The Indian Startups’ Nightmare: Where are the Early Adopters?

by Vijay Anand

So I’ve been through this roller coaster of a ride so far in these past four years working with Startups here in India. There seem to be seasons of issues that seem to “plague” an entrepreneur from starting off. First it was the funding, then it was the lack of mentors. Lately it has shifted to the struggles everyone is going through to hire people. But if you really think about it, none of these issues are unique to India alone. Everyone in Europe, and Asia are going through the same issue.

In the midst of all these dubious claims and silly excuses, I think there are issues that are unique to India and to the emerging market and we seriously need to think about it in terms of how we are going to tackle them. I think an Indian startup’s nightmare is not with funding, mentors or with talent. Its with the Early Adopters. Or the lack of them.

The theme of the sessions that we are planning for the upcoming edition of Proto.in are all surrounded around the topic of Selling. I strongly believe that we’ve lost focus on actually making money and have decided to instead focus on the wallet of the investors that even the dead rat in our closet isn’t smelling anymore. Startups, or any company for that matter, need to sell. Sell their products or services and make money. If they don’t then we do have a problem – web2.0 or not.

But how does a startup go about doing all that? Do we understand as to what ‘cost of sales’ means? Do we know what is the differentiation between sales and marketing? Do we have any idea as to what is the acceptable marketing budget that a startup can afford to allocate? Do we know the best means to engage our early adopters? Ah, the last one is the killer and let me focus on that for the moment.

Whether you are a company who is building something for the web, the telecom sector, robotics, anything related to consumer hardware, you have a slight issue of gaining traction here in India. The mammoth of the corporates are essentially using their financial muscle to entirely skip the part where “the early adopters turn into influencers and create traction” and are heading directly to take up that responsibility on themselves. But can startups afford to do that? Can a startup even dare ask an investor for that sort of money to match up with the marketing power of the reliance and the likes? I hope not. In a sensible world, a startup cant.

The early adopters are always that 1% of the population. So in a country of a billion people, there are 10 million early adopters running around. Where are they? How do we get in touch with them? Is there a common access point where they all gather around? Is it the web? Is it the mobile platform? Is it television? One really doesn’t know.

What differentiates the Silicon valley from the rest of the world is not the money, the experience, the risk-appetite, the greed for quick bucks, the talent or any of whatever else you might say. or it might. But What really sets the Silicon Valley, and the US for that matter, apart is the density in which you find early adopters and how thanks to the revolution of the personal computers, the software industry, the two generations of internet applications, and the plethora of communication channels available, that it is a possibility to reach them.

So does focusing on the US instead of India solve the problem? Actually not. Most of the services and products that are built in India are also built for Indian customers (which also applies to all of the emerging markets). As such we need a emerging market which can adopt this technology/product early on and provide the relevant feedbacks which will go into the building up of that technology.

I cannot stress this enough, but if India needs to get an edge in innovation, it HAS to build this network of early adopters. We have already in someway made that possible in the pharmaceutical industry, also since health is personal and the network of closely linked doctors and hospitals make it relatively simpler. We are gonna have to wreck our brains to bring together a similar arrangement for the technology community. I know that the community of barcamps, MoMos, etc do have a relevant role in this scheme of things, but this is a topic that sure needs some thought.

Lets see, if in two months I can wrap my head around this, I might even talk about what I think needs to be done at Proto.in, and even set a couple of things in motion to make that happen.

Related Articles:
Wikipedia: Early Adopter
Technology Adoption Curve