Mobile
I was early to the mobile revolution, but this was the one I missed as an entrepreneur – multiple times. As part of Netcore, I had started multiple services: an SMS content service, an SMS groups service, a mobile web portal, and had even tried something called phone.cc to create a dedicated mobile portal for every mobile. All failed. What I missed was the smartphone and apps revolution – both from the B2C and B2B standpoints.
I was one of the early buyers of the iPhone. I was in the US in August 2007 – a few weeks after it was launched. I went to the Apple store in New York and bought one. I had a colleague at work do a jailbreak so I could use it in India. I should have seen the power and potential of apps, but for some reason, I did not focus on the consumer side. I stuck to the enterprise SMS services that Netcore had launched, perhaps bitten by the repeated failures of the MyToday variants in the previous few years.
A decade or so later, I missed the app engagement and analytics layer in the marketing automation platform Netcore was building. While I had correctly identified the emergence of martech, the focus was more on journeys and the web platform. The exponential growth of apps energised by the launch of cheap data from Jio was a big miss in Netcore’s journey. We did catch up in terms of features over the next few years, but as they say “the early bird catches the worm” and we were late.
As I look back, the mobile revolution was what I missed in India. It was going slowly until Jio revolutionised mobile data with its aggressive pricing. In the early days, could I have focused on global markets like I did with IndiaWorld? Perhaps. Maybe, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money in the global mobile apps game where I thought we would not have a significant advantage working out of India. But I underestimated the power and ubiquity of the smartphone. During those years, I was also trying to think of ideas to transform India with digital technology. While this later came to fruition with Niti Digital and my work in the 2011-14 political campaign, I had by then moved too far away from technology to get an intuitive sense of the new opportunities being created in the mobile and smartphone era. I do sometimes wonder: what if I had recognised the potential of apps and smartphones? I was an early adopter and I knew something transformative had taken place with the launch of the iPhone. What should I have done as an entrepreneur? All I can say after all these years is: it was a road not taken, and that did make a difference.
