Happy Birthday to ion
One year ago, on this day, we launched ion, the ipod charger. The launch was just one blog post. That’s it. Within two hours, Atul Chitnis bought the first ion in our online store. We celebrated.
But hold on, let’s rewind the story a bit.
As people might have heard in our recent running talk, it all started when Vikram, Niara and myself started training together for the 2006 Bangalore Marathon.
During one of our runs, Vikram told us that he had created his own charger circuit and came up with this wacky idea of manufacturing and selling them. I never took it seriously but Niara did. She convinced Vikram to take the idea forward. Nearly six months later, the idea had taken wings.
The prototype looked nothing like something we could sell.
Later, I was planning to attend the first proto.in. Vikram and Niara joined in and we went together. I was totally floored by the energy of the people there and the fire in the eyes of these startup guys. I told those two that they should talk to this guy called Arif Vakil of “Vakil Housing” fame and how he was looking to fund interesting ideas. Immediately, Vikram swung into action, approached Vakil and started explaining the idea. Surprisingly, he showed interest!
Luckily, Vikram had brought his prototype and went to fetch it from his bag. Then Vikram started searching for his iPod when Arif said “Let’s try with my iPod”. Wow. That moment. Imagine if your VC is a would-be customer and the product solves a problem that he himself faces. Nothing like it.
We connected Arif’s iPod to the charger and the charger to a power socket. The blue LED came on. The iPod was showing the charging symbol. We all had smiles on our faces. Arif was impressed and went on to even ask us where we live and so on. That means he really was interested.
After that incident, it was time to head back. Vikram was on an all-time high. That was when we were all convinced that we were on to something. And throughout the bus journey from Chennai to Bangalore, those two convinced me to join ion. I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, it was a Saturdays-only part-time thing. Yeah, Vikram and me had discussed about such things endlessly. But still, I wasn’t sure.
I thought about it the next day and thought “Why not?” I don’t lose much if it bombs and it was a good excuse for us three to keep meeting up.
For various reasons, we didn’t approach Vakil for funding and put in the initial investment ourselves. And we went from shopping for running shoes to shopping for resistors and capacitors and modifying Drupal code.
Then there was the countless decision-making sessions like coming up with poster ideas and then the stories about how we decided the logo for ion, how we landed in trouble with the cops, and finally the launch of ion.
We sent an email to friends asking them to forward to their company internal groups and anybody who would be interested. We also gave posters to put up on their company notice boards. That was pretty much our ‘marketing strategy’. The idea was that we marketed it as an iPod charger and our target audience was the techie crowd.
We marketed it as an iPod charger even though it will work with anything that can be charged with USB right from mobile phones to battery chargers. We use the term iPod charger because that’s what people have most demand for. The second part about targeting techies was because they will be the ones who will look to finding a solution that is cheaper than the official charger which costs 2000 rupees but still is reliable. Ours was one-fifth that price.
The most humbling experience for me was trying to sell ion outside the Aerosmith concert. That was such a good example of a wrong person (me) in the right place doing the job not suited for him. But yet Niara and me did it for ion.
Then came the amazing customer feedback and our highest point - getting featured in a half-page article in Economic Times:
And yes, Arif congratulated us.
But you want to know what’s the craziest part? We made just 200 pieces of ion. Yes, that’s it. 200 ions. Crazy. And see how far it went.
After that ET article happened, we ran out of stock. That was six months ago. Many people have asked me why we’re not selling more ions. So I thought I’ll tell the hidden part of the story today - We never intended ion to live longer than those 200 pieces. It was just a business experiment for us, nothing more. Why? To learn what it takes to convert an idea to a reliable quality product and take it to market.
We never called ourselves a startup back then. That has happened only in hindsight. In fact, I was in it because I thought I could help since I had some experience in maintaining my own websites and maybe I can learn a thing or two in running an ecommerce store.
After we managed to the finish selling the batch of 200 pieces and made decent profit, Vikram moved to USA, Niara moved on to other things in life and so did I.
But the response hasn’t stopped. Even last Thursday (Apr 17), we got emails from four different people in a single day asking when we’ll be back in stock. Crazy, I tell you.
I have had so many personal failures and failed projects in the past few years that it seemed stupid to kill a successful project of ours. So Vikram and myself have been working on reviving ion. We hope to be back with a batch of second generation ions in the next month.
The experiment continues.
Searches leading to this website
I gleaned this from a random look at the website logs for two weeks.
P.S. What does he/she mean by using orkut effectively? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
My first Adsense cheque
After opening a strange envelope with a Sweden stamp on it, I was holding my first Google Adsense cheque.
Not only did I get money, but later in the day, Google (Mail) gave me career advice as well:
Heh.
Wah, Kya Theme Hain
Chug’s awesome design for my website has been getting great reviews and has been featured on many design review sites:
4 things
Usually I don’t pay attention to memes because everybody’s doing it at the same time and it gets boring quickly, but for once, I decided to play along. Pradeep has tagged me to make lists of four things. So here goes:
Four movies I can watch over and over:
Four songs I can listen to over and over (there are too many songs I like, I’m just listing 4 songs I want to listen to, right now):
- King of Sorrow by Sade
- Dillagi title song
- Roja instrumental theme by A R Rahman
- 1 Stp Klosr by Linkin’ Park (Reanimation version)
Four TV shows I love to watch (I don’t really watch TV anymore):
- F.R.I.E.N.D.S
- Full House
- The Big Fight on NDTV
- Any show on Discovery Travel & Living
Four places I would rather be right now:
- Any place in India listed in the Outlook Traveller Trekking Guide
- New Zealand
- On the terrace of my home
- With a friend
Four websites I visit daily:
- Bloglines
- Google News for India
- Wikipedia (for the Featured Article of the Day)
- GMail
Dakshina Kannada Police
I would’ve never expected to see the Dakshana Kannada Police blogging. They have updates on the ZP/TP election results. Also, they have entries in Kannada.
(via Sharath)
More Conversations
Apparently, Doug Kaye and Team ITC were not satisfied with ITConversations and now they’re onto an even grander vision. I say more power to them!
Richie blog rich
My blog is worth $32,178.78.
How much is your blog worth?
YPodcast
Podcasts.Yahoo.com went live today.
It’ll help you find and listen to podcasts as well as create your own podcasts.
Many of my friends in Bangalore are part of the team that created this. Kudos to them for converting a concept to a product launch in an amazing short period!
Update : Interestingly, Yahoo! announced this via a podcast. Very appropriate.
The shortest interview possible
P.S. No, I did not select that photo.
