mobile-only – Sukshma

India’s Mobile-Only Products 2015

Ecommerce and local commerce services here in India are beginning to soak up the mindspace around the buzzword “mobile-only“. I imagine that the idea of mobile-only will follow the regular cycle starting with sinking in deeper into app design and eventually, business design too. But there’s something superficial about the way its being thrown about.

Here’s one instance of the term in use to critique the product strategy of flipkart, other ecommerce players.

3 questions about Indian ecommerce’s mobile-only obsession – Karthik Srinivasan, MediaNama.com, 22 March 2015.

One of the earlier references I managed to uncover was a report on India’s Internet usage being predominantly “mobile-only” (Over 50% of India’s Internet Users are Mobile-Only, Times of India, 23 October 2014). Fast forward, we now have an accelerator dedicated to mobile-only startups.

To me, mobile-only by design implies direct, efficient function for mobile users, even beyond the desktop. For instance, if you find it hard to get something done with a mobile social networking app (as opposed to impossible) and you switched over to a laptop to do so instead, that’s not mobile-only. On the other hand, Mobile-only does not imply that your product strategy is simply restricted to the mobile as is being used in the popular press.

Mobile-only is intended to simply serve the user with that characteristic. In other words, what makes the Uber app mobile-only is the assertion that you’re reserving the cab on the kerb-side. They’ve fastidiously stuck to this idea despite the immense temptation to solve for other cases. The fact that you can’t book a cab on your laptop is then just a symptom. The day we see an Indian ecommerce service restricting itself to serve the user on the go, that’s going to be an interesting day and will hopefully mean they’ve grown out of a “serve all equally” approach. As you can imagine such as service must have a different product mix on sale, perhaps an entirely different business model as well.

Think HotelTonight and not MakeMyTrip.

We are like this only!

India’s Digital Payments Freeway

In the process of building a movie tickets platform, the BookEazy team stumbled upon a revelation of card-less digital payments. We weren’t the only ones to come upon this discovery. And yet, its taken eight years for the digital payments freeway to become a potential reality. I believe that this is an important, polarizing discussion as it offers the ability to permanently close the larger digital divide in India.

Card-less Movie Tickets Online, April 2006 to 2009.

When working on getting BookEazy live we framed the problem of movie tickets in simple terms. We wanted both students and knowledge workers to be able to book their movie tickets via mobile SMS without using plastic. This was before net-banking had become possible and only a small portion of the urban population were card-enabled. An offline method, Cash on delivery was on the horizon and multiplexes had begun offering home delivery of movie tickets to movie-goers.

BookEazy cofounder and CEO offered a solution. Inspired by how we rent movies and Inox’s cashless “reserve a movie ticket by SMS and show up 40 mins before to collect them”, she suggested – why not take that idea to the next level? We then designed a cashless system which allowed movie-goers to reserve movie tickets against a security deposit and show up at the theatre to collect their tickets any time before the show.

We built over several assertions, selling ~1CR of movie tickets in Pune. Some turned out to be true, while others turned out to be false.

We got the mobile-only use case bang on right and ported the system to work not only with desktops, but with SMS transactions and mobile browsers. But we were too early for smartphones and native apps.
Urban debit and credit card penetration has grown significantly since then. I can imagine more than 60% of a site’s transactions are card based (with a 3 to 1 factor in favor of debit cards to credit cards).
We were on target for the “impulse buy” use case. By eliminating the card altogether from the workflow, our movie-goers booked more often than box office average in a year.
We weren’t able to onboard Students as well as we did with Knowledge Workers who valued convenience over price [1].

E-Payments Develop, 2009 to 2012.

The years that followed, were relatively quiet years for payments, overseeing the development of card gateway infrastructure and other channels such as cash on delivery, net banking. Since 2012, Flipkart and other ecommerce sites drove the development of the e-payments infrastructure. Oxigen and One97’s PayTM were two outlying payments services that continued onwards through this time.

The other key building blocks that solidified during this time are inexpensive smartphones and ubiquitous saturation of mobile internet. As we’ll see further – these will have a significant say in the development of our digital payments freeway.

Wallet Services, 2012 to 2015.

For comfort I’ve always stayed with prepaid mobile cards. Recharging them with my local kirane-walla (local Grocery store) hasn’t always been convenient and so began the search for an online solution. My earliest prepaid recharges with PayTM culminated from the frustration of trying to recharge directly with the operators website (AirTel, TATA DOCOMO, Idea). Initially, PayTM recharges were restricted to the desktop with a credit card. Subsequently, PayTM launched their Wallet service and app for iOS and Android.

The original insight for a Wallet service comes from prepaid users ‘lending’ each other minutes [2] of talk-time (or credits, if you will). Which also explains why the growth of M-PESA a mobile wallet service in Kenya was led by a telecom operator and not a bank.

It makes sense for PayTM to have mobile recharge as a captive service [4]. Even if there appears to be a contradiction between the Wallet service target demographic (prepaid customers) and the channel favored (smartphones). Students are perhaps a unique target demographic where both attributes happily co-exist. Explained another way, students are both – heavy users of smartphones as well as prepaid services.

On the flip side, at least one source directly cites unfavorable regulation as to the reason why Wallet services haven’t developed in India [2]. Fast forward to today and we’ve got a plethora of Wallet service providers here in India led by first-generation wallet services, banks and others with a desire to bank the unbanked and the underbanked [3].

The creation of a nationwide digital payments freeway has implications for e-commerce and others. For instance, students now can now be included under digital payment channels making it possible for them to be a higher margin demographic and offer a greater lifetime value. On a longer timeline, Wallet services can potentially digitize common small-value cash transactions and simply unite the larger India.

References:
[1] Product plans must pursue a target demographic with a desire to make it possible to replicate their success.

[2] Mobile Banking: Financial Services Meet the Electronic Wallet, Knowledge @ Wharton and Ernst and Young.

[3] HDFC, ICICI Bank launch digital banking services.

[4] What is the Growth Strategy of PayTM?

2014 Goes By

A viral cold has brought with it an opportunity to reflect. Going over all the events that dot the past year, I realize how challenging it can be to nurture an idea to fruition. Tangible outcomes, the ones you can feel or touch, those that are real to you and everyone else; they’re hard to create from scratch.

I’ve joined up this year’s Startup Leadership Program from Pune. Although I was greeted with initial questions on “what are *you* doing here?”, as I went through the program it’s helping me open up in many ways. An interesting discovery for me has been to learn that a significant number of startup founders had begun their own spiritual journeys. A friend called that leaning out as “downshifting”.

Through the entire year, I trialed three different ventures. One which I setup at the beginning of this year, another which I joined in Bangalore in June and the final one only recently which stuck and continues to evolve. The experience of teaming up with collaborators to solve a problem energizes me for weeks together, although I don’t explicitly seek it out, the rush is welcome.

An emergent sequence of circumstances brought me back in the saddle of running the community website – punestartups.org for startups based out of Pune. With it came the ability to contrast design habits around products for the desktop and for the mobile-first world. I’m now certain that India is going to be a mobile-only connected audience.

My son’s growing up. He’s interacting and racking up those inches. He isn’t putting on a lot of weight. He enjoys sharing his world with us and vies for our attention, especially on days when my better half and I are working from home. He’s devised infallible ways of interrupting whatever we’re doing. Crawling up to my desk on all fours, he barks a sweet puppy dog bark alerting me to his presence.

Apart from the usual routines I’ve made it a habit to run, build software and meditate whenever I get the chance. I’ve signed out off the many digital social networks and they’ve been replaced by other networks of a different kind.

I’m looking forward to the next year.