We are a product startup from Delhi NCR and to be honest, not big fans of Yo Yo Honey Singh. He started his music career as a Music Director in 2005 and for 7 years, was virtually unknown. Then, something happened in the year 2012 that catapulted him to overnight success and by 2014, his songs were in close to 15 big Bollywood movies and he wrote lyrics with legendary Gulzar!
In past 2 years, he has been in news all the time, with a Yo Yo Honey Singh song cropping up every few days. He did this by partnering with many established singers and by being in songs of various movies. With his signature voice and style, many might not like him, but one cannot just ignore him.What he did struck us as a great strategy for early stage product startups.In India, customer validation for product startups takes 12-18 months easily and as an independent platform, things get off the track all the time and the period only increases. By using YO YO strategy of piggybacking upon existing, established distribution network, a startup can:
- Reduce their time to market drastically
- Amplify their reach substantially in quick time
- Carry out quick product iterations to reach product/market fit
Ours is a B2B2C product – a white label plugin for payment splitting and aggregation for use-cases like group-gifting, group-travel, group-event booking and crowd funding. We have partnered with multiple e-commerce websites in gifting, travel and crowd funding domain in just a span of three months.
We have learnt that while taking this approach, it is important to take a Selective Distribution approach and tie up with partners that cater to the Target Segment you would have targeted if you had not taken a YO YO strategy and had been an independent B2C product.This stems from Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing The Chasm” lesson where you must ensure that partners whose network you are leveraging, cater to end target segment your product is meant for, to facilitate organic word of mouth spread among customers.We have a lot to learn and we realise that on path to creating great software products out of India, we will have to embrace innovative and new approaches which sometimes, we might not learn from a Silicon Valley blogger but from Indian celebrities you might not generally like.
Guest Post by Ankit Singh, Aprogift