By Vikram Raichura,
Managing Director, VivaConnect Pvt. Ltd.
It was the year 2001, when ‘dotcom’ was the buzz. “Hey! What’s your email-ID?” was the most common thing overheard during any conversation. And if you had one, you were the coolest person in the group. It’s another matter altogether that most of our IDs were like cooldude85@xyz.com and pisceanprincess@abc.com! People used to go to cyber cafes, logged in to random chatrooms, talked to strangers, asked ASL, all on Yahoo and MSN messenger.
A friend intrigued with all this buzz thought of entering into e-commerce. With hopes high, we started our business and guess what we decided to sell online? Grocery! I arranged a small desk in a corner of my father’s saree shop as our workstation. We made a complete catalogue of grocery products, consolidated a huge Business Directory (BD) for marketing and everything started with full zeal and enthusiasm. But within a few months, we realized that the idea was too early for the market and people couldn’t connect with it. Not just e-stores, even the Internet was an alien thing for people. For a Gujju like me, the loss was totally unacceptable. Upon careful and in-depth analysis, what I realized was that for any business to be viable, there needed to be a lot of customers and suppliers.
I sought to fill the very same gap by publishing directories, but on electronic formats (on CD-ROMs) and hence started my successful pivot in connecting businesses. These BDs were sold to SMEs between a price range of Rs 699 to Rs 2,500. The distribution mode went completely online when a person called me up for a meeting, kept me waiting for two hours and then said, “I didn’t want the product, I just wanted to meet you.” To avoid such waste of time again in future, the products were couriered only after receiving the payments via Money Order. The business went well for a few weeks but a drop in the orders was noticed shortly due to piracy. This gave birth to a ‘read-only’ BD with the help of an engineer friend, leaving the pirates deserted.
The focus shifted from BDs to SMS in 2008, when mobile penetration increased by a considerable level and customers started asking for SMS marketing solutions. Though SMS marketing gave good results, I realized that Voice Marketing had bigger potential to connect with the people. This realization paved the way for VivaConnect to be one of the largest infrastructures for ‘Voice’ and ‘Missed Call’ services in India. Creating context has always been more important than creating concepts for me. If the context is strong, you can create multiple concepts and VivaConnect is built on the context of ‘Connecting’. This philosophy recently gave birth to our new subsidiary DONE, a cloud-based order management CRM and Analytics company for the Food and Beverage industry.
‘Never Give Up’ may be the fad, but knowing when to hold and when to give up and move forward has given my life a better direction.
Feedback: Vikram@vivaconnect.in
