Launch of ion2
Last week, we quietly relaunched ion, our USB
charger. The very next day, we shipped ions to
customers in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. And an hour
ago, I shipped one to Bhubaneswar. It’s good to be back! 
First of all, thanks to all those 96 people who wrote to us in the past few months who kept asking us when we’ll be back in stock. The fact that there are people really interested kept us going. And we really needed that boost.
I’m sure there are a lot more people who would have also visited the website, saw the ‘Out of stock’ sign but not written to us. We felt bad in having to turn away so many people for so long. But we are very conscious of delivering the best goods, hence we ended up taking a lot of time to do it right.
<shameless plug>
The good news is that the next generation of ion, unimaginatively called “ion2″ is here and now available.
Not only does ion really solve a pain point, what sets it apart from other USB chargers are:
- Is the smallest USB charger available in the Indian market.
- Of very high quality. It is CE certified.
- Works anywhere in the world. No more voltage conversions.
- Works with almost any device that can be charged via USB, including all kinds of mp3 players (the entire iPod family, Zune, iRiver, etc.), mobile phones, and so on.
- Advantage of ion working with so many devices is that you no longer
need to say “Do you have an iPod charger” or “Do you have a Nokia
6300 charger?”…
Just ask “Do you have an ion?”
</shameless plug>
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.
Vegetable 2.0
The other day, mom was telling me why she has completely switched from the traditional neighbourhood HOPCOMS (Horticultural Produce Cooperative Marketing Societies) outlet to the fresh@ store to buy the vegetables. I got curious and asked to explain. She mentioned several points:
- HOPCOMS doesn’t allow the customer to choose the vegetables/fruits, they can’t pick the good ones. fresh@ allows it and this ensures quality.
- A minimum quantity of 250gm is imposed at HOPCOMS, but no such thing at fresh@.
- fresh@ is open from 7am-11pm compared to HOPCOMS which is open for 8 hours and is closed during the afternoon.
- fresh@ provides all kinds of items, like milk, curds, rice compared to going to HOPCOMS, neighbourhood shop i.e. different places for these items.
- fresh@ provides separate covers for each item whereas HOPCOMS requires customers to carry their own bags.
- fresh@ stores perishable food in the freezer whereas HOPCOMS keeps it in the open.
- fresh@ has a much better ambience and a more friendly environment (don’t underestimate this)
- They have many offers and a points systems - this is not important according to mom, but if you’re anyway going to buy from fresh@, people are going to use it.
- Amazing thing is that the cost is not the differentiator!
- The important thing is that mom never intends to go back to the old way. If fresh@ goes poof one day, it is going to have a negative effect. This shows that fresh@ is really making a difference.
This brings me to the 2.0 part… consider how fresh@ takes a leap forward in bettering the customer’s life. Compare that to the latest mumbo jumbo startups out there. Are they really adding value?
I think the first thing a wannabe-entrepreneur should consider is whether it is a must-have or a nice-to-have utility that they are creating.
I mean how many more photo sharing sites or video sharing sites do you really need? And how many more social networking sites?
(Well, on the other hand, if you can sell your me-too social networking site for Rs. 39.3 crore, sure why not?)
But seriously, how many people really know all the India-specific social bookmarking sites out there? Ever heard of xoomly.com? Well, neither did I until just now. And I’m probably never going back again.
I don’t mean to pick on only ’social’ websites, but I feel many other hardware and software startups out there are solutions looking for a problem. (On a lighter note, a christmas tree that lights up when I connect it to my laptop via USB can be really handy).
As Paul Graham says:
Let me repeat that recipe: finding the problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it. Simple as it seems, that’s the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.
I can say that this is true because of (yes, you know it was coming) our experience in ion.
In fact, in one of the interviews we have given, we were asked the question “Why a product like ion?”, and we replied:
“To scratch an itch.” Vikram didn’t want to spend money on the expensive official Apple iPod Charger, and being an electronics geek, he designed a circuit himself and started using it to charge his iPod.
Then, we discussed about many people who are facing the same problem. For example, people who are not aware of the official charger (or don’t want to purchase such an expensive one) even leave their computer switched on overnight just to charge their iPod! That’s a lot of unnecessary wastage of electricity.
There are many unbranded chargers available in the market, but it is sold on the condition that it may or may not work, and there is no assurance on the quality, or even that your iPod will be safe when using these chargers.
The charger that Vikram built was a perfect fit to solve all these problems, with reliability, and within a reasonable cost. We got together to take it to market.
The bad news is that ion ran out of stock sooner than we expected after the recent Economic Times article and we apologize for the several customers who wrote in to us asking when it’ll be available. We’re working on it and will update you all as soon as possible.
One customer said he desperately needed it before Christmas because he’s going for a long vacation and he wants to be able to use his iPod during the trip.
It feels good to know that we are solving a real problem. It’s not life-changing but it does meet Paul Graham’s criteria.
ion on a roll
First, there was the Mint financial newspaper’s article on “casualpreneurs” in the July 8th, 2007 edition which featured ion. FYI, Mint is a joint collaboration between the Hindustan Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Then, there was an article in the BTW magazine’s 10th September 2007 edition on “netpreneurs” which featured ion.
And yesterday, there was a huge half-page article on ion in the Economic Times! (Bangalore edition)
I can’t help but think on how much hair-pulling, teeth-gnashing and forehead-slapping happens behind the scenes. But to see all the response from customers as well as an article in the Economic Times dedicated exclusively to us just six months after launch makes it seem all worthwhile.
So, thank you to all our dear customers for making ion so successful!
And some of you actually like it so much that you spread the word
around for us!
P.S. Yeah, we know we don’t look great in that big photo, but hey, our
excuse is that we were too busy working on ion
OpenCoffeeClub 2
Yesterday morning, I dropped in on the OpenCoffeeClub Bangalore, 2nd edition. It’s supposed to be a place where people interested in entrepreneurship show up, have coffee together and discuss.
The theme of the meet was marketing. There were some interesting discussions, and the one that interested me was when Pratik (and friend) from Muziboo explained some of their experiences followed by the subsequent discussions and free advice and suggestions thrown in. One good advice was to actively market Muziboo to the teachers and students of the various music schools, “there are around 10 of them in just the Koramangala area”, and so on.
I was pleasantly surprised to see people have actually heard about ion and I was asked to tell the story of how we chose our poster design, people found it amusing and relevant (”market research”) at the same time. I gave some inputs that offline marketing, but targeted offline marketing really does help.
Although I didn’t mention it at the meet, we did stand outside the Aerosmith concert and marketed ion to people. That was such a humbling experience. Sales is hard.
Coming back to OpenCoffeeClub, the mix of people was not surprising - mostly “software engineers” who are ashamed of the term. The interesting people were a lawyer, a chartered accountant, a director of the entrepreneurship wing of an IT college, a non-IT businessman, etc.
The lawyer made an interesting point that she couldn’t get one of her contacts to come visit OpenCoffeeClub because 2 hours every 2 weeks sounded like too much time for him. That’s interesting because if someone was really passionate about their startup/business/passion, they would be out there working hard at it, instead of talking about it. Not to take away anything from the meet, but people need to be out there “doing their thing”.
I guess where the meet plays a role is it gives a support network to those people who are about to start off on their venture and need the confidence and advice in interactions with others, and the feeling that other people are into it too. Maybe that explains why there were more wannabes than been-there-done-that kind of people. However, the intensity of people that they wanted to do something was quite palpable. It reminded me of the title of Gusteau’s cookbook in Ratatouille : “Anyone can cook”. If you need to be in such an atmosphere, you should think of attending the next meet (it happens on alternate Sundays).
It also reminded me of a chance meeting I had with the founder and CEO of Pepper Square at the Flex Users’ Group meet last Friday. It was refreshing to meet someone whose mission was to make people understand the value of “design”. Even though he’s 42 years old (although he appeared half that age), he still has the “we’ll change the world” attitude in him. Inspiring stuff.
ion logo designs
One of the many parts in the creation of ion was the designing of the look and feel of the product.
We do very limited direct selling (we sell mostly online) and from what I’ve seen, people just see the finishing and packaging of the ion and instantly buy it. My understanding is that based on how the product looks and feels, we assume that the same level of “attention to detail” has been maintained even in the internals of the product. In other words, “if it looks good, the product must work good”. Heck, we even apply the same logic to boys and girls, we obviously go for the good looking ones… must be something in the genes.
As I was saying, good look and feel increases the “sellability” of the product as well as the desire of the customer to buy the product. It so turned out that we were lucky to arrive at a combination of both good packaging and a solid product (thanks to Vikram’s electronics prowess).
We sought help from a friend Diwan Babu (of Guru ColorTech) who did some “amateur” designing for us and it came out really well. He made some four designs (well, actually three since two are variations of the same basic design):
All four were good designs, and we didn’t know how to choose between them.
My view was that I didn’t like the black one because the long ‘i’ makes it look like ‘j’ and the red one was too bright. I was biased towards the blue horizontal one, especially because I remembered what Philip once said:
“Light blue is a universally neutral colour in that all other colours that exist are either offensive or have negative connotations in some religion, or culture.”
We happened to be sitting in front of a Nike showroom thinking about what to do, and this crazy idea of asking real people came up (okay, I admit it was me who suggested it, but catching random people and talking to them is not my thing, so those two did most of the hard work). Several people, who tried to walk in to the store, were bombarded by us asking about which logo they would prefer. Just to make sure we were doing a proper survey, we changed the order of the logos (so that they’re not biased towards the one in the center, etc.), we asked people of different age groups, and so on.
It was a clear decision - the blue (horizontal) logo was going to be the look of the ion.
After that, we used the blue logo as our basis to create many more designs such as the posters, the banner and the final box design:
It was “too blue” all the way, heh.
ionized
The past couple of weeks has been a rollercoaster ride for us and for ion.
Sales has been very good so far, but our observation is that people in India are still hesitant to buy online from reasons such as credit card security concerns (understandably so) to recently Paypal changing their UI making it more difficult for the average person to understand what to do. So, we started accepting offline payments and that has worked out well.
What’s the response to ion? Simply amazing. I mean if you think about it, it’s just a charger (<marketing-pitch>and works really really well</marketing-pitch>), and yet people are so appreciative and supportive of what we are trying to do. The clincher is that it solves a real problem. I’ve often heard the phrase “I just needed something like this.”
As we say in our about page:
Moral of the story : “See a need, fill a need” — ‘Robots’ movie.
The three biggest points about “ion” (both the company and the product) that people like are:
We took the idea to execution. This alone amazes people. I still remember what Jace once said: “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”
The statement we make : “Made in India. Available only in India.” and “We are just Indians who want to make products for India.” Nothing much to be said here, except that we mean it and it’s not something we say lightly or say it for the sake of it. And no, we’re not going to rephrase it as “I’m just an Indian who wants to develop products in India for everyone in the World” as someone suggested.
We have a very good finishing - the ion itself and the packaging looks very good and has a professional presentation. At the right price point.
Another aspect is how word-of-mouth has helped ion and we were banking on that because we do not have a marketing budget other than the posters we are giving to our friends to put up in their company notice boards. Most people came to know about ion through emails, and it’s surprising how effective email forwards are - the chain just keeps going on and on, and many times my friends had come to know even before I sent it to them because someone had already forwarded it!
Processing all the ion emails is both a chore and fun…
The worst mail we’ve got is:
first time in india single click orkut programs launching a product,website,service etc. but dont have enough money to market your product,service,website etc.
there are more than 3 crore registered resident indian on orkut out of 8 crore indian internet user.noboby can question the potentional of orkut.
orkut single click tools can help u to reach 3 crore indians at cheapest price possible.
the features of orkut single click program are as follows:
1)Single click to scrap all your friends. 2)A Single click can directly take u to a user’s scrap book or album 3)A single click directly creates a topic in all the groups u have joined 4)A Single click helps u to join a community. 5)IDEAL for people who frequently use ORKUT,people who want to market their product.
Free stuff included : 1)orkut FAN FLOODing 2)DATABASE of 8 crore email address 3)FREE orkut tweaks
i m gonna give this full package in a cd for 500 rs and shipping 50 Rs extra
plz call 098________(Editor’s Note: Full number not reproduced to protect the guilty)
Some of the best mails we have received are:
I would like to congratulate all three of you for your New product - “ion | power your music”. I wish you three develop more and more usable products for all of us. I would like to buy it even though i don’t have any of the product which needs usb charging.
and
If you are devising a marketing strategy for your company and this product, I will be glad to offer any assistance. I have worked in pre-Sales Europe for quite some time and my experience, given the remarkable nature of your product may prove helpful.
and
I am a B.Tech-III Electronics student. Came to know about you through some forward. I actually have few such ideas (related to electronics), but don’t know how to commercialize them. Can you help me out? Though I can get placed in some MNC easily, I am more interested in implementing my ideas.
I think this last mail was the best we’ve ever got. I’m starting to believe what Vikram says that more and more of this generation are thinking like this, and “want to do things for India”, and he/we mean that in a non-political non-hyper-patriotic manner. It’s just that simple “ness” in us.
And finally, some of the blogs that have written about us are:
All in all, there’s more work to be done, but so far so good. There’s more to it behind the scenes, and perhaps I’ll write about it in another post.
ion and the police
This incident happened about three weeks ago when the preparations for ion were in full swing, and Vikram and myself worked all day long to create the posters for ion as well as the website itself. At one point, we realized that we were spending most of our time in choosing just the color and placement of text, and we spent some 20+ min just to decide the font of the apostrophe in “plug ‘n play”!
At around 6 o’ clock, we were dead tired (at least I was, Vikram said he had never seen so lazy before) and decided to go get the posters printed but I didn’t want to, so he suggested instead to go for the new place that he went for cycling to recently. We went by bike through a zig-zag maze of roads and after 3-4 km, suddenly ended up in a place which seemed to be deserted! It was a new layout being formed by destroying the hill and the greenery, the signs of urbanization marked by destruction, the green being replaced by the grey (concrete).
We climbed up the rocks, just sat down there in the darkness and we had a long discussion about random things and sometimes deep things. Then, we noticed there was a huge reddish moon in the sky. Simply beautiful. I was taking photographs.
The ion : ipod charger, mobile charger and more
For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product.
Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day!
I’m talking about “the ion” - a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss.
In fact, it works with any device that charges through USB, whether it is your iRiver, or any mp3 player, or your mobile phone!
Some more cool features:
- The ion is portable, you can carry it around anywhere, especially to places where you will not have access to a computer.
- Do you really need to switch on your computer the whole night just to charge your iPod?
- You can listen to your music when your iPod is getting charged by the ion, instead of staring at the ‘Do not disconnect’ message.
- An awesome looking product. A great companion for the iPod.
All this for just Rs.399 only. As a bonus, you get solid reliability because the ion has a voltage regulator circuit that protects your device from power surges. Most existing charger products out there do not have such protection.
We’re going to get the product out in the stores soon, but* the quickest way to
get an ion is to buy it online right now!
We’ll also be trying to get the posters put up in all the IT companies so that
more people get to know about the ion. If you can help us with this, please do
drop us a line, we’d be glad to hear from you.
If you want to grab the posters yourself, you can get the digital
version and set it as your wallpaper and help us
spread the word about ion
If you are curious about how the ion was born and how it was transformed into a real product that we are holding in our hand today, you can read about the interesting history of the ion.
Last but not the least, if you have any sorts of questions, doubts, queries or feedback, please do write to us.
* Due to various circumstances, ion will not be available in stores, it will only be available online!
