What is the best Hyper Local strategy for India

mayanks

Hyper local has been a buzz word in Indian Internet startups for more than a year now. We had first "Local" and a lot of companies attempted cracking it, but all came out of it with a broken limb or two except for JustDial. Even before we could crack the "Local" industry "Hyper-Local" made an entry.

Now one of the biggest pain point with cracking the "Local" (local search etc..) has been the lack of foot-on-streets strategy (Please note, I say one of and not the only, so don't pick me on this and start a flame war), which JustDial did pretty well. Does that apply to Hyper-Local as well? Do you play it head-on or you try to circumvent it innovatively?

Basically want to start a discussion on this forum to brain-storm on what hyper-local ideas (both consumer facing as well as money making) works and what does not work specifically for India.

sinha

My observation is that the entire hypothesis of "hyperlocal" for Indian market hasn't been validated yet (Justdial is local, and not hyper-local).
So far most of hyperlocal startups/mobile app companies have focused on 'information' - which I strongly believe is not a pain point in this industry.
And here is why - I (and extrapolated to a lot of people) hardly need information regarding 'what's happening in HSR layout', i.e. 'just-my-area'. In India, an area isn't defined by PIN codes etc (unlike US), but is a combination of where you work and where you live. And at max, this is a distance of less than 15 Kms.
Is that hyperlocal? No. For hyperlocal to become BIG, these 'small distances' have to be very big (in India, distance is often judged by 'traffic' situation and not by Kms).
And that's why information consumption for hyperlocal hasn't worked very well.

What will work?
- an online grocery store. That just solves a bloody pain. And people will pay for it. It's hyperlocal. You can distribute local information as well.

But what's very important is to solve a pain and I am (now) convinced that delivering local area information isn't solving any pain for anybody (it's NOT that BIG a business yet).

As far as feets-on-streets part is concerned, its one hell of a model and you can't be doing too many things (unless you are Justdial) - asklaila tried and (maybe) failed.

vvpreetham

Tried to provide a succinct opinion but failed. So wrote a blog post on my thoughts here: http://thesimulacrum.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-is-best-hyperlocal-strategy-for.html

Sameer

I agree with Ashish. Hyperlocal will not be so much about business listings etc, but more the ability to surface the inventory, deals, rewards etc from in-the-vicinity and already known brands and stores, and providing tools to interact with these businesses. In the Indian context, it could be personalized delivery, maintaining a "tab", getting an update of a specific product availability, or a tie-up with logisitics to source something from a different part of town. It'll be a mish-mash of many such tools and solutions addressing problems in the context of specific regions, geographies etc.

Meera

@sinha, Re: "hardly need information regarding 'what's happening in HSR layout'" - We find it otherwise.
Running a successful 'hyperlocal' media print magazine focussed on JP Nagar-Jayanagar-BTM-B'ghatta Road etc (primed by city-level content online at www.citizenmatters.in) - we find people appreciate local info.
People feel more connected and then empowered to act locally. Without a platform to connect, one lives in a silo! We have seen umpteen instances of one person's initiative inspiring others to take action.
Of course, the definition of hyperlocal is slightly different in India - it is based on multiple parameters like neighbourhood, school zone, shopping zone etc.
-Meera, Citizen Matters

Sameer

Meera, it'd be very useful for folks developing for hyperlocal markets to understand the kind/depth of info folks are looking at. Do share some insights. What kind of tools and enablers might help?

Sagar

Just a scenario+question to get an idea of what's being discussed: most Kirana shops in India have nearly forever done home deliveries for groceries up to even a km away, for free if you give them repeat business or if your purchase is large enough. Are we discussing hyperlocal in this sense?

Sameer

Sagar, I guess yes. A large portion of our monthly budgets are spent in the neighbourhood, after all.

Sagar

Ok. Here's something purely anecdotal; when I first started shopping around for everyday items in Bangalore I had trouble with the language barrier. This is in spite of the fact that Hindi is pretty well spread in Bangalore. Friends who've had to move to Chennai or so have had worse problems. It then made sense to walk the extra km to the nearest hyper-market.
So, if there is a solution to resolve the language barrier that's a start IMO. For e.g. if someone could give me an app by which I can pick out stuff from the Kirana shop's inventory and share that list with the guy at the shop counter ... something like that.

sinha

@Meera - What you are doing with CitizenMatters and what a regular hyperlocal stands for is different. You guys are 'neck deep' into hyperlocal news, which is where it adds value.
What I was referring to was a typical use case by an "Indian tech startup" - i.e. look at feeds from Google news, filter them on location keywords and pump them to users - i.e. no extra value. Because in that scenario, they are not in content creation space.
Hyperlocal Content has a HUGE opportunity - but I am more referring to the 'sitting-in-office' entrepreneur who thinks hyerplocal is about crawling technology! :)

mayanks

Phew, my small note on hyper local strategy generated a lot of comments. Was in hibernation so am just returning now. Quite a few ideas and some philosophies are being discussed here. I will carefully chose the ideas and ignore the philosophy for now. Not that I don't like them, just that I am not in mood for one.

Local Shopping : Yes this is one big opportunity, and after failing (in one sense) with Local listing, people are looking at this niche as well (nudge nudge zopnow). But I am not really convinced about the size of this market to warrant a startup. A number of them (fabmall now IndiaPlaza) tried earlier and failed quite miserably (in all senses). But yes if Flipkart can know IndiaPlaza off, I am open to surprises. But personally will not bet my money (Do I have any?)

Local Info : As CitizenMatters has shown there is definitely a demand for this. Maybe niche. May not be online (as the target audience is not online). Some are approaching it from a philanthropic front (CitizenMatters), some are actually treating this as a niche but don't have a big budget (CityPlus of Dainik Jagaran) and some obviously are trying to solve it from technology perspective. There needs to be some alignment with the above three seemingly orthogonal viewpoints to converge and make a larger impact. I have closely monitored CityPlus execution and knowing that they are maybe breaking even, I am quite bullish on this aspect. Self generated Content (citizenmatters), with a razor sharp offline circulation(cityplus) and using technology to reduce all other costs will make you win this game.

Local Listing : Clearly tonnes of companies have embarked on this train hoping to replicate JustDial's success and not one has succeeded. To borrow Ashish's words here, it's not the technology that you need here. A lot of people have dissected this space, so I will just ignore it and move on.

Local Directions : We at ONZE provide directions on SMS. When people hear about it first they brush it off saying who needs them? Google is there for online. Does it work? Not really. What about offline? SMS is too cumbersome. The fact is that we have an awesome location aware local search and directions service on SMS. But even today the requests for directions surpasses local search on our platform. Believe me, this is one big space. We have just scratched the surface and are quite excited as we are digging deeper.

Local Advertisement : A TV commercial in one barometer to measure your arrival as a brand/product/service. Only the rich can afford it and masses can only see them. But what if a Local business wants to advertise on TV, and that too only for his city? Big opportunity right? Look what Amagi is doing.

Local Ad platform : Millions of apps being made today but there are just handful of them (like angry birds) who are making money. Next to angry birds are the mobile ad platform like inmobi who would be making the next big buck just by sitting between the advertisers and publishers. Taking a cue from Amagi, I personally feel that the moment these Ad platforms (or maybe a new one) focuses exclusively on providing the ability to the advertisers to advertise hyper-locally (show only to jayanagar folks), it will provide a huge benefit to the advertisers. Not only the conversion will be higher, both the advertisers and consumers will be happy.

So do watch out this space. That's it. What? waiting for philosophy? Get me drunk.

arjunram

A little late to the game - A lot has been said by a lot of folks, so lets start with some disclosures first

- We havent figured hyperlocal/local out yet
- it is coming from an "Arm chair entrepreneur thinking of crawling technology" :)

Lets also get some facts out of the way - the fundamental market is this - people spend a majority of their lives around a certain radius and interact with various pieces within that radius. That radius could a couple of blocks/kilometers/miles. We can call it what we want but most of these efforts are to capture that broad use case or sections of it.

The key to addressing that use case is distribution - how do you distribute your service to your end user. What has traditionally worked in India is offline channels - examples of this successful distribution/touch points have been JustDial and Dainik Jagran's city plus.

The other key issue is packaging. The end user doesn't care if the content is created or crawled as long as its packaged well.

The third issue is about quality of content. Its vital to any community. Key is how to provide it in a cost effective way.

The two traditional approaches of solving this market have been as follows:

Solve the problem at a small scale and then scale (but scaling out has proven to be difficult) Citizen Matters is a good example. Other examples in the US have the same problem.

Take a broad sweep across and improve gradually - patch and others are trying this but you burn rate is really high and iterating at a bigger scale is different.

The truth lies somewhere is between. I would go ahead state this "hyperlocal" has not been figured out internationally let alone India!

My 2 cents!

Krishna

@Sagar your small idea has lot of potential. It's a huge market. People buy most the time same grocery items and they are least bothered to see those item. If we can browse those items on cell phone, order from phone and either pick-up or home delivery. However the challenge is how are we going to get product catalog for these store. If some one can implement this, then small retailer (Kirana shops) can sustain their business in long term otherwise they may run out of business in few years...

keepdealing

In above context, it would be interesting to keep a close track of this 72 hour old site. www.keepdealing.com . Hyper local, yes to the extent of going to Pin code level & further. enabling Stores to create own deals & promos, enabling buyers to buy without paying online & enabling multi location brand stores to offer a single point Deal/promo launch with added advantage of managign their promo , deals, customers. This also means city sepcifc Brand & Deal promotions, Quick scale up to other markets ( outside India) & much more. Let me know your views.

Welcome to Pluggd.in Forum!

Categories

Recent Activity

Top Posters