App
The Email+WhatsApp combo is a first step to gaining attention and changing minds. A daily selection of news, videos, charts, quotes and explainers can provide an alternative narrative on what’s happening. It can provide a freedom-centric view of the world, rather than the narrative dictated by the government of the day. But the content factory and the pipe are only the start. Action needs to come next.
Among the actions that will be needed to bring United Voters of India and Sabhas to life as the two pillars to winning elections and forming a Lok Sabha of Independents will be to build membership and train candidates across India. It will be almost impossible for any entity to create a national organisation like those of the main political parties in India who have built these over decades. Instead, Nayi Disha needs to borrow from the digital marketplaces like Flipkart, Amazon, Ola, Uber, Zomato, Swiggy, and their likes. They have built two-sided platforms to connect supply and demand. Nayi Disha’s platform – in the form of an app/website – has to do the same by connecting members (non-aligned and non-voters) with potential candidates. Primaries (akin to the bidding system employed by some marketplaces) will help choose the winner without a top-down selection mechanism. This becomes a genuine people’s platform, rather than a political party controlled by one or two people at the very top.
The Nayi Disha app can learn a lot from successful gaming apps. The best ones ensure they become utilities in people’s lives – drawing them back, rewarding them, creating a sense of accomplishment and fulfilment, and also creating clans and tribes by connecting them with others. I have watched my son play Clash of Clans a few minutes every day for many years. I too have now learnt the tricks. It is an amazingly well crafted multi-player game with plenty of hooks to bring the users back again and again.
Buck-Fifty MBA has this on Clash of Clans: “Once they’ve activated users through the immersive tutorial, Clash uses more than a few well designed habit loops to bring people back. In Hooked, Nir Eyal describes these habit loops as (1) trigger, (2) action, (3) reward, (4) investment. The trigger gets a user’s attention with something external (a notification) or internal (an in-product prompt). The action is immediate (clicking the notification or following the in-product prompt). The reward should be variable (attacking another player in Clash isn’t guaranteed to result in a win). And the investment is an action with no immediate reward (like training more troops or building a better town hall). Clash relies heavily on notifications to bring users back initially (“your building is finished” or “your troops are trained”), but as you become more engaged the trigger becomes more intrinsic. Supplies (gold and elixir) must be “harvested” to central storage or else the harvesting machines will overflow and stop collecting more. Other players can only attack when you’re offline, so if you’re saving up supplies for a large purchase you’ll want to log in often to keep other players at bay.”
The app can borrow ideas from successful games to bring its members back daily by giving them an interface which feels like fun. Make Nayi Disha a reality game of power, freedom and prosperity!
