On Jan 16th I was at the Social Media Club, Delhi's second meet up. The topic for the meet was 'How can Social Platforms work in India'. It was presented by Mayank Dhingra and Dipankar Sarkar, who used their first hand experience of kwippy as a case study. To discuss the event in brief, let me tell you what kwippy was.

Kwippy enables one to integrate their IM status updates with the product. So, apart from regular microblogging feature, it also catches your IM statuses and when’er you update IM status, it goes as a kwipp to all your followers. (Thanks Pluggd.in!)

So, Mayank and Dipankar launched kwippy in 2007 and by late 2008 they closed it down - after a delayed investment decision and almost getting (tech)crunched. They had a story to tell - why did this happen?

This is what they learned:

  • Most social platforms in India are improvisations of western social platforms for the Indian market. Innovation is hardly there.
  • The challenge with building a social platform is to build something users will like and, more importantly, want. Ensuring that they keep wanting it. Keep adding value to the offering and aligning the business interest of the product while managing the aforesaid.
  • The challenge is not only in designing a shining product but also ensuring that it is accessible.
  • Making money is very important to stay in business. Don't loose the focus.
  • Manage the perception of the product in your user's mind and media. Position it well.
  • The 80:20 Rule - 80% of your users use 20% of your features only. Don't overload your app with features. Add only that which makes sense.
  • From the user's perspective: Interface Design  and Interface Usability is very important. As important is the reliability of the product - delivering the features in a timely fashion.
  • Why is it tough to get investors to invest in your product? - Their is hardly any innovation!
  • The First Mover's advantage can make or break a business. Example: Slideshare is doing better than its technically superior competitors due to the first mover's advantage.
  • Managing Social Platform projects is all about managing chaos - don't compromise with the individual. The project management is a big fail if you expect people to work like you. Make your processes and workflows such that they are not interfering and let the person contribute his best. Don't hamper your team's activities.
  • Having a team is a lot more important than everything else.
  • Mentoring can wait. It never contributes as much, in any case. Focus on building your teams. That is what will take you forward in the long run.
  • All Social Media apps are a clone of one basic idea: "Someone commenting about something"
  • There is a good opportunity to make international apps based on APIs right now, plus, interoperability is the future (Reminds me of sn:afu *sniff*)
  • It was their frustration with work (they were working at Slideshare) that needed a creative outlet and they came up with kwippy. See! A bad work experience isnt that damaging to your careers. Point is:  Hey there, Mr. Grumpy Gills. When life gets you down do you wanna know what you've gotta do? Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim.

It was, all in all, a very useful insight into how small startup teams are working towards innovation. The same applies to what Twitter and Facebook did right - small projects that are now huge behemoths. By the way, Twitter still doesn't have a business model -  something, Mayank's extra emphasis on a business model, kept coming back to me. What did I tell him?

"At some point of time, it seems to me that folks at kwippy started not having fun and working more towards a business. I guess its pretty important to have fun all the way and not loose focus. Do you know what I am doing? I am building an application for India, which I know will never work in India - Social Matrimony, just for laughs" I was glad that everyone had a good laugh then, including Mayank and Dipankar.