In the past 3 months I have traveled a lot and is planning to travel more, on 7th February, I will be at entrepreneurship summit which will be held at IIT Bombay, now for such travels, I normally look at all the top 4-5 travel sites to find the cheapest hotels and flights, though after using them couple of times, let me assure you, there is no price difference between any, so here is my tip to other guys to save some money and Time, stick to one OTA site and they will help you to get more concessions in long run as old customer.
Now to the Post Topic – why on the web, Design and usability matters specially when you are in competitive field, Online Travel Agents and Hotel booking is a low margin, cut throat businesses with way too many players playing volume game trying to lure the same set of customers chasing limited amount of money, this is where I love ixigo, it is a no frill site with no ads, very clean design, no images and offers what the users wants. All other sites pushes something else too or shows ads or are not user friendly and ixigo certainly stands way apart from them.
I am of course no way associated with ixigo, just a regular user of it who feels others travel sites should work on usability and design of their sites to make them more responsive and interactive to retain the customer.
The biggest problem any Indian startup targeting online space facing is the medium being “Too Spread Too Thin”
Indian Online Space is way too Spread and is way too thin, making each startup to push extra hard to find, convince, acquire and retain customer meaning the startup to put more resources hence higher burn ratio something which I am seeing more and more often.
As a startup, you can not do anything to change the market other then evolving and remolding yourself to be what the market yourself to be and the great thing about Indian market is, the rewards are huge for the players who have followed what the market want them to be.
For me, 2009 started on really bad note, for some reason I wasn’t feeling well mentally, was down and out, was visiting doctors regularly for first month but yesterday when I sat and looked at the whole year, it was probably the best year of my life. in terms of learning, growth and financially.
The more I think about life, the more I feels, it is all about solving problems and cracking codes, once you are able to solve it, you get a reward. Now some people are way too quick in solving them, going higher and higher in life in terms of success where as some just sit and stuck in the the very basic problems of life.
Anyway so today on 1st of jan 2010, I have sat some goals (I am not a great believer in making goals public so won’t do it) for the year even though I know that other then financial goals, I won’t be achieving most of them as more likely I will be getting/achieving something unknown (yearly goals are flawed, you should always set weekly goals), I think this is what keeps me going though, the thrill, the excitement of something unknown.
In 2009, My primary focus was on money but now I want to focus on the overall growth of my assets and networking. I also want to grow with others, means, I want to build partnership where I can help others to achieve their dreams and goals with my experience and knowledge. And ofcourse, I do want a better health!
Best Wishes to everyone, Have a Great year and try to enjoy each and every moment of life.
I have to go a long way but I have my share of success and failures and learnings and one thing which I leanred the hard way is, you need to kill it before it gets too late.
It happens with way too many of us when we are putting all we have into something which we believe in that we blindly feels it is the next big thing even though it is not, we don’t care about what people says and pumps more money and time and try to create non existing market and then we realize that OK, it is indeed too late and your idea, product or service is not going anywhere.
I am obviously way to new in this field to suggest people when to quit and when not to, though if asked, I will always suggest people to hang in there as much as you can since the more you hang in there, the more chances you have to succeed, ofcourse this do not apply if your expenses are increasing way too rapidly than your growth, something which happens with lot of non web startups.
Personally I feels, you should complete the cycle and only then call it quit, so launch the product, see how market reacts, if you feels it hasn’t done well, make some changes, then see how market reacts, see everything from finances point of view (you shouldn’t even start if things don’t look good from finance point of view) and only then kill the product.
Just read a news headline on digg that Apple is looking to launch its “kindle” killer and people were already rooting for it even though most of the people are very much satisfied with that $400 kindles (it delivers what it promise so no reason for people to complain). This “rooting for” is something which always made me wonders how strong can be this coolness factor.
For example, Google and Apple are cool, WalMart, Verizon and AT&T are not. It is not that difficult to tell why some companies are cool and why some are not. In case of apple, they make trendy, exclusive and great (though overpriced) products, people don’t mind paying more money as it make them look hip and cool. On the other hand, companies offering day to day products which are so mainstream that the people don’t even care about the company like walmart and verizon can never have the cool image, and I don’t think their marketing team is even trying to make them look cool (which is surprising though I am sure there must be reason behind it)
Now I strongly feels, if you are a startup or small company looking to offer B2C service or product, you want to be cool, because there is nothing better then having a fanbase spreading information about your product and service for free and this loyal fanbase will stick with you in good and bad times as long as the feeling of being special is reciprocated. Offering the product/service for free and helping people without expecting anything in return are two easy ways to be cool.
PS – pic unrelated but still you can check the story behind professor badass here
Here is a question to anyone who is reading this post, if you have Rs 50,000, where will you invest it to get the highest ROI ?
1. Fixed Deposit – Banks are giving 6.5% yearly fixed deposit interest Rate so that is not exciting, infact if we consider inflation rates you may lose money in long run.
2. Buy Gold – Gold has doubled up (its around Rs 18k per 10 gms) since last year but than I don’t think it will go very high, may be 25k at max so you already missed the opportunity. Also gold prices sometimes just stuck for years at same rate, so again not ideal investment.
3. Mutual Funds and stocks – You can certainly get good returns specially from stocks if you do it full time though personally I feels daily trading is a flawed business model and it doesn’t excite me personally, but considering you just have Rs 50k which you may break it into multiple parts and make diversified investment, you won’t be getting high return unless you are willing to make very high risk investment, sort of double or nothing, something which I will never do since one day (most likely today), you will lose everything.
4. ULIP, SIP and Insurance – well they are not bad option though you won’t get much return from them unless you are willing to invest for 5 years minimum.
So where can you invest your Rs 50,000 to get the highest return ?
Here is my answer, and amazingly I was able to realize this back in college days (where my mind was only working at 30% efficiency), if you have Rs 50,000 you want to invest it onto yourself. Don’t buy a bike, Don’t buy costly watches or shoes, Don’t to go to costly multiplexes watching bollywood trash and eating at overprices restaurents, Don’t put the money in banks or invest in Mutual funds or stocks, Spend the Money on yourself learning new things, getting more knowledge and make yourself better.
You will be amazed with the kind of ROI you will get and this Return over Investment will be life long. In November, I ordered ebooks of Rs 9000, I had made a list and I always wanted to buy those books so I did, Rs 9000 is not a big deal for me now, but even in college days, I would had done the same, even if I had to borrow some money from someone (something which I always hated and will never do it again in my life)
Its not only about books, go and attend seminars in your areas of interests and don’t hesitate to pay even if it costs money, there are tons of great audio/video material available on the web, even if it is paid, buy it. many business schools and similar colleges offer shot duration (few weeks) programs, join them.
You can always invest 50k later, say after 3 months in stocks, Mutual funds, fixed deposit or to buy gold and it will make little difference in return so why do it now, when you can put your money on yourself to get much higher returns and that too, life long.
So there were lot of complaints about Prometric and how they failed to conduct the exams properly and how many students faced problems like -
1. Systems not working and Virus attacks (seriously, virus attack?)
2. Questions and pattern getting repeated giving unfair advantage to others, specially in colleges where students can discuss the papers.
3. some people getting extra time to solve the problems due to reboots of systems.
4. Students still haven’t got any rescheduled dates and times.
Why CAT 2009 Should be scrapped
I feels CAT 2009 should be scrapped and this has nothing to do with me being sympathetic to the students (though I always be as I always felt in India, atleast 3 deserving candidates fight for 1 seat in almost all exams) but due to the fact that a mistake was made. There is nothing wrong in admitting that things went wrong which can happen with anyone and anywhere. Relying fully on computer hardware and probably not doing due diligence was a mistake from IIMs but may be due to ego problems and due to prestige on stake, they are taking time to admit it and ofcourse there is no going back once you admit that things went wrong.
Now IIMs are saying that very few people (say 500, I don’t know the exact numbers) are affected by these problems out of 2 lakh but then this is not a small number, not to mention the other problems of questions getting repeated and students discussing during exam or few getting more time than others.
I don’t think people can share the answers in quick discussion (they probably must have discussed “what the hell is going on”) and I don’t think some 70 percentile guy will score 99 percentile because he got few more minutes, and I also feels there is more smoke and noise than what actually is but still there has been problem and IIM need to make sure they correct it, as CAT is about Students, not about IIMs, also I don’t think anyone specially IIM wants to hear “2009 CAT exam was a joke” for the next 10 years.
You can not correct a mistake by just ignoring it (something which Indians has mastered) as that is another mistake. Failures always has a price, and someone has to pay it, but lets not make students pay for it specially if the mistake is from IIM and Prometrics Side.
If students feels they are cheated, they should go to court, and I am glad few are already doing this (as read from a CAT forum)
Today I exchanged some emails with one of India’s leading ad network regarding possible advertising partnership and I came to know that they are offering $0.20 to $0.60 CPM rates for Indian Traffic, something which I felt is very low though I am not surprised as they were keeping a huge 40% cut for themselves and that most of the sites which are with non google ad networks in India have inferior quality of inventory.
Now this made me think, how can we make this whole scenario of adnetworks paying peanuts to advertisers more win-win-win for advertisers, ad networks and publishers and the most obvious thing that can be done is to start thinking about the “user” and how to get them more involved by having better display ads specially on Indian web space where I see some very dull ads of advertisers which are spending loads of money.
Google (and I am sure others too) do have quality score where they measure how successful an ad is in terms of attracting users but I think ad network can do better than this, rather then advertisers trying to make their ads perfect, they can get involve in helping advertisers to build best interactive ads which can result higher CTR which will result in higher earnings for both ad network and publisher
Hi, I am Pushkar Gaikwad, Founder of 6to10 Media and this is my personal blog and online journal. If you know me or you think I can help you in some way then feel free to contact me at pushkar.gaikwad at gmail dot com.
