Today is the second birthday of our ION USB Charger and we are happy to announce that it is now available in a new and improved packaging!

We needed some improvements to our packaging because:

1. Our previous packaging did not have the product visible.
2. The packaging needs to have a hook so it can be hung – that is how all accessories are placed in a retail store these days.
3. We had room for improvement on the look of the box.

The new packages arrived in a box:

And we soon formed an assembly line. I removed the ions from the previous packaging:

Vikram filtered out the new packages, including rejecting any damaged ones:

Varun folded the boxes and put the new ions in them:

It doesn’t sound glamorous, isn’t prestigious to talk about, but it sure was a lot fun and exciting. That’s what startups are about!

Here are the newly-packaged ions stacked back in the box:

Just to put things in perspective, here is our packaging and its size compared to the competition:

And here is our previous and new packaging:

Here is the sleek “product photography” version:

You can grab an ION with the new improved packaging at www.ion.co.in

Note: Cross-posted from our company blog

It’s been nearly 5 months since I last quit my job. Five months. Wow. It’s weird because it doesn’t feel that long.

I spent most of the first few months whiling away, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I did have some plans though. For one, I was hoping to go for an M.S. in the USuAl places but the American universities didn’t think well enough of me and asked me to stay back, heh.

I wasn’t disappointed though. I thought I’ll spend some time in gaining some skills and get back to another job in the computer science areas that I wanted to explore.

But as John Lennon would say “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”

Vikram and I were working on reviving our iPod Charger business and since I didn’t have anything in particular to do, I did some of the running around. However, we still didn’t have a big picture in mind, just that we wanted it to continue.

Suddenly one day, Vikram called from USA and said that he had a brainwave to improve one of our ideas. We had last discussed it nearly six months earlier and shelved it because we didn’t think it would work. It suddenly dawned on us that the improved idea passes all our viable business criteria, especially the parameter that it is actually useful to people, it is doable, and it belongs more in the must-have category as opposed to the nice-to-have category.

After that conversation, everything changed.

Vikram quit a nice cushy job in USA, ditched his H1 visa and is back in Bangalore. He was so sure about this that his colleague Varun also got convinced about the idea and moved back to India.

Here we are, three people who have quit their jobs and working to create a new product. I hate using the latest buzzwords, so I’ll just say, yes we have our own company now. We don’t have any salary and we have lot of work.

A domain name I had registered long ago suddenly came into use. It was going to be the name of our company – IONLAB:

The ion was our first product we created, manufactured and marketed during weekends. Excited by its success, we are now working full-time on making our own products. Hence the “ion” in our name.

We are focused on designs and ideas, and match them to our capabilities. Hence the “lab” in our name, which emphasizes that we are about taking ideas to execution.

We have been having a ball of a time working on our own ideas full-time and gaining experience in expanding our ion business.

Regarding our specific idea, there’s no point in talking about it this early but we’ve described it a bit on our products page.

FWIW, I have no idea how far we will go and what will happen in the future. You may never even hear about us or our product. But one thing’s for sure, we’re going to give this our best shot and we’ll work to make it happen.

As we wrote in our company weblog’s first entry:

We love putting in effort. After all, it’s our dreams and ideas. What can be more exciting than that? As Mark Cuban once said, “The one thing in our business lives is effort. Either you make the commitment to get results or your don’t.”

IONLAB is our dream, our destination.

The next experiment has begun!

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:

1. Is the smallest USB charger available in the Indian market.
2. Of very high quality. It is CE certified.
3. Works anywhere in the world. No more voltage conversions.
4. 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.
5. 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>

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. A minimum quantity of 250gm is imposed at HOPCOMS, but no such thing at fresh@.
3. fresh@ is open from 7am-11pm compared to HOPCOMS which is open for 8 hours and is closed during the afternoon.
4. fresh@ provides all kinds of items, like milk, curds, rice compared to going to HOPCOMS, neighbourhood shop i.e. different places for these items.
5. fresh@ provides separate covers for each item whereas HOPCOMS requires customers to carry their own bags.
6. fresh@ stores perishable food in the freezer whereas HOPCOMS keeps it in the open.
7. fresh@ has a much better ambience and a more friendly environment (don’t underestimate this)
8. 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.
9. Amazing thing is that the cost is not the differentiator!
10. 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:

1. “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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

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

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.

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.

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:

1. We took the idea to execution. This alone amazes people. I still remember what Jace once said: “Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.”

2. 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.

3. 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:

• Amit Agarwal
• Aarthi Ramamurthy
• Shashidhar Desai

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.

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.

(more…)