Chamak washes dirty linen in public. Execution, Execution!

Just yesterday, we had been discussing what else hyper/local play could do to expand business and create differentiators, and I'd mentioned to Indus that ironing services inside apartment complexes have always been a major point.

This morning, went downstairs to drop the kids to the school bus, and what do I see ?

Chamak - Neighborhood Washing & Ironing Services

Each kg of clothes is 40/- and they even SMS you once its done!

Quite obviously, its intended to be a big chain over time - a la Ferns And Petals for flowers. They seem to have about 10 locations in Bangalore itself. Someone obvioulsy heard the chatter about the pain points with the existing vendors etc and decided to give this a shot. I'm not yet debating about it being a great idea etc, but its and opportunity, and its heartening to see someone take a crack at it.

On digging just a little, here's what I found - introducing the Village Laundry Service funded by Innosight Ventures, and promotes individual entrepreneurs to run their rigs.

One's heard often that 10 other people have exactly the same idea at the same time as you have it (or even earlier), and it boils down to execution, but it was still a very wow moment to come across a real world example of one such.

Substitutes, Alternatives and Opportunity

Here's what an ISP is having to contend with, in South Africa.

This reminded me of something we read in our networks course - "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes hurling down the highway" - Andrew S. Tanenbaum

Sure, this is a stunt by a really pained customer to highlight the pain point. But it brings alive an interesting fact - that you never know what corner the competition will come from. The obvious ones are never the only ones to worry about.

And when looking for opportunity, do not be discouraged merely by what seem like saturated markets served by existing players. Despite better-than-South-African-speeds, the above did get me to think if there is a logistics business to be built here in India around short distance high volume data transfers. Of course it needs more market research than I want to do around that - but nevertheless, the opportunity that pain points present are numerous. A better email service seems dumb, but who knows. Or a common kitchen in apartment complexes.

Out of the box is the only way, or at least a terrific one.

Update: Ashish discusses the same example here. Its a very strong example - and this opportunity is something we'd discussed over chai. Sure its a little crazy but hey, the message is - think hatke.