Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

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.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

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.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

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.

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

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.

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!