Where do start-ups get their money ?

Take a look at this small animated sketchbook video by Paul Kedrosky for the Kauffman Foundation. BTW, Infectious Greed is a very smart blog that I follow.

Saving Crafts

Over the last year, I've been thinking on and off about how to save crafts in India from dying out. Interestingly, Subir Dutta, CEO of Apoorv.com, startled me a couple of days ago by saying that 23+ million people hand-making things from India, and that the overall market is Rs. 10,000 crores, largely for export (does this include handloom textiles ?) So what is the issue ?

Customer Experience Design Firm

The last few days have been spent at IFFI, the International Film Festival of India. The poor experience started with the atrocious website. The next interaction was the various communications on the public domain. The real clincher was the horrible process of getting the delegate cards.

My idea is that there is a space for a firm focused on the overall customer experience. This would cover not only things like web site, general communication design, but also have wings with expertise in process design (think TQM, Lamm and Six Sigma), and in customer service.

The overall premise is to focus on the overall customer experience across all aspects, not just the traditional areas that designers do.

Another example is inter city bus travel. Opportunities for improvement abound.

Questions: Who in the company is this sold to? And what is the pricing model?

At first glance, one would expect event management companies to have a great deal of expertise in this area. But I would say that most do not see what they do in this light.

Sweating the small stuff

One of the most boring parts of running any organisation is executing on the details well. I find many of the people I work with do not appreciate quite how important this is for their success.

Some great examples of this come from the world of the internet and ecommerce. Many Indian websites have woefully inadequate user interfaces / user experiences. Yet, there is a wealth of experience in designing user interfaces, especially to increase success in ecommerce. Take a look at this link for example. If you look at the first case study in the article, there was a 30% increase in sign-ups based on a simple wording change. Now, in any business, getting a 30% increase usually takes a lot of hard work. Here is a place where there's easy pickings, but for some reason, very neglected.

Idea : How to discontinue paper statements

We have all had banks and various utilities trying hard to get us to give up paper statements and opt for e-statements. I, for one, have resisted switching to e-statements. Since its obviously greener, I have been thinking hard as to why I am reluctant, and what will it take to make me switch.

For all you guys selling to businesses

This is probably the single most important lesson in business ! 

Sell it first. Making it is by far the easier thing.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcWjOodAtoE?wmode=transparent]

Business Models - Trade Magazines

Over the last few decades, the magazine industry has seen huge fragmentation as readers are looking for more specialized magazines. There was a time people read a sports magazine. Today, people want to read about snowboarding, or even snowboarding in the rockies. Trade magazines are caught between a market that is looking for very specialised information with low circulation but very valuable eyeballs, and a mass market with low resonance with readers. Magazines in general suffer from a business model where in the short run, they lose money as more copies are sold, as the printing cost exceeds the revenue from the individual copy. Advertising makes up much of the revenues. So as more specialized magazines spring up, the generalist (rather the not-so-specialist) is caught in a vicious circle of falling circulation leading to lower advertising rates leading to fewer journalists leading to weaker content. So how does one respond ?