#ZipDial2Twitter – how a wacky idea went mainstream!
A random email from an American with a Polish last name hit my Inbox in 2008 saying, “Dev Khare asked me to talk to you”. Purely out of intrigue and politeness to Dev, I agreed to take the call the next week. Within 30 seconds of the call, while driving in Bangalore traffic (which probably impaired my hearing), I realized I was dealing with someone special. A few months later the company made hotel reservations for a Mr. Valerie Rozycki – and she flew into Bangalore to meet the team; 3 months later joined mChek as a Head of Strategic Projects. During her tenure working with me Val focused on inclusive banking for women at the bottom of the pyramid and did a variety of pilot projects – some of which will hopefully still see the light of day someday in the future – but at all times her work ethic and sheer thoroughness made her a pleasure to have on the team – and oh BTW, did I mention she graduated from Stanford, had worked at two startups in the valley, and left a solid role at eBay to come and work with us.
A few years earlier, while I was setting up Ketera, one of the sharpest engineering leads I got to work with was a fun-loving young (THEN!) man – Amiya Pathak. He and I shared two things in common – a passion for cricket, and a passion for being partners in PingPong – so that he could never beat me. That he was an IIT-JEE #14 rank, an IIT-Kanpur Computer Science graduate was something I accidentally found out a few months later – such was his humility (THEN!). After I moved over to running mChek, he and I kept in touch and occasionally he stopped by to see if I could afford to hire him, then to mentor him on a few startup ideas etc.
Late in 2009, as Valerie & I were fighting amnesia on a late night flight back from Delhi, we suddenly had the craziest of ideas – why couldn’t a missed-call be used to trigger a simple transaction like checking your bank balance. That weekend, she came home and we worked through a concept. But as Monday came along we forgot about it and didn’t do much about it.
A couple of months later, I decided to move on from mChek and I remember chatting with Amiya on Yahoo Messenger. He asked me “what next?” and not knowing what to say I told him “Well – a friend and I have this crazy idea of doing polling using missed calls”. Given our rather unique wavelength match, his immediate idea was “That’s a GREAT idea”. We chatted a bit and then the three of us got together and started imagining what could be done – and it was clear that all three of us felt passionately about the possibilities.
Takeaway #1: Its no point keeping all your ideas top secret – you need to speak about them with trusted people.
Of course when we told people about it, we heard all the objections – Telcos won’t like it, businesses won’t pay for it, nobody is going to use it, it’s a behavioral change from consumers, how will you make money, etc. But one thing was clear to us – trying it out wasn’t too expensive or risky – and we never wanted to regret not trying.
Takeaway # 2: The cost of trying is very low – but the opportunity cost of NOT trying is way too high!
Amiya suddenly started writing code and in true Amiya-style launched the product for the IPL in under 3 weeks; we joke that he literally did it single-handedly, given he had a fracture in the other hand. In parallel we pulled out all the favors we could - we were filing patents – thanks to a friend who gave us a great deal, we accidentally bumped into someone who was building a Twilio for India and he agreed to implement what we needed, etc. etc.
Takeaway #3: When you set your mind to do something, the world conspires to make it happen for you.
Of course for the first few days, we each used to keep dialing the number and we could literally see the counter increase by 1 each time we dialed. A few months later, we stumbled upon the name ZipDial – instinctively it felt like a good name to have. We then had to procure the domain – and after a long negotiation with a domain squatter, we convinced him to let it go for $500; and so ZipDial.com came into existence.
Our first real success was in the Carribbean thanks to a good friend Arunjay who got us a deal with Pepsi. Within 30 days of existence, believe it or not, we were on Live TV for an ad from PepsiCo. We hurriedly had Val’s cousin design our logo and lo and behold, in June 2010, in a corner of the Carribbean, we had change advertising.
The 30-second video remains my favorite use of ZipDial and its here if you want to check it out.
In India we launched a live-football score service – given that the matches were in South Africa most Indians would wake up and check the score in the morning. That service was helped by Amiya’s love for football at the cost of sleep – because all we did was watch the match, update the SMS with the final score and that’s how the service ran. While the football score service was small, it showed that people were very loyal to the service – and came to depend on it – so much so that when Amiya once fell asleep and forgot to update the score, we got an irate email from a customer. To me that was the first sign that a consumer was finding enough value and it had changed their behavior.
Takeaway #4: The perfect product happens over time – don’t over-engineer early. Be careful about choosing what you need to prove at any point in time.
In parallel however we did find two very early customers who actually agreed to pay us for the service – and they still are paying customers today. I remember when companiesInn.com bought a 1800 number and paid for a 1 year subscription – was an amazing feeling indeed. What this did for us is validate that not just consumers would use it – but businesses would pay for it.
With a bit of money from family and colleagues – two of whom, Bala Parthasarathy & Shripati Acharya later became my partners at AngelPrime we launched the free cricket score service.
That of course grew crazy – every time Sachin was in the 90’s the call volume grew exponentially. We later realized there was some spam, there were people making 1000 calls per day – but we took the attitude that filtering out spam would be adding more IP to our company and worked on the solution. During one of the customer meetings Val heard a customer say, “we have no budget because our mobile marketing is all committed to this BookCricket WAP game”. Without thinking much she said “I’m sure we can build it on ZipDial”. She later called and asked– “do you know what book cricket is” – and Amiya and I both jumped up and said “of course we can build that on ZipDial”. That was perhaps our first multi-lakh rupee customer and guess what – the marketing manager probably got a promotion because, although he had less than 1000 games played on WAP and 1.2Lakh games played on ZipDial.
Takeaway #5: Be bold, be adventurous, the price of failure isn’t that high.
At some point we raised a good initial round of funding from Mumbai Angels and subsequently from Blume and other investors. But right from day zero we had the attitude that investor money has to be dealt with more carefully than our own, customers have to value our service, and the only money that matters is revenue. In other words, we must add keep creating and value. A year into ZipDial, AngelPrime was formed formally, but both my partners at AngelPrime, were actively involved in ZipDial from early days and still are people Val and Amiya turn to for advice and mentoring on tricky subjects.
Takeaway #6: Have more people worrying about your company – its always a good thing!
Probably the single-biggest moment in ZipDial’s coming of age was during the Anna Hazare Anti-Corruption movement in 2012. During that time all TV Channels were promoting various campaigns – but Times chose to augment email, Facebook, Twitter and Google with ZipDial’s missed-call facility. While all the other channels combined had less than a lakh, we had more than 5Million unique users on ZipDial – and we knew we were for real.
Takeaway #7: Despite cynicism, we knew we had a WINNER – because in at least in some situations, we would trump whatever other medium existed.
From that point on it was a case of scaling the team investing in analysis of the data and building great analytics tools, and doing all the fundamentals of running a business. Val and Amiya did a commendable job of taking the business to the next level and actually getting into commercial agreements with virtually every brand in India, expanding to other geographies, and along the way working strategically with several players including Facebook and Twitter.
Along the way the team made significant sacrifices – the number of times everyone worked till 3AM, the number of times Val was in multiple time-zones in the same day, the time she spent away from home, from her husband – whom she married 2 years into ZipDial, nothing short of a Bhaag Milkha Bhaag like movie. And yet there was a lot of fun. Every employee was wished by an email from each team member on his/her birthday with the traditional cake smearing too. Fun and hardwork were combined very effectively to build an environment where people worked hard because they were committed to the cause and to each other – not because of the immediate financial benefits.
Fast-forward to today and it’s truly a pleasure to share with the world that Twitter has acquired ZipDial. The acquisition by Twitter is also a huge event for the Indian startup eco-system – it proves that a truly Indian idea has been acquired by one of the biggest global brands because this made in India for India product, team and culture matter a great deal. I’m sure there are many more takeaways about how to build a company that Val and Amiya will someday narrate!
My congratulations, kudos and best wishes to Valerie, Amiya, their families and the entire ZipDial family as they now move to this next phase of the journey – part of a bigger global company, the $25Billion startup called Twitter! You guys have really proven to the world that Success isn’t a game of chance – it’s about taking your chances!
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