Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

Over the last one year or so, a number of Indian blogs have come up, which cater to upcoming webapps and entrepreneurship.

I remember that when I had started there was only AlooTechie.com and WebYantra which I read almost everyday. But now there are really a lot of them - Trak.in (the latest of the lot), Watblog (major competitor of alootechie) and of course WebYantra (by the CEO of infinitely successful slideshare).

But the one blog which has suddenly become a must read for me over the last few months is Pluggd.in, which is run by Ashish Sinha and his team. On more than a few occasions, Ashish has called it India’s Techcrunch. If it was somebody else I would have liked to slam them for it, but somehow Pluggd.in manages to come up with some great posts every few days, and you get the feeling that if they are not there yet, they will definitely get there one day.

For example, there was a post on Pluggd.in yesterday by Prashant, one of the new bloggers in the team, and it was far from regular. Prashant went on to explain a few guerilla advertising tips for entrepreneurs. He maintains that it’s not the amount of money that you can spend, but if you can use your head. He added the example of a web IM company who asked their SysAdmin friends to advertise the products

So founder called one of his friend who was a SysAdmin at a big IT service firm, showed him a basic demo (of their web based IM) and requested him to tell people about it .

Surprise ……server log showed that in next 3 days 500 people logged in to their service from a single building of that company. Very soon, every branch of that company started using it . Truth was that they were using Lotus Notes messenger to tell their colleague about this cool new Web Based IM . That SysAdmin probably had told it to few guys, may be out of sense of obligation.

But he started an avalanche

Smart. You just have to go and check out the original post to get the rest of them.

I can actually think of a couple of similar examples. One of them is from Seth Godin’s excellent write up for his book ‘Be a better Liar’. He talks about a couple of Harvard entrepreneurs from the 1980s who sold stereo speakers with the story that they were stolen.

In the 1980s, a few entrepreneurs came up with a great business. They bought some name-brand stereo speakers (last year’s model) and packed them into a U-Haul truck. Then they parked the truck behind a dorm at Harvard and started whispering. “Pssst … Hey! You wanna buy some speakers?” While they never actually said that the speakers were stolen, it seemed to passersby that they were—and so had to be a great bargain. Harvard students shouldn’t have fallen for this. Of course, they did. In droves. The entrepreneurs sold out in no time. The story the students told themselves made the purchase incredibly appealing, even if the speakers cost about what they would have at the local stereo store. The local store spent plenty of money on advertising and real estate. These entrepreneurs made it easy for people to tell themselves a story. They both sold speakers for the same price. Who won?

Yeah I know, Harvard guys are smart. But that’s not all, smart entrepreneurs everywhere are doing this. For example back home, MouthShut.com made themselves really popular when they decided to start advertising on auto rickshaws. A lot of companies have followed them, but they were the ones who came out with the idea.

But now you say, what now? These guys did it find. But tell me something my company can do.. All I can say about that is either you get Prashant onboard (I have offered him already :)) or you find some exciting new medium to advertise, maybe like this one.

UPDATE: I just forgot about ContentSutra, by the awesome Nikhil Pahwa