10K India Style

Today I walked part of the Hyderabad 10K with my coworkers, mostly just to promote our company.  It started with a group warmup and a live band, followed by the start of the race.  There were serious runners vying for serious prize money, but most people saw it as something fun to do on a Sunday.  Like many participants, we had no intention of completing the race.  I think we maybe completed 2K and in that distance I saw participants buying and eating ice cream and stopping for chai.  During and afterwards, the band played patriotic songs and the crowd danced and drank water and tried to get noticed by the camera for the big screen.  As a white girl with a clearly Indian company, I stood out a little.  I was interviewed by 2 local news stations (I don’t have a TV so I don’t know if I actually got air time).  Hopefully it’s all good press for GreenMango.  It was sure fun for those of us who turned out.

Other parts of the race were pretty much the same as what I’ve seen in the US.  There is a lot of corporate sponsorship and corporate groups running together.  This particular event was the first major public event in Hyderabad since the recent events in Mumbai, so there were moments of silence and words of support for everyone there.  I was impressed that the event had a large turnout despite the Mumbai attacks.

Workin' for the Man-go

This is my third week at GreenMango and I’m loving it. I’ve had a chance to go out “in the field” and see our sales staff recruit vendors for the website. These sales associates go down every narrow street and alley in their territories. One of the biggest hurdles is gaining the trust of these vendors, as they are initially skeptical of any new model. It is also difficult for some of these vendors to understand the nature of a web search; they don’t see how customers will find them using the GreenMango platform. As the GreenMango brand becomes more recognized, this will be less of a problem.

I'm Hydera-bad

I have officially moved to Hyderabad, India, and am almost settled in at GreenMango. This picture is the view from the balcony of my first hotel room. I’ve spent a couple of (really hot) days in the field getting locals to give their information to be put on our website. I also took a little time out to sightsee at Charminar and buy bangles. Hyderabad is interesting. It is considered a 1st tier city by most (on the same level with Mumbai and Delhi and Bangalore), but its growth is fairly recent and its official population at a mere 8 million. Supposedly it has overtaken Bangalore as the tech hub. Luckily for me, my suspicions that it is also the Indian social enterprise hub appear to be correct (e.g. SKS Microfinance is across the street from my guest house). I now have to find a decent furnished short term apartment, a formidable challenge in a city where most expats can afford luxury at a level I cannot, but most Indians live more modestly than I would prefer.

Green Mango

I’ve decided to spend a couple of months working with Green Mango, a for-profit Hyderabad firm seeking to connect service providers, like tailors and plumbers, with customers using their pilot web platform (see screenshot below). The co-founders, who came from Women’s World Bank, saw that access to capital was not enough to get BOP entrepreneurs off the ground. They also needed access to markets and important information (like pricing). I’ll be working on their volunteer capacity, public relations, and other projects I’ll dream up. I’m excited to dig into an interesting problem and live in an up-and-coming city. Many of my favorite organizations have offices in Hyderabad, including Acumen Fund and Vision Spring, as well as some of the larger Indian microfinance institutions. It is also located in a region known for the level of spice in their food, so we’ll see how that goes.

In preparation I’ve been thinking about similar models where a business is built to connect buyers and sellers. Some examples I could think of were ebay, Kiva, TripAdvisor, craigslist, Angie’s List, and Innocentive, What do these intermediaries provide? One thing is a marketplace, a connection that these buyers and sellers might not have otherwise found. Where else are you going to sell your used TV other than craigslist? But in addition some provide information: ebay ranks buyers and sellers, TripAdvisor presents hotel reviews, and Kiva puts a face on microloans. Green Mango seems to be heading in the right direction, with user rankings and shopper networks already built into their platform. I am very interested to see how Green Mango applies lessons from these other models in the areas of revenue models, customer experience, and network effects in their unique environment, where their “seller” segment will not likely have internet access at home.