Customer Focus at People Group : Anupam Mittal

Interview Questions

Full Interview with Anupam Mittal

Anupam Mittal:

When we started, there wasn't really much to lose. All we wanted to do was to be in the consumer Internet space. We set out to explore and try different things. That's how Shaadi.com came about. In fact, when the company was started, I was not even in the country. I was abroad working for another company. Technically, we started Shaadi.com 10 years ago, but I think, for all practical purposes, we really started focusing as an organization and building out with great purpose only around 2002. That's when I started spending more time in the country and finally moved back to India in 2004.

In last six or seven years, we went from Shaadi.com to Fropper.com. We launched Makaan.com more recently. A number of different and interesting business models came up. We also started Mauj Mobile along the way, which is a leading mobile VAS (value added services) player in the country with a strong mobile marketing business. Now, we are in the film production business. The journey has been exciting, painful, challenging, and frustrating at the same time.

When I look back, 10 years have been a great journey. To me it seems so short. Through it all, I observed that technology has played a critical role in all the areas we are in. If convergence or digitization had not occurred around the time we started our businesses, then we wouldn't have been able to do the things we have done. I must say that we have been very opportunistic in building our businesses. That said, if you ask me if I think about technology, my answer would probably be no. I think about my consumers, their behavior and what they want. But, I can say, without a doubt, that without technology we wouldn't have been where we are today.

 

Anupam Mittal:

No doubt poor connectivity, low bandwidth and a lack of credit card penetration were major challenges when we started our Internet-related businesses. However, when we started Shaadi.com, most of our revenue actually came from NRIs. The number of resident Indians who used the platform at that point was low compared to NRIs, thanks to India's e-commerce-related challenges. Over the years, this has changed. A significant portion of our revenues come from within the country. But still the conversion rate in India is a major challenge as most Indians can't pay online because don't have credit cards. This continues to be an issue we grapple with.

To tackle it, we introduced different modes of payment. We have tied-up with banks so that they can accept payments on our behalf and we pickup of payments at a customer's doorstep. Nonetheless, the Internet adoption rate in the country is not something to be proud of. While plenty of people think that the Internet has come of age in India, it needs to be said that it's only growing at 15 to 20 percent a year. This is not a healthy pace considering our vast population. I would have hoped that by this time we would have had more than 100 million regular Internet users. However, we only have about 30 million. This continues to be a challenge because you can't scale up as fast as your global competitors unless you start to look at other businesses as well. I think there is a perpetual strain on the supply side of Internet access.

On the supply side, companies are so busy supplying mobile phones connections that they don't see a compelling business case to increase the supply of Internet access and broadband connections. Also, there are last-mile connectivity problems. Effective last-mile connectivity options such as Wimax are going to take time to materialize. On the demand side, people don't really know why they should move to the Internet. That's something the supply side needs to do something about. Unless a consumer understands why he needs access to the Internet in the first place, we will never see an uptake in its adoption.

 

Anupam Mittal:

At IAMAI, we grappled with the low penetration of Internet in the country. While I was chairman, my agenda was very simple: make the organization as democratic as possible. As a body, the IAMAI had a mix of large, small and individual members.

There were competing factions within the association whose interests were not aligned initially. From that perspective, we were quite successful in creating an independent association with a single-minded focus on driving Internet penetration and adoption in India ahead. We strongly believed that if that could be solved, all the other problems related to e-commerce would be resolved.

 

Anupam Mittal:

When we started the websites, technology allowed us to take one user profile and market a service to it. For example, when we started Mauj mobile services, technology allowed the data to be consumer mobile phones. Mauj mobile is powering the mobile side of the business. We saw the opportunity to take Bollywood content to consumers on their mobile phones. As we started to understand that industry, we identified an opportunity to produce films as well. If you ask me how technology is common across all these companies, I'd say that we started these very companies because technological changes afforded us the opportunity.

 

Anupam Mittal:

Frankly, I don't spend time thinking about technology. I spend my time thinking about consumers, their requirements and how we fulfill those. Deploying technology for the sake of technology doesn't make sense to me. Let's take Shaadi.com. What does the Internet do for the matchmaking business? Basically, the Internet takes away geographical limitations and content-spatial restrictions. This means that one can find a match anywhere in the world and can share plenty of content and data about oneself. It also enables communication in a secure and anonymous fashion, which is not possible via a newspaper or via any other media. Most of all, the Internet is cost-effective and efficient. But while it offers users these benefits, it also requires them to be at a certain comfort level with the medium. It is not like television. You don't just switch it on.

As a result, despite technological benefits, we could only reach a certain faction of the market. Especially because in our country, parents usually take matrimony-related decisions We had the option of waiting for parents to get comfortable with technology. Or, we could take technology to them. The Shaadi.com Centers, the brick-and-mortar model you refer to, are still driven by technology and powered by the website. All we have done is taken away the complexities involved with technology. Consumers come in for a matchmaking solution and that's exactly what we offer them. Technology remains in the backend and still gives us all the advantages we spoke about. We just extended our technology platform to the Shaadi.com Centers

Anupam Mittal:

The term Web 2.0 can be defined in two ways. It can be defined as interactive websites that use the latest technologies to allow collaboration. It can also be defined as websites with user generated content (UGC). I think, Shaadi.com is all UGC and has always been interactive. In terms of incorporating new technologies into our websites, we continue to do so pretty regularly. We are constantly upgrading our technology - if it provides more benefits to the end-consumers. Once people start collaborating in different ways, and different Internet applications are incorporated into the websites to enable such collaboration, more possibilities will open up. It can impact business but frankly I don't see much change to our business model, in next couple of years. However, over time the Internet space could change. If it does change, we will embrace it.

 

Anupam Mittal:

Ultimately, the kind of technology infrastructure and solutions that one desires starts with the clarity of one's objective. Our objective is clear: we want to be in the top-five percentile in terms of speed, current usage, performance, etcetera. Once you have defined that, then it is really a question of a few things: first, finding the right infrastructure partner is critical. Our partners have been around for six years now. Their services have been wonderful and have never let us down. Once you have such a partner, half the battle is won. Second, you need to have the right processes and systems to upgrade, control and monitor your infrastructure. To have the right people for the job is key. The people you bring in to manage infrastructure at the top level is critical. The person who manages People Interactive's technology infrastructure has been here right from the beginning. So, he understands the intricacies of the organization and its technological needs.

Anupam Mittal:

We saw this sort of sudden growth in the early days of the Internet. It was a time when you planned for about a lakh users and you saw five million. They crashed servers and choked bandwidth. We haven't seen that in last few years. As I said, if you have the right infrastructure partner and responsiveness is good, you can turn things around pretty quickly. We generally try to provide enough room to absorb surges in traffic. Over time, we have learnt which marketing or branding activities will lead to surges in traffic. We proactively plan for that. We like to start small and scale as we grow further. Our model for scalability is more incremental. I also believe that unless companies adopt a managed-service model, it becomes hard to manage surges.

 

Anupam Mittal:

The CIO plays a critical role for us. I may not rate it higher than the role of a CFO but would definitely treat it at par. We have been without a CFO since the beginning. Though we have a head of finance right now, there were a few years when we had done without a head of finance. But without a CTO, we would have fallen flat on our face.