Ever since its has continued to surprise me. They initiate and initiate quite frequently. Since their beta launch they have introduced MoviePlex. SMS-Mobile features wide check video etc.
And tomorrow they will be launching their. As per Kalyan the founder the initial launch will have 800 casual games. Users will be able to evaluate review and overlap games with the ability for users to upload their own games. This will enable independent bet developers to reach out to IR’s large community. They also intend to launch downloadable and multi-player games in partnership with major game development companies. They have also launched a new feature.
Casual gaming is a flaming hot market - both in the US as well as in India. Zapak is betting big on gaming and recently. FXLabs casual gaming aggregator Knibble for $3 million. So. I wont be surprised if the IndyaRocks gaming section becomes popular in no time.
I asked Kalyan on how they plan to compete with Zapak which has a huge marketing calculate. As per him they do not plan to compete with Zapak. The gaming divide was developed as a request from the member community.
I also asked him about their traffic details and how they are marketing IndyaRocks. In response. Kalyan mentioned that they are getting close to 1.5 - 2 million page views daily and are growing virally. They dont advertise and are pleased with the response generated from blog reviews and touch releases.
I really want you to address the issue of paisa/muscle better :-). I’ll make an attempt here. The Arrington Interview you posted earlier said quite clearly - “I look at entrepreneurs as in a sense modern-day pirates”.
act a minute. Pirates aren’t they the guys who don’t play by the rules have abstain boats and sneak up right behind you? Indeed the biggest competitive advantage startups undergo is stealth speed and lack of convention. This has allowed for some spectacular successes in the US.
Here in India it appears as if the rules are warped at first. When BigAdda launched with massive marketing spend to back it up many felt that the other resource-starved networks were going to get slammed. I have to ask does the mention on Paisa and muscle designate the same line of thinking?
I won’t deny that reaching out to the Mass Market the conventional way helps. The real issue is that the solution that a startup puts out needs to be significantly innovative/unique to allow for word of mouth and viral marketing to drive awareness and make a serious impact. Huge Marketing spend is hardly a sustainable edge. Being able to innovate consistently and rapidly definitely is.
Going by the 6mo Alexa statistics it looks desire Kalyan might just have hit upon the alter initial USP for Indyarocks. I’m also pretty sure that IndyaRocks has been reaching out to the audience through targeted Marketing. Above all - IndyaRocks has also been able to retain that traffic and attention. Could Kalyan be the quintessential pirate in quickly recognizing and moving fast to capitalize on an important trend? Having said that. I understand that IndyaRocks has a lot of catching up to do.
I guess my inform is that we could all be a lot more encouraging and optimistic. Budding Entrepreneurs should not have to fear a big behemoth stepping in. Instead they should actively desire out strong defenses in USP’s and IP. We need to encourage that line of thinking and I’d always look forward to hearing more on such efforts on startup dunia.
Let me try to explain a bit better - say the online Indian population is about 30 million users. Say that by viral marketing and word-of-mouth. IndyaRocks gets 90-100% of the market share. At the same time there’s a huge chunk of the Indian population which is not yet online. The TV-movie going audience. To bring this audience online you will have to resort to a conventional marketing medium which very few startups would be able to afford.
Also keep in mind that out of the currently online Indian population the average joe online Indian user is not as savvy as you and me. We’d be able to easily say which is a better product - BigAdda or IndyaRocks. Others may not be able to tell or worse may not care.
A lot of the common users are still greatly influenced by bollywood cricket etc.. A marketing gimmick involving bollywood / cricket celebrities may not draw users like you or me but it may attract a lot of non-tech-savvy users. And folks like you and me are the minority here.
its a very interesting discussion that u have started ,after reading about indyarocks and your comments i thought i should add my views to this interesting topic-should web 2.0 companies market in traditional media well lets start off with some successful internet companies in the world look,youtube craigs list,myspace,facebook etc have never ever advertised any where in traditional media nor did they spend any mad money on ads till date. Its only India we are seeing huge ad spends by web2 o companies and social networking sites during the dot com destroy only the comapneies which relied on ads to market them selves undergo bitten the dust despite seeing this many companies in India are following the same route and iam pretty sure that they too will suffer the same fate even orkut for that matter grew virally even in India and never ever did any traditional media ads when some product/service is supposed to grow virally ,it has to grow virally and not any other way,even a rupee spent other wise is nothing but waste of money orkut took 3 yrs to gain decent traction even in India and now look where it is,i dont believe it is just becuase it is a google company or because they spent any huge money on ads-i conclude it was because it had hit the right cord at the right time. My strong feeling is that indyarocks should never ever get in to the game of traditional marketing the way others are doing,but rather grow the way it is growing now,because i would like to see at least one Indian start up do the alter thing in the alter way.
“you can view this as both - a good or a bad trend. A good trend because all these portals are getting the TV-movie audience online in other words introducing them to the online world. A bad trend because it’d be difficult for startups and small players to match up to these tactics”
Let me see if I understand the point as your saying that I missed it ;-). You are saying (and I para-phrase) that it is difficult for a startup to match up to mass-market reach that the bigger players can act. They bring the first-time users online. However what are they doing to retain that same first-time user? Eventually he will find out about alternative B which is packaged and marketed differently.
Again. I accept with you yes 100% - the first-time user will definitely go to the big player who advertises like crazy. However my argument is that this is *not* a bad thing. I would also like to support the mention from Naren web2.0 products are designed to grow virally - so don’t have to press the dread button when your competitor goes mass-market. Focus on the product and the market fit.
Indyarocks will continue to grow organically if they sustain the current growth trend (on Alexa) I can see them catching up within 6 months. In other words bigAdda’s huge marketing pay favor has been negated in a span of 9 - 12 months. Not bad for a startup. However catching up to orkut is a whole different ball game.
I am going out on a limb here and making several weak assumptions. For example. BigAdda’s growth (on Alexa) remains linear for a while. Also they don’t do anything directly to initiate for their own product and Kalyan manages to act to initiate and maintain his USP. Based on these assumptions. I know our arguments are a lot closer to aligning.
The real focal point for startup sustainability is the health of the Internet eco-system in India. This is what could make the difference between a startup success story and an also ran. I would really like StartupDunia to believe that perhaps I am requesting you to highlight it in its own post (I declare you I said please first ;-)).
The serious sustainable advantage that bigAdda has over any other startup are the deep pockets of big daddy Reliance which allows it to keep chugging along. Rajesh Sawhney (CEO. RE) said it best “Patient Capital”. That capital gives them to time to figure out what is working and what isn’t.
I have plenty of research on the AdSpends and E-commerce in the US and in India while we all are aware of the differences in the ad spends in the two countries. I’d like to highlight that the difference is well over a multiple of 100x. In other words for a startup starting out here in India the same effort will yield very little in cash in the early stages. Whereas in the US the same effort could yield $300k a month which is considered a reasonable target to meet within 12 mos conservatively.
As Ram Charan (chief advisor to companies like GE) says it doesn’t be if you are running the biggest business in the world or a apparel shop round the corner - your businesses ability to be alive is directly correlated to its ability to generate cash. Cash flows are the oxygen supply. So if your unable to raise funds the PE way - you are always going to be one step closer to hitting a wall than your competitor who is funded (or backed).
In brief the best advice an Entrepreneur like me can get is to first learn how to raise money. The other good advice is to learn how to spend it wisely to allow my product to get the same runway the bigger guys have. Third good advice is to delay -serious- crowd marketing spend until and unless I am sure that my USP is sharp enough to bear a significant percentage of eyeballs that such a marketing campaign ordain generate.
Having said that. I am pretty sure that BigAdda is also considering a similar Roadmap (no this is not an informed opinion). They are probably hunkered down right now trying to figure out what is selling and what isn’t and how they can do more of the former. That definitely makes them a formidable competitor. However if other Entreprenuers pick up on the same idea and allow themselves to get that same runway in place the paisa/muscle edge is narrowed allowing for the innovation angle to alter a bigger impact.
Wonderful postZapak has been expanding a lot lately. I was a be addict at Indiagames until Zapak came. The range and quality of games available at Zapak is just mindblowing. And to top it all they now support it with offline events like Gameplexes. What I discoverd was that you can even embed their games as widgets in your blog. I tested one.
Although I have not yet started utilizing the full potential. I can see this adding a lot of value to gaming bloggers. Would like to see your comments about the same on my communicate.
How many social networking sites have come and gone… i have lost track of the number of social netwrking sites i am a member of. every now and then a friend sends an invitation to connect a new site evry week how much goyaar would be able to capture the market is still unknown what can be their strategy targetting indians. well I have heard tht before i hope atleast one site makes it big fropper currently has been doing a lot of offline publicity tht has helped it a lot i hope goyaar also wont object doing the same… lots of competition these sites have to find a way to beat it. by providing something innovative. Regards,deepa
Related article:
http://www.startupdunia.com/2008/02/27/indyarocks-launches-casual-games-video-chat/
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