant to your profile. It is very easy to find people who have the same interests as you. As a result, building a good Instagram profile can be valuable if you want to attract younger audiences. Hashtags will take you a long way in discovering like-minded people on Instagram.

2. Reach: With features that attract the younger audiences, if your target audience is under 35, you should think of Instagram seriously. It is very easy for you to discover others, similarly, others can discover you with equal ease. As long as you keep posting photos consistently, you will grow over time. Reaching out to new people would seem like an organic process. Yet, one of the problems Instagram faces is the huge number of bots that follow profiles just to increase follower count. Be wary of using bots yourself, as they could be good in the short run but affect you in the longer run.

3. Effort: This depends on the type of person you are. If you are a person who has a lot of pictures that you can share, Instagram is the easiest tool to do that to build a following. One photo a day is an excellent benchmark to start with. Clicking a picture, applying filters and putting enough hashtags in the comments would take

This essay was published in my weekly newsletter on Jan 2, 2020.

Kabaddi, a sport that originated in India and popularized in leagues since the 1920s, was never the topmost sport in the country. Until the late 1980s it was Hockey, after which India started obsessing over cricket. As cricket grew in popularity, it created so many careers. Not just for the players, but the managers, organizers, coaches, etc. If you visit any city in India, you can view how popular cricket is by looking at streets or fields. You would find several interpretations of cricket, with rules being tweaked to suit the conditions and space.

But, Kabaddi did not die. India has been a consistent performer in Kabaddi at the world stage. It has won all 3 world cups that have happened so far. The sport doesn’t qualify in Olympics yet, because of the limited number of countries playing, but the growth trajectory of Kabaddi could lead to a World Cup berth in a few years’ time.

Pro Kabaddi League

In 2014, Mashal Sports and Star Sports launched the Pro Kabaddi League with 8 teams from across India. This league is modeled after the success of a similar Cricket league, the Indian Premier League.

Over the years, the PKL has become the second most-watched leagues in India. In fact, in 2018, the PKL managed to attract a higher India viewership than the soccer world cup, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. In December 2018, the league was rated higher than the Indian cricket team’s Test match win against Australia in 2018.

The trend of growth is echoed in Google Trends as well. This is a chart showing the percentage of people searching for Football, Hockey and Kabaddi in India.

Source

Look at the interest in Kabaddi during the June to September period, right when the Pro Kabaddi League happens. Kabaddi is giving serious competition to Football, the second most searched sports in India after Cricket.

According to Nielsen Sports, interest in Kabaddi itself has grown by 14% year-over-year since 2015. At the same time, player salaries have also grown by quite a lot. The maximum salary in Season 1 was ₹12 lakh. In Season 6, one player went for ₹1.5 crores, the highest-paid professional athlete in the country outside cricket. Star India likely earned Rs 200  to 230 crore from PKL in 2019, a significant jump from 2018 when their revenue was likely Rs 150 crore.

A lot of this comes at the backdrop of smart production and packaging of the sport. Kabaddi is a short-format sport packed with action, with something or the other happening every minute to keep the audience engaged. Each side gets a chance every 30 seconds. At the same time, there is a lot of strategy involved, which keeps people guessing about the outcome.

Why is this important?

Looking at the numbers, we can expect Kabaddi to keep growing over the next decade. Revenues from Kabaddi would grow while creating many more jobs, not only for players and their staff, but in marketing, advertising, and whatnot. The growth in viewership will inspire younger generations to take up the sport.

That said, why should PKL be the only league that earns all the revenues?

In Cricket, apart from IPL, there are several local leagues, which are broadcasted live on YouTube. Tennis Cricket, a channel that exclusively streams local leagues in Maharashtra, has 637k subscribers. With the growth of a bigger league, several smaller leagues popup.

We can expect something similar in Kabaddi.

I am sure that there are smaller Kabaddi leagues happening across India at the junior level. With investment in production and marketing, businesses can be built on streaming these leagues. Revenue can come in from sponsors as viewership increases.

With YouTube, distribution is practically free. You don’t have to pay to upload videos. The easiest way to start a business today is to take your phone, shoot videos and upload them to YouTube.

In fact, why should such a model be restricted to Kabaddi only? Think about Football, Hockey, Basketball, etc. There is a huge revenue potential to be earned by streaming sports at a local level. For example, district-level school tournaments are great for viewership by school students. If students view their peers on screens, they are likely to engage in the sport more often, even getting encouraged to play sports more often.

For India to be a sporting nation, sports have to reach the nooks and corners of the country. So far, only cricket has been able to do that. Would Kabaddi be the next?

I hope it is.

Subscribe to my free newsletter to get posts like this every week.

Subscribe now

This essay was published in my weekly newsletter on Jan 2, 2020.

Kabaddi, a sport that originated in India and popularized in leagues since the 1920s, was never the topmost sport in the country. Until the late 1980s it was Hockey, after which India started obsessing over cricket. As cricket grew in popularity, it created so many careers. Not just for the players, but the managers, organizers, coaches, etc. If you visit any city in India, you can view how popular cricket is by looking at streets or fields. You would find several interpretations of cricket, with rules being tweaked to suit the conditions and space.

But, Kabaddi did not die. India has been a consistent performer in Kabaddi at the world stage. It has won all 3 world cups that have happened so far. The sport doesn’t qualify in Olympics yet, because of the limited number of countries playing, but the growth trajectory of Kabaddi could lead to a World Cup berth in a few years’ time.

Pro Kabaddi League

In 2014, Mashal Sports and Star Sports launched the Pro Kabaddi League with 8 teams from across India. This league is modeled after the success of a similar Cricket league, the Indian Premier League.

Over the years, the PKL has become the second most-watched leagues in India. In fact, in 2018, the PKL managed to attract a higher India viewership than the soccer world cup, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. In December 2018, the league was rated higher than the Indian cricket team’s Test match win against Australia in 2018.

The trend of growth is echoed in Google Trends as well. This is a chart showing the percentage of people searching for Football, Hockey and Kabaddi in India.

Source

Look at the interest in Kabaddi during the June to September period, right when the Pro Kabaddi League happens. Kabaddi is giving serious competition to Football, the second most searched sports in India after Cricket.

According to Nielsen Sports, interest in Kabaddi itself has grown by 14% year-over-year since 2015. At the same time, player salaries have also grown by quite a lot. The maximum salary in Season 1 was ₹12 lakh. In Season 6, one player went for ₹1.5 crores, the highest-paid professional athlete in the country outside cricket. Star India likely earned Rs 200  to 230 crore from PKL in 2019, a significant jump from 2018 when their revenue was likely Rs 150 crore.

A lot of this comes at the backdrop of smart production and packaging of the sport. Kabaddi is a short-format sport packed with action, with something or the other happening every minute to keep the audience engaged. Each side gets a chance every 30 seconds. At the same time, there is a lot of strategy involved, which keeps people guessing about the outcome.

Why is this important?

Looking at the numbers, we can expect Kabaddi to keep growing over the next decade. Revenues from Kabaddi would grow while creating many more jobs, not only for players and their staff, but in marketing, advertising, and whatnot. The growth in viewership will inspire younger generations to take up the sport.

That said, why should PKL be the only league that earns all the revenues?

In Cricket, apart from IPL, there are several local leagues, which are broadcasted live on YouTube. Tennis Cricket, a channel that exclusively streams local leagues in Maharashtra, has 637k subscribers. With the growth of a bigger league, several smaller leagues popup.

We can expect something similar in Kabaddi.

I am sure that there are smaller Kabaddi leagues happening across India at the junior level. With investment in production and marketing, businesses can be built on streaming these leagues. Revenue can come in from sponsors as viewership increases.

With YouTube, distribution is practically free. You don’t have to pay to upload videos. The easiest way to start a business today is to take your phone, shoot videos and upload them to YouTube.

In fact, why should such a model be restricted to Kabaddi only? Think about Football, Hockey, Basketball, etc. There is a huge revenue potential to be earned by streaming sports at a local level. For example, district-level school tournaments are great for viewership by school students. If students view their peers on screens, they are likely to engage in the sport more often, even getting encouraged to play sports more often.

For India to be a sporting nation, sports have to reach the nooks and corners of the country. So far, only cricket has been able to do that. Would Kabaddi be the next?

I hope it is.

Subscribe to my free newsletter to get posts like this every week.

Subscribe now

This essay was published in my weekly newsletter on Jan 2, 2020.

Kabaddi, a sport that originated in India and popularized in leagues since the 1920s, was never the topmost sport in the country. Until the late 1980s it was Hockey, after which India started obsessing over cricket. As cricket grew in popularity, it created so many careers. Not just for the players, but the managers, organizers, coaches, etc. If you visit any city in India, you can view how popular cricket is by looking at streets or fields. You would find several interpretations of cricket, with rules being tweaked to suit the conditions and space.

But, Kabaddi did not die. India has been a consistent performer in Kabaddi at the world stage. It has won all 3 world cups that have happened so far. The sport doesn’t qualify in Olympics yet, because of the limited number of countries playing, but the growth trajectory of Kabaddi could lead to a World Cup berth in a few years’ time.

Pro Kabaddi League

In 2014, Mashal Sports and Star Sports launched the Pro Kabaddi League with 8 teams from across India. This league is modeled after the success of a similar Cricket league, the Indian Premier League.

Over the years, the PKL has become the second most-watched leagues in India. In fact, in 2018, the PKL managed to attract a higher India viewership than the soccer world cup, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. In December 2018, the league was rated higher than the Indian cricket team’s Test match win against Australia in 2018.

The trend of growth is echoed in Google Trends as well. This is a chart showing the percentage of people searching for Football, Hockey and Kabaddi in India.

Source

Look at the interest in Kabaddi during the June to September period, right when the Pro Kabaddi League happens. Kabaddi is giving serious competition to Football, the second most searched sports in India after Cricket.

According to Nielsen Sports, interest in Kabaddi itself has grown by 14% year-over-year since 2015. At the same time, player salaries have also grown by quite a lot. The maximum salary in Season 1 was ₹12 lakh. In Season 6, one player went for ₹1.5 crores, the highest-paid professional athlete in the country outside cricket. Star India likely earned Rs 200  to 230 crore from PKL in 2019, a significant jump from 2018 when their revenue was likely Rs 150 crore.

A lot of this comes at the backdrop of smart production and packaging of the sport. Kabaddi is a short-format sport packed with action, with something or the other happening every minute to keep the audience engaged. Each side gets a chance every 30 seconds. At the same time, there is a lot of strategy involved, which keeps people guessing about the outcome.

Why is this important?

Looking at the numbers, we can expect Kabaddi to keep growing over the next decade. Revenues from Kabaddi would grow while creating many more jobs, not only for players and their staff, but in marketing, advertising, and whatnot. The growth in viewership will inspire younger generations to take up the sport.

That said, why should PKL be the only league that earns all the revenues?

In Cricket, apart from IPL, there are several local leagues, which are broadcasted live on YouTube. Tennis Cricket, a channel that exclusively streams local leagues in Maharashtra, has 637k subscribers. With the growth of a bigger league, several smaller leagues popup.

We can expect something similar in Kabaddi.

I am sure that there are smaller Kabaddi leagues happening across India at the junior level. With investment in production and marketing, businesses can be built on streaming these leagues. Revenue can come in from sponsors as viewership increases.

With YouTube, distribution is practically free. You don’t have to pay to upload videos. The easiest way to start a business today is to take your phone, shoot videos and upload them to YouTube.

In fact, why should such a model be restricted to Kabaddi only? Think about Football, Hockey, Basketball, etc. There is a huge revenue potential to be earned by streaming sports at a local level. For example, district-level school tournaments are great for viewership by school students. If students view their peers on screens, they are likely to engage in the sport more often, even getting encouraged to play sports more often.

For India to be a sporting nation, sports have to reach the nooks and corners of the country. So far, only cricket has been able to do that. Would Kabaddi be the next?

I hope it is.

Subscribe to my free newsletter to get posts like this every week.

Subscribe now

This essay was published in my weekly newsletter on Jan 2, 2020.

Kabaddi, a sport that originated in India and popularized in leagues since the 1920s, was never the topmost sport in the country. Until the late 1980s it was Hockey, after which India started obsessing over cricket. As cricket grew in popularity, it created so many careers. Not just for the players, but the managers, organizers, coaches, etc. If you visit any city in India, you can view how popular cricket is by looking at streets or fields. You would find several interpretations of cricket, with rules being tweaked to suit the conditions and space.

But, Kabaddi did not die. India has been a consistent performer in Kabaddi at the world stage. It has won all 3 world cups that have happened so far. The sport doesn’t qualify in Olympics yet, because of the limited number of countries playing, but the growth trajectory of Kabaddi could lead to a World Cup berth in a few years’ time.

Pro Kabaddi League

In 2014, Mashal Sports and Star Sports launched the Pro Kabaddi League with 8 teams from across India. This league is modeled after the success of a similar Cricket league, the Indian Premier League.

Over the years, the PKL has become the second most-watched leagues in India. In fact, in 2018, the PKL managed to attract a higher India viewership than the soccer world cup, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. In December 2018, the league was rated higher than the Indian cricket team’s Test match win against Australia in 2018.

The trend of growth is echoed in Google Trends as well. This is a chart showing the percentage of people searching for Football, Hockey and Kabaddi in India.

Source

Look at the interest in Kabaddi during the June to September period, right when the Pro Kabaddi League happens. Kabaddi is giving serious competition to Football, the second most searched sports in India after Cricket.

According to Nielsen Sports, interest in Kabaddi itself has grown by 14% year-over-year since 2015. At the same time, player salaries have also grown by quite a lot. The maximum salary in Season 1 was ₹12 lakh. In Season 6, one player went for ₹1.5 crores, the highest-paid professional athlete in the country outside cricket. Star India likely earned Rs 200  to 230 crore from PKL in 2019, a significant jump from 2018 when their revenue was likely Rs 150 crore.

A lot of this comes at the backdrop of smart production and packaging of the sport. Kabaddi is a short-format sport packed with action, with something or the other happening every minute to keep the audience engaged. Each side gets a chance every 30 seconds. At the same time, there is a lot of strategy involved, which keeps people guessing about the outcome.

Why is this important?

Looking at the numbers, we can expect Kabaddi to keep growing over the next decade. Revenues from Kabaddi would grow while creating many more jobs, not only for players and their staff, but in marketing, advertising, and whatnot. The growth in viewership will inspire younger generations to take up the sport.

That said, why should PKL be the only league that earns all the revenues?

In Cricket, apart from IPL, there are several local leagues, which are broadcasted live on YouTube. Tennis Cricket, a channel that exclusively streams local leagues in Maharashtra, has 637k subscribers. With the growth of a bigger league, several smaller leagues popup.

We can expect something similar in Kabaddi.

I am sure that there are smaller Kabaddi leagues happening across India at the junior level. With investment in production and marketing, businesses can be built on streaming these leagues. Revenue can come in from sponsors as viewership increases.

With YouTube, distribution is practically free. You don’t have to pay to upload videos. The easiest way to start a business today is to take your phone, shoot videos and upload them to YouTube.

In fact, why should such a model be restricted to Kabaddi only? Think about Football, Hockey, Basketball, etc. There is a huge revenue potential to be earned by streaming sports at a local level. For example, district-level school tournaments are great for viewership by school students. If students view their peers on screens, they are likely to engage in the sport more often, even getting encouraged to play sports more often.

For India to be a sporting nation, sports have to reach the nooks and corners of the country. So far, only cricket has been able to do that. Would Kabaddi be the next?

I hope it is.

Subscribe to my free newsletter to get posts like this every week.

Subscribe now

This essay was published in my weekly newsletter on Jan 2, 2020.

Kabaddi, a sport that originated in India and popularized in leagues since the 1920s, was never the topmost sport in the country. Until the late 1980s it was Hockey, after which India started obsessing over cricket. As cricket grew in popularity, it created so many careers. Not just for the players, but the managers, organizers, coaches, etc. If you visit any city in India, you can view how popular cricket is by looking at streets or fields. You would find several interpretations of cricket, with rules being tweaked to suit the conditions and space.

But, Kabaddi did not die. India has been a consistent performer in Kabaddi at the world stage. It has won all 3 world cups that have happened so far. The sport doesn’t qualify in Olympics yet, because of the limited number of countries playing, but the growth trajectory of Kabaddi could lead to a World Cup berth in a few years’ time.

Pro Kabaddi League

In 2014, Mashal Sports and Star Sports launched the Pro Kabaddi League with 8 teams from across India. This league is modeled after the success of a similar Cricket league, the Indian Premier League.

Over the years, the PKL has become the second most-watched leagues in India. In fact, in 2018, the PKL managed to attract a higher India viewership than the soccer world cup, one of the most-watched sporting events in the world. In December 2018, the league was rated higher than the Indian cricket team’s Test match win against Australia in 2018.

The trend of growth is echoed in Google Trends as well. This is a chart showing the percentage of people searching for Football, Hockey and Kabaddi in India.

Source

Look at the interest in Kabaddi during the June to September period, right when the Pro Kabaddi League happens. Kabaddi is giving serious competition to Football, the second most searched sports in India after Cricket.

According to Nielsen Sports, interest in Kabaddi itself has grown by 14% year-over-year since 2015. At the same time, player salaries have also grown by quite a lot. The maximum salary in Season 1 was ₹12 lakh. In Season 6, one player went for ₹1.5 crores, the highest-paid professional athlete in the country outside cricket. Star India likely earned Rs 200  to 230 crore from PKL in 2019, a significant jump from 2018 when their revenue was likely Rs 150 crore.

A lot of this comes at the backdrop of smart production and packaging of the sport. Kabaddi is a short-format sport packed with action, with something or the other happening every minute to keep the audience engaged. Each side gets a chance every 30 seconds. At the same time, there is a lot of strategy involved, which keeps people guessing about the outcome.

Why is this important?

Looking at the numbers, we can expect Kabaddi to keep growing over the next decade. Revenues from Kabaddi would grow while creating many more jobs, not only for players and their staff, but in marketing, advertising, and whatnot. The growth in viewership will inspire younger generations to take up the sport.

That said, why should PKL be the only league that earns all the revenues?

In Cricket, apart from IPL, there are several local leagues, which are broadcasted live on YouTube. Tennis Cricket, a channel that exclusively streams local leagues in Maharashtra, has 637k subscribers. With the growth of a bigger league, several smaller leagues popup.

We can expect something similar in Kabaddi.

I am sure that there are smaller Kabaddi leagues happening across India at the junior level. With investment in production and marketing, businesses can be built on streaming these leagues. Revenue can come in from sponsors as viewership increases.

With YouTube, distribution is practically free. You don’t have to pay to upload videos. The easiest way to start a business today is to take your phone, shoot videos and upload them to YouTube.

In fact, why should such a model be restricted to Kabaddi only? Think about Football, Hockey, Basketball, etc. There is a huge revenue potential to be earned by streaming sports at a local level. For example, district-level school tournaments are great for viewership by school students. If students view their peers on screens, they are likely to engage in the sport more often, even getting encouraged to play sports more often.

For India to be a sporting nation, sports have to reach the nooks and corners of the country. So far, only cricket has been able to do that. Would Kabaddi be the next?

I hope it is.

Subscribe to my free newsletter to get posts like this every week.

Subscribe now