At the risk of being accosted on my way home tomorrow, and also risking it all on my first post on this blog. I have a question, Why are/do people find startup’s of no interest in India?
The question is probably not that straight forward, simply because they maybe of no interest because no one knows about them. But here’s the scenario, A new idea launches in the valley, it suddenly breaks into the blogsphere, users start to us, users in India get attracted pass the word word, and voila we all start using myspace, orkut whatever.
Now assume this happened down in Bangalore, budding entrepreneurs risk life and limb , build it and then…wait, emails, calls, tell a few friends, still who cares, who knows..no one, how will they, the people who talk, don’t want to talk, why should they?
You can ask all the journos in the world (bloggers excused :-)), but they are not interested unless they can recognize a name, or you can include the word Crores in your budget or revenue stream…why is that?
In a startup the entrepreneur takes a risk, the VC takes a risk…I guess we need a few more risk takers in the mass media. Correction, we need alot more risk takers in the mass media…just maybe someone will realize that some people want to read stories other that Reliance, Tata and Bharti.
To me the ecosystem is not just money + startups, PR is crucial. Example in point Proto been doing alot top get coverage…how many people know about it.
- Building a startup in 30 mins (well 41ish) – Iqbal Gandham - December 3, 2009
- Should Facebook and Twitter bother to make money? (Iqbal Gandham) - February 17, 2009
- How we got Nivio to Davos (WEF)…and won - February 5, 2009
May be the reason is our survival attitude which is so narrow focussed that we are less bothered about the overall progress of our entrepreneurial ecosystem.
But I am to believe that the situation is changing… few years back, no big media would have covered startup news. Now atleast we have few good blogging sites covering digital news and occasionally stuff about startup.
However we Indians are not good at PR, period. We assume if TechCrunch doesn’t covers an Indian startup, it mustn’t be great. For instance, hardly any Indian blogging site covered the following news
1.Bangalore-based Sobha Renaissance Information Technology (SRIT) has developed an algorithm that throws up search results on the basis of the context of the search, and not the keyword.
2.Featuring Zoho
3.Featuring Cyn.in
and many more such startup companies which needs attention, care and a strong community around them.
Another factor here would also be this country’s immense resistance to change and innovation. Everyone seems to be following a ‘wait-and-see’ approach, preferring tried-and-true methodologies. A startup based on a radically new idea, no matter how sound and usable it is, is bound to encounter this attitude at some level or the other.
This lag seems to hold true even for startups that invest a lot of money in PR. Basically, there is a period where people want to know who else is adopting this innovation, before trying it out themselves. And it hold espacially true for Internet-based startups, since there is such a small fraction of the country that is on the internet in the first place.
The situation is improving though. Slooowly but surely. *Sigh* This is India, after all. Where change is measured in decades rather than months.
Show me the money. You can do all the PR you like, but unless there’s a lot of Mahatma Gandhi adorned RBI promissory notes, you are not going to get hajaar interest.
Mass media does not care, and are probably fatigued of these gazillion startups that work very hard for marketshare among the 10 lakh fickle rich college students, of which their audience is perhaps a hundred. Someone do a big deal please and light the fire.
hi,
I myself work for a startup (Myzus, incubated in Kresit, IITB), i know the feeling or feedbacks one gets from the others when you are working for a small company trying to make it big.
Do anyone remember how Sify acquisition of Rajesh Jain’s Indiaworld for 500 crores triggered the Indian Dot Com boom… Some event like that in the start-up world would lead to a Start-up revolution in India.
cheers
satish
Starting with the best comment @Paras, perfect line 🙂
Airbus on one hand excites, why? on the other hand a 1Rs call, again are these not on the opposite spectrums.
1lakh bonus…where? just curious
@Satpal: valid points, but I dont think anyone talked about wipro until it became big (I maybe wrong here, have no press clippings that far back), the point is that they only get talked about when they are big.
If reliance backs Yatra, it gets mileage, how is that helping society, and if it is, why not look at the other portals.
If wipro tomorrow announced it was launching a social network however poor, I am willing to take a bet ALL papers would cover it, I dont believe its a problem of what the company does for society …more a problem of the press/PR actually stepping out of their comfort zone and doing something a little different. Again all it will take is one…just one major daily to start carrying a writeup pre day.
I discussed this last year with a PR company, they mentioned they needed 30 stories to get a column…surely there are 30 good stories in India…by good I dont mean someone who is making a billion….more someone who has a chance.
Iqbal