Just saw this article from Avnish, Matrix Partners. Avnish, I know you are around somewhere on venturewoods, so please do participate in this friendly discussion!
A followup would be unnecessary if I agreed with this statement. However, I must say that I myself do believe that the “kids hanging out” variety of social networks are premature in India. These businesses are essentially media businesses, and reach and engagement levels are the key metrics. Besides the internet penetration being low in the country, kids are not spending hours at end on the internet — the engagement levels simply arent there as yet. The only hope for these is a strong and simple mobile addon.
And now for the exciting part — some social networks will fly in India, IMHO. I believe these will be driven by specific tangible benefits, rather than being “hangouts”. I will afford a couple of examples. The first one is referral based recruitments. The Indian e-recruitment technology is 10 years old (no, there are no company wars here! I mean this across the board.) Global sites like linkedin, simplyhired, jobster and so on have demonstrated how social networking can be tied into recruiting very effectively. The Indian model is going to be different from these, and I believe there is a significant market there.
The second example that I would afford is networks for buying services (I am yet to see a good model around product ecommerce) — services are intangible, and often very fragmented. Think of hiring a printer for printing visiting cards. These selections are essentially social in nature, and I believe translating them to the web will be productive.
I am sure there are a lot more examples — social internet is waiting to be discovered in India. And like any other business, the customer is a good place to start from.
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The problem with anything which is ‘Social Networking’ or anything ‘Web 2.0’ is that every discussion is about the future and potential benefits. These days (specifically starting end 2006) In the bay area, you are in a soup if you are labelled as one with a ‘Web 2.0’ idea. I don’t know what your experience has been, but a lot people I know have been fairly dejected after approaching Tier 1 and Tier 2 VCs with such ideas. The ideas are listened to, and often appreciated, but the output is ‘you are putting too much wood behind the arrow’ (I quote them). ‘The idea is great, but why don’t you spend time, get subscribers and then come back for funding?’, which is not the same response you hear for non Web 2.0 ideas. Besides a small minority of Web 2.0 companies, almost everyone else has a revenue model of ‘eyeballs to subscribers to revenue’ which is future speak. If the primary exit strategy is to get eyeballs and hope to get bought out, it does not serve as a general plan for a company.
Avnish is right when he says we culturally are not a land of “loners” with a compelling need to network.
But the flip side is that since we live in crowded cities, our need for privacy with exclusive communities to a significant extent can be met thro SN.
With a bit of ingenuity, we can even up-sell customized packages woven around themes like trekking, leisure, spirituality, social welfare, pilgrimages if the community has totted up sizeable numbers in each of those.
It remains a puzzle how he liked Seventymm though
I only have one thing to say:
India has only 3M weekly users beyond email
what market?
@Nilesh, True to an extent. But we do go (as students/alumnis) to a batchmates.com instead of a facebook. i.e. not always possible to generalize
and say ‘who use any indian sites if there is a good(great?) US site’. Granted for any product to be successful it got to hv a ‘pull’ factor but just bcoz there is Micorosft Off. that does not mean I should not create a Google Office.
Guess what i ‘m essentially saying is hey, its a blue ocean out there.
I think Avnish has a valid point. Why would I go to apnatube.com when Youtube is there? Who will sign up for RediffMail when GMail is here? The product/service will strongly need a “pull” factor.