Irritation to Go-live in a few hours

A couple of days ago, got yet-another-email in my inbox announcing deals. As is often the case, they were either uninteresting/of unclear value or felt like a trap with layers of well disguised fine print.

My first reaction was the usual irritation - the kind you have when a smrt-ass-wannabe tries to take you for a ride and you just manage to spot it in time. But, over lunch which I had in a few minutes later, it occurred to me that I might possibly not be alone in this sea of deal-noise. And that like me, folks naturally have a nose for good, genuine deals which actually made sense.

And as I thought more, it became obvious that the whole definition of a "deal" as a "discounted" offer was flawed. I'd just bought great tyres for my dad's car - even at no discount they were awesome deals compared to the other choices. And we humans, we just know these things, don't we ? Especially Indians - VFM is part of our DNA.

Of course, we find deals everywhere. And the really interesting ones are those that are around us - those in the neighbourhood mall, or with our usual grocer, or favourite diner. Offline, online. Sometimes just a friend selling something they don't need anymore.

So created the easiest thing I could - a Facebook page for dealrater. And followed up with a WordPress install with a plugin for voting deals up or down. And then added a Google spreadsheet form so folks could add stuff they found VFM, or a great deal they'd go for themselves.

The site is now up at http://dealrater.in. Its a simple blog with some features now, and will grow if my gut feel of folks being better at this, and interested in cutting down deal-noise is vindicated (them being able to find the site is of course part of the testing so help me please :))

// Pardon the crappy logo - its a 2 minute job to get started. Will get a fancier, designed one later.

All of this took sporadic effort over all of 48 hours. Including some data seeding.

A few things I've noticed/felt

• CRM is broken. Sure, I have almost no knowledge of formal CRM systems etc, but having sat through a few presentations and discussions on this, feel strongly that both the Customer and the Relationship are completely missing from this - its from a sales force pov, completely. There's a startup idea in this somewhere - ping me if you're keen and can help find a market.


• Hyperlocal will be big. Sure its been a jittery start, but there's no other way to go. And the JustDials of the world ain't cutting it.


• Search will be more about how Soc Nets/people's heads are crawled (/trawled?). Realtimeness is one attribute, reactively looking for things, opinions, thoughts, ideas will be another. Aardvark has already been one small tiny step in the direction - there will be more.


• Skills : breadth is catching up again. For a while the world was too taken up with specialization - at the cost of wider skillsets. Specialists are very critical, as are those who can do 5 things well.


• I'm guessing a lot many in our generation (ok, I'm already old, so maybe half a generation downstream from us) will have second/alternative careers. Workplaces, HR practice needs to factor this in, starting now.

Online ? Who's online ? Get outa there....

... and be where the customers are!

Context : was pleasantly surprised to see this along with our morning newspaper a few days ago. And there was another one this morning.

Now everyone's been talking about hyperlocal, but guys like CommonFloor and Open2Save seem to be actually doing it.

I've believed for a while now that

• Hyperlocal is big
• The internet is a tool - it may not be the final consumer connect but can enable a lot of it

So its good to see both these players trying to connect online with existing channels, though not everything has been tried or figured out yet. Purely as an advertising play (some coupons are little more than plain ads) this serves a market which cannot afford and does not need city level visibility, but did not necessarily want to go with what was being offered by the guys who print and ditribute flyers on cheap paper. Given the "aggregation" of deals etc, there's also a better chance of the user being interested in one or more of the deals, and retaining the coupon, unlike single-business flyers.

There's a bunch of other ideas that can be tried in the web-as-a-tool for hyperlocal businesses space. But I'm pleasantly surprised to see efforts to look beyond the web and work with existing behavioural patterns and business flows to provide a better mousetrap within those. The changes can then be effected once some traction happens.

Who says its all about web 2.0 ?