The Indian Product Story
I am in my hometown Lucknow. I happened to come across this app called ‘Dakia’ which perhaps is the North Indian counterpart of Dunzo and is seemingly responsible for delivery across the entire city. It has huge traction and the DAUs/MAUs are outstanding since Lucknow is known for its Awadhi cuisines and people ordered food a lot during the pandemic. I spoke to the founder who wants to scale it up to a lot of other cities and as we were speaking he was looking for Ux experts who could help him improve the Cx as he felt it wasn’t state of the art. A couple of years back, I was in Indore where I noticed the Jugnoo app which was a local taxi hailing service. I used it much to my satisfaction and was quite happy with the experience. It seemed it was a widely used app in Indore and the frequency of usage was at par with Uber and Ola. What struck me from both the experiences was the singular fact that somewhere down the line India transitioned silently from a services economy to a product ecosystem replete with all types of apps solving one customer problem or the other.
What really led to this phenomenon? What prompted this app revolution? Let’s talk about it in detail. Over the last 15 years or so ever since Flipkart started and scaled up, it somehow created a spark that slowly spread like a wildfire. Moreover post China where they fared really well, the next destination for Venture Capital, Private Equity and Hedge Funds was India because of the magnanimous population of 1.3 billion people. But is that the only reason what prompted this product revolution? Of course not? It was also a volley of people who chose entrepreneurship over jobs because they were interested in solving a particular problem for the Indian diaspora. If Kunal Shah wanted to solve the mobile recharge problem for India, Bhavish Agarwal wanted to create an indigenous taxi hailing app like Uber for India. If Shreeharsha Majety wanted to ensure food delivery can be made possible to every household in India , Ritesh Agarwal wanted to ensure everyone has a place to crash anywhere across the country at affordable.
This phenomenon wasn’t limited to the top 8 cities in India. It spread to everywhere across the country. Powerful computation was available thanks to cloud ramping up in a big way and with emerging technologies like machine learning, IoT, crypto,AR and VR exploding , it seemed Indian entrepreneurs were all set to solve the most important problems people were grappling with. Add to it the simple fact that we produce a large number of undergrads and grads a year and a good percentage stepped into entrepreneurial careers right after college. So folks like Varun Agarwal who braved it out with Anu aunty to produce a million dollar startup emerged out of nowhere from across the length and breadth of the country. If one reads a little about India, we’ve been dabbling in entrepreneurship for over 2 millenia and the recent product revolution is not entirely surprising.
What also sparked the product movement in India was also the singular fact that a lot of senior folks who had spent a lot of years in the technology ecosystem in the bay area, decided to start their own ventures. More so with the advent of prime startup programs like Morpheus Ventures that supported HackerRank when it was Interviewstreet, TLabs, NSRCEL,Techstars and more recently YCombinator, a lot of product startups had someone to handhold them in the initial days when almost everything is seemingly uncertain. In fact what really blew everyone’s mind was the active participation by respective State Governments, Central Government and Universities that actively started promoting entrepreneurship by running programs like StartupIndia, Elevate and Emerge50.
If India today is at par with the first world in terms of product startups, the credit goes entirely to NASSCOM. NASSCOM or National association of Software and Service Companies has been highly instrumental in acting as a catalyst to promote the growth of software as an industry. In the last 32 years that it was founded, it has created an optimal environment for software companies across the country and has also forged ties with some of the top countries in the world. It was NASSCOM that decided to create a product council as it witnessed the sharp rise of product startups in the country. Today NASSCOM Product Council is already in the business of creating an open stack of content for students who wish to opt for product careers. Along with that, there is enormous focus on creating a course for people who want to get into product management and integrate it with the Futureskills platform which is one of the most technically advanced education technology platforms created by a country to upskills its populace on skills of the future. It’s surprising how Futureskills has built an impressive volley of courses that focus not only on teaching relevant skills but also on producing outcomes in the students through corresponding capstone projects and assignments.
From where I stand, I can see a bright future replete with some of the most disruptive products history has ever seen coming right out of India. As I see some really disruptive products being created around the country. As I see product management running across B2B or B2C ecosystems striving it hard to build the next generation of products inspite of the high degree of entropy. As I see the laser sharp focus that really helped us become one of the most technically advanced nations. As I see Indian students embracing more and more product roles. As I see product innovation growing exponentially across the nation with India jumping leaps and bounds to No 48. As I see a cross collaborative effort by a group of smart people who are brainstorming day and night to envisage what the future looks like for India, I am reminded of these words our first prime minister spoke at the eve of independence,”Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom”
Come join hands with us and help us make India, a product nation replete with innovation and creativity. Afterall ‘India padega, tabhi India badega’.
