The Game

The name of The Game is… Consumer Services.
The object of The Game is… a revenue stream of Rs. 1 crore (~ $250,000) per year.

All you need to do is find something which

1. 40 people pay 250,000 per year (forget it)
2. 400 people pay 25,000 per year (schools, daycares, tuitions, vocational education)
3. 850 people pay 12,000 per year (the psychological 1,000 per month mark, telecom, internet)
4. 4000 people pay 2,500 per year (250 per month. Almost lost in the noise.)

A good place to play is somewhere between 3 and 4.

Now I’ll make the game simpler, to avoid the “oh-we-don’t-know-what-customers-want” song. You now have a large enough peer group of IT professionals who think sufficiently like you, so you should not have problems empathizing with their needs. They constitute a big enough TAM (total addressable market, as we business gurus call it) to easily hit 3 and 4, even if you restrict yourself to one city, even to just 2-3 companies! IT folks also have sufficient money sloshing around in their pockets and are more willing to spend.

Here is one example.

The gas stove cleaning scam: Clean-cut chap comes to your house and says, you sign up for this service, pay this small amount in advance and we’ll come clean your gas stove every month. You pay up and get a yellow cleaning schedule card. You never see the guy again. Although it’s a scam, it has some points of interest which can be usefully emulated.

1. It picks an activity which you know you should be doing, but don’t (and therefore have some guilt)
2. It appeals to your laziness by coming to your house, doing a “professional” job and charging a modest fee which you don’t mind. No action is required on your part.
3. Even if something goes wrong, you don’t get very upset because the amount involved is not large.

And here is a more realistic example.

Door-step backup: You go to people’s houses once in a quarter. Backup their entire machine (for bare metal restore) or part of it (user-generated data, photos, home videos, etc). See how it maps to the gas-stove principles:

1. Nobody ever backs up of their home machines, but it’s always at the back of their minds and they always feel guilty about not doing it. Regular backup requires discipline and few folks are organized enough to do it. Like insurance salesmen, it’s easy to give a stern lecture about your responsibilities for backing up your priceless photos, “If… God forbid… some virus wiped your disk…” etc.
2. Appeal to laziness. Someone comes to your house to do it. You don’t even need to install software or visit a website. This is particularly appealing to the Mom-and-Pop demographic.
3. The charges are small enough that people won’t get very upset when they realize that you only promised backup and nothing about restore 🙂

Some optional extras:

1. Privacy option: Give the customer a shiny key and assure them that without the key, nothing can be read from their backups and he is hereby charged with keeping the key safe. Gives him a feeling of responsibility and control.
2. Online archival, incremental backup/restore option with Amazon S3. See http://www.jungledisk.com/ and http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000808.html
3. Physical copy of his backup, in DVDs.

Other details

1. You could partner with someone who already has the “last mile” connectivity i.e. someone who has the infrastructure to go to people’s places, collect bills, with basic computer skills, etc. One example is a local ISP. Your value add is to come up with a simple, fool-proof (well, as much as possible) backup architecture and the software to implement it.
2. Graceful exit possible – just give everyone their backup copies in physical form, say ta-ta.

FAQ

1. Why services? I have this brilliant product idea…
   • Product ideas are difficult to germinate, very risky (especially financial, unless you can con a VC) Services are lower risk. That’s why most of Indian IT is in Services.
   • The idea is, in fact, not to do product innovation, but to integrate well-known, well-understood pieces of technology and create a workflow which can be run and managed with relatively low-cost manpower.
   • Subscription-based services, if done even half-decently, tend to be very sticky, again because of the laziness factor. People are too lazy to even cancel unless you provide some serious negative value. This results in a much more assured and steady revenue stream.
   • Once you’ve built critical mass, you can just float without having to continuously search for new customers, because every customer gives periodic and continuous revenue.
2. This is a very different ball game, need to recruit a different set of people…
   • Hiring is actually easier for such services. You don’t need the high-skill, expensive, flighty talent which is required for product development.
   • Or simply build the infrastructure for the service, partner with someone who already has the ability to deliver the service to the last mile.
3. Why not a web-only service?
   • Sure. The main appeal of a web-only approach is the elimination of the physical last-mile connectivity requirement. Bookeazy is an excellent local example. But there are many services which, by their nature, need last-mile connectivity. Also, certain web-only services may have too low a barrier to entry, making it difficult to distinguish yourself from the herd.

The Baseball Development Methodology

Management and software engineering are still dark arts. Anything which happens to work is instantly picked up and turned into a cargo cult, spawning a flash ecosystem of consultants, training programs and seminars for the fad diet du jour. I will tell you how one of these got started.

In the late ’90s, managers all over America realized that most of their workforce consisted of slackers, with a couple of nerds called Dexter who actually got the job done. Now you don’t want to be a Vice President and confess at a board meeting that your empire, responsible for the company’s flagship product, consists of two guys called Dexter. You’ve got to have slackers to pad the numbers. With the flattening world, it made a ton of sense to outsource the slacking to India, where it could be done much more cost effectively.

This was a windfall for Indian companies like Baba Soaps & Outsourced Services (motto: “Trespassers will be recruited”). BS&OS was press-ganging far more people than could be absorbed in existing projects. The rough wooden benches lining the corridors to hold surplus personnel were perpetually overflowing. Benchies would hover around those fortunate enough to bask in the green glow of a terminal, solicitously ply them with beverages and wait for nature to come calling. Clearly, such a situation could not last. After a few episodes of the type which mortified Tycho Brahe, a new social order spontaneously emerged from the chaos. Groups of two formed, with each guarding access to the precious green light while the other did his business.

A visiting client from a US was intrigued by this phenomenon. “Why are they sitting in pairs? Don’t you have enough computers?” For an instant, his Indian chaperon thought of telling the truth – that computers were far more expensive than people. Despite Moore’s law, Indian family planning values (“The Moore the merrier”) still had the edge. He dismissed this moment of weakness and launched into an impressive spiel which was to make history. Well, a little bit, anyway. “Oh, that? We call it Pair Programming…”

And so the long day wore on… “How come you’re charging us for 10 QA engineers? We haven’t even finished the design yet!” Caught at overbilling, the Indian remained unfazed. He drew himself up to his full height and put on his best philosophical, idealistic expression. “How would you define a working product? One that passes the test suite, right? Therefore, creating the test suite defines the product, wouldn’t you say? Much better than a design document which nobody bothers to update anyway…”

The American had the last laugh, though. He took down notes, gave it a “cool” name – Xtreme Programming – and got rich.

There has never been a better time for starting another of these schemes. Managers in Big Companies have already experimented with all the management cults that exist, reorganized again and again, by product, by feature, by release, matrixed models, agile matrix models, with little visible success. They are looking for something, anything, which they can use to showcase as an example of strong leadership, being a change agent, and generally treading water for a couple of years until they get promoted to a different role or a different job, jettisoning their old responsibility like a spent booster stage and watching safely as it slowly falls back to earth. While they head onward to the fabled Moon, towards Cheese Everlasting.

You, too, can come up with a brand new development methodology and become a rockstar consultant, putting thousands of programmers in mortal peril. Just follow these simple steps:

1. What goes ’round comes ’round. Pick something which was popular before the current incumbent. Agile’s ad-hocism was a reaction to the suffocating bureaucracy of Waterfall, which in turn was a reaction to Utter Chaos. So you’d do well to base your new development methodology on Waterfall, as a reaction to Agile.
2. Insult the incumbent. Notice how Agile vendor presentations use words like nimble, quick, innovative to describe their own brand of poison, while dismissing older methods with words like regimented, slow, silo-driven, etc. Draw adoption curves showing where you are positioned. One Agile presentation I’ve seen even had helpful pictures of dinosaurs near the Waterfall (“obsolete”) end of the curve, and lightning bolts at the Agile (“leading edge”) end so that even your manager would get the hint.
3. Make a Web Thingy. Web 2.0 thingies are all the rage now. There are Scrum tools which are so basic that they won’t even let you track dependencies, but you’ve got to buy and use them because they’re all Agile and Web 2.0 and stuff. You’d do well to draw on the reservoir of black hatred enjoyed by Microsoft Project and come up with a simplified Web Waterfall Thingy.
4. Last and most important, Use a sports metaphor. Even the few sensible American men who are lukewarm about sports have to pretend to be rabid fans, on pain of having their testosterone levels becoming a matter of public debate. So you simply can’t go wrong using sporty terms to re-label all the concepts you’re ripping off. This will give the illusion that you have invented something new, confuse your detractors, force them to use your terms and make their arguments sound silly, while providing your supporters with a ready fund of sports catchphrases and anecdotes to distract the audience. Thus, Agile calls a meeting a scrum, a project manager is a scrum master, you have sprints.

Agile has already taken Rugby, so we’ll have to find another sport. Preferably American, since they’re still the largest market for this kind of mumbo jumbo. Baseball admirably fits the bill. It’s a team sport with an extensive jargon of its own, which can be mapped to software development terms. For instance, if you are going to create a Waterfall-like methodology, try this:

1. First Base. Initial investigations, Project overview, Requirements Analysis. Generally get a feel for the issues at hand.
2. Second Base. Detailed analysis of various features, flesh out one or two prominent features.
3. Third Base. Rapid Prototyping, Simulation.
4. Fourth Base. Frenzy of Development, Quality Assurance, finally culminating at RTF (Release to Fulfilment).

I’m sure you can find your own creative uses for other baseball terms. Like inning to replace sprint. Remember, no matter how crazy it sounds, no matter how many silly gimmicks you add (make everyone wear coloured baseball caps), it will find adherents. Even the most ridiculous religions and open source projects find devotees, much to the surprise of their founders.

Go hit a homer!