SmartCrowds Blog

For the last 2-3 months, BrandAdda  has been in lights-on mode. The site has been up, but there is no action on it behind the scenes. Due to lack of success on the business front, we have decided to shut it down.

At this unfortunate juncture, a saying comes to mind:
It is better to have loved and lost than to have not loved at all

We loved building BrandAdda, enjoyed pursuing our dream, and learnt a lot from the experience. We do wish the outcome was different, but not all was lost.

There were many challenges we faced in building the business, and a few we faced building the product.

• Working without a founding partner was extremely hard
• Hiring quality talent was super tough (see previous post)
• Brands have not yet appreciated social media, specially in India. It was a hard sell. It was hard enough explaining the concept to them, forget selling a service. They need to first warm up to it, and then organize themselves appropriately to take advantage of it. That will take longer than we had hoped for
• The budget for internet marketing is a tiny fraction of the overall marketing budget
• BrandAdda wasn’t giving consumers something compelling or solving a pain point, so consumer adoption was poor. We were counting on Brands to be able to offer something of value to consumers, but with no traction from Brands, this never materialized
• There was no one from the Marketing industry in the team. We were outsiders to the industry, trying to reach Brands through a well-established layer of Agencies around them. That was hard. The soft business climate made matters worse.

So what were the key lessons in it for us?. To be honest, easily the most important lesson was that SUFFICIENT VALIDATION OF A PRODUCT/SERVICE WITH THE PAYING  CUSTOMERS IS ABSOLUTELY VITAL. We did not do much here. We should never have moved forward without being convinced that we did plenty of validation. A lot of the challenges we faced later would have surely surfaced earlier. Shorter distance. Less pain. More time to try other ideas.

Some of our other learnings include:

• Start with a partner
• Do have an expert from the business domain in the team, atleast in the role of an advisor
• VC Funding has its pros & cons. But an overriding pro in India is that it eases hiring greatly. By and large, we found people to be risk-averse, and putting more  emphasis on cash compensation than on equity
• There are some great tools in the startup ecosystem in India, such as pluggd.in,  WATBlog, TiE, HeadStart, Proto, etc. Make good use of them. Participate.

As we sign-off, we wish the current and new crop of entrepreneurs all the very
best in turning their dreams to reality.

We couldn’t agree more with Mr Vaidyanathan’s views in this article published by Economic Times. Our experience talking to some brands can be summarized as follows. They agree that online engagement is important and highly impactful, but they are reluctant to invest the time, are happy with the status quo, and are comfortable thinking that this can be postponed to some time in the future.. Online engagement is held to a far higher “ROI” standard compared to advertising even if its cost is a small fraction of the traditional advertising budget.

With the support and impetus given by folks such as Mr Vaidyanathan, the powerful force of Engagement Marketing will surely come to be part of the mainstream sooner rather than later. The concluding part of the article carries the gist:

“An even better approach would be to use the force to work for you….

Finally, user generated content is not just more information, it’s more credible. We can discuss the trappings, but can’t hide from the wisdom of the collective. Better to harness it. “

We are happy to report the latest addition to the SmartCrowds team - Arun Prabhakar.

Arun completed his graduation this year at MEC, Cochin.  He likes to tinker with code and websites. He was part of the design & editing team for his campus website, and was also the organizer for the hack competition during the college techfest this year. He has won prizes, too many to list, at various Coding Contests - most notably a First prize during Shastra ‘08 at IIT Madras. He blogs regularly at http://digitalpbk.blogspot.com/ (warning: very geeky stuff).

Welcome aboard Arun!.

We are mighty thrilled to report that Mukund Mohan of BuzzGain has joined our Advisory Board. You just have to meet him for a few minutes to realize his positive, dynamic, can-do aura, and his penchant for ideas. Besides, he brings in a wealth of Marketing experience that is crucial for SmartCrowds to forge ahead and thrive.

Welcome Mukund!!

A major milestone in our company’s history was just crossed!. Sumita Chakrabarty joined us to head Marketing & Business Development. She brings with her a valuable educational background and work experience in Canada & India.

She has a number of degrees - including English & American Literature, Writing for Film & Television, and Marketing & Communications, from Utkal University (India), Vancouver Film School (Canada), and York University (Canada) respectively.

Her work experience includes stints at Mudra, O&M, McCann, Euro RSCG, Spencer Francey Peters (Canada), CIBC (canada)  etc, in a variety of roles including Copyrighting, Creative, Communication & Business Strategy. Just the right experience that can help propel our business forward!!.

More from her as she continues to blog here…. (she’s started already!).

We’re extremely excited to have her on board.

In Goafest was a fantastic opportunity for us to take our message to the who’s who of the Advertising world. April 3 & 4 were extremely well spent days in the critical phase of our company, not because it was on a pristine beach in Cavellosim with beer, water sports, dancing, and good food abounding. Almost everyone that powers the Indian Ad industry forward was there!. The knowledge & learning seminars featured five talks from key global players - Sir John Hegarty, Jean Marie Dru, Neeraj Nayar, Sean Finnigan, and Dan Wieden.

We brought along a 1-page brochure which distilled our key message to Brands, Agencies & Media Houses, and made our 30-second elevator pitch easier. One side of the page had a picture and key messages, and the other side some corroborating quotes from a paper produced by the IBM Institute for Business Value (Thanks to Manu for forwarding it). You can take a look at the front and the back of the 1-pager.  The essence of the message was “Don’t just talk. Listen”. And boy, is it gratifying to see that the #1 of the “Five new rules of Marketing” according to Simon Clift, Unilever’s CMO, is “Listening to consumers is more important than talking at them“.  See the whole article.

Its terrific to see such strong validation among influencers in the industry.  The theme of “engaging” with consumers also ran through all the talks at Goafest, particularly the ones by Neeraj Nayar and Sean Finnigan.

We hope all of this helps us bolster our case that we need to make to Marketing professionals who are faced with challenging and turbulent times.

The beta version we released on Nov 21 last year got lots of feedback. We evolved the product quite a bit over the last few months and have shipped it for the world to see. Here’s a summary of the changes in the new release of BrandAdda (a bit of a repeat from a previous post):

• Simplification part 1: There are too many content publishing modules for Consumers on the current site. We brought it down to just a few that users on community sites are very familiar with: Forums, Reviews, Idea Center, Photos/Videos.
• Simplification part 2: The demarcation between what content Brands can publish and what Consumers can was quite confusing to a visitor. We’ve marked them out clearly. The content that Brands can publish: Ads, Polls, Promotions, and Blog.
• Simplification part 3: Five tabs on a Product/Brand page are now reduced to two (we call them Consumer Podium & Company Podium for now)
• Login/Registration: We’ve made it nearly effortless to register/sign-in. We support a variety of major id providers (Google, Facebook, Yahoo among them).
• Social: We’ve provided a simple way for users to message each other, using a public or private channel (similar to orkut scrapping, but simpler). We’ve added support for a rich user profile. We’ve added the ability to see Facebook friends that are on BrandAdda. We’ve added a way to invite friends using many different providers, and using the latest secure standard (oAuth) where supported.
• Friend invitations: We’ve made it easy to invite friends in Yahoo/Gmail/MSN address books or friends on facebook
• Buzz: Added News.
• Discovery: Added a “Related Products/Brands” view
• Taking the Tools to existing Communities: Widgets, and Social Network apps are under development.
• Other user experience improvements: E.g. An action-oriented menu bar, and an action oriented dashboard on every brand content page, Visual indicators to aid quick cognition of content, etc

Here’s a fun & informative post by our very own Anirudh about the launch: its here, here and here.

Tekarma is in private beta. This invite link from ReadWriteWeb article might let you in. Tekarma, atleast on the outside, is very similar to BrandAdda. We’re glad to see some validation. The most interesting part is that Pierre Omidyar (founder of EBay) is an investor and so is EBay Inc. Two thumbs up!!.

I had the good fortune of meeting with some senior folks at one of the biggest ad agencies in India.  It was an enthralling 2+ hours. The world of Advertising & Marketing is more complex and fascinating than one might imagine. A great many of the human pursuits - Arts,  Mathematics, Psychology, Philosophy, Communication - blend together to create the output in this industry.

Learnt many insights about the industry, specifically with regard to the adoption of technology and the new medium - the web. The most important and heartening takeaway was that there is indeed hope for products like BrandAdda to add value.

Would love to make it to GoaFest 2009 - the annual advertising awards festival - to pitch our vision and learn about ways to add value to this industry.

Met an ex-coworker (founder of ReviewBag) at a TiE event last night and got reminded that I haven’t posted here for quite a while :). A lot has been going on and it would be good to post it here and hopefully get some feedback.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been working on development for the first public release of BrandAdda. After the beta launch, we didn’t spend a penny on Marketing, because we weren’t sure the product was ready yet. Thanks to the coverage on Pluggd.in, WATBlog, AlooTechie and a few others, we got some traffic that was instrumental in getting some feedback about the site. They came, we listened, we developed…

Our value proposition to Consumers remains the same: self-expression around products & brands. Our value proposition to Brands remains the same: interactive & high-engagement marketing. However, our focus and positioning has gone through much evolution.

The site in development has evolved quite a bit from the public site. We are not only building a site where users can come to form & join communities, we are also working on taking our tools to wherever communities are already formed. Conceptually, our solution does not run in a data-center. The solution’s platform is the entire web.

At a high level, here are the key changes we are working on:

• Simplification part 1: There are too many content publishing modules for Consumers on the current site. We brought it down to just a few that users on community sites are very familiar with: Forums, Reviews, Idea Center, Photos/Videos.
• Simplification part 2: The demarcation between what content Brands can publish and what Consumers can was quite confusing to a visitor. We’ve marked them out clearly. The content that Brands can publish: Ads, Polls, Promotions, and Blog.
• Simplification part 3: Five tabs on a Product/Brand page are now reduced to two (we call them Consumer Podium & Company Podium for now)
• Login/Registration: We’ve made it nearly effortless to register/sign-in. We support a variety of major id providers (Google, Facebook, Yahoo among them).
• Social: We’ve provided a simple way for users to message each other, using a public or private channel (similar to orkut scrapping, but simpler). We’ve added support for a rich user profile. We’ve added the ability to see Facebook friends that are on BrandAdda. We’ve added a way to invite friends using many different providers, and using the latest secure standard (oAuth) where supported.
• Buzz: Added News.
• Discovery: Added a “Related Products/Brands” view
• Taking the Tools to existing Communities: Widgets, and Social Network apps are under development.
• Other user experience improvements

If I were to summarize two key drivers behind all of this: Consumer centricity, and Business value to Brands would be it.

Looking forward to help Brands leverage the web to supplement their Marketing efforts. Jai Ho!! :).