This blog advocates thinking of local opportunities and bootstrapping your way to success with local strategies. Someone may think business principles are universal so what is the difference in the way a bootstrapper will work in India. Here is an example which I think will not exist in a bootstrapping blog of a western writer.
As customer service standards are increasing in India there is significant demand for call centers serving the domestic market itself. Also with increased phone penetrations, teleselling is a strategy no company can ignore. Its a natural evolution if you consider that all the call centers in India were earlier operating from within US serving their own domestic market. Hence, if you have been associating call centers with only offshoring please don’t. Outsourcing yes. It is an ideal function to outsource to a specialist company since it can handle seasonal spikes, experience from across the customers, investment in call center equipment, recruitment/training of personnel etc.
As a bootstrapped Indian startup you want to minimize investments, think local and be creative. All of these come together if you were to create a call center in a really low cost town like say Allahbad. Hmm … lets list fundamental problems – no electricity so power backups will kill a bootstrapper and no english speaking talent. Apart from that there are pluses – low salaries, low attrition, low rentals, low deposits.
Now what if we were targetting only Hindi speaking customers. That seems nice: suddenly this looks like a niche which is not crowded and being in Allahbad seems like an advantage given that people speak better than average Hindi in that place. Suddenly one of the problems has disappeared and almost seems like an advantage.
The other one i.e. infrastructure seems less tractable. Even in bigger cities a full backup is needed to even start the operation and this doesn’t really suit a bootstrapper. Let’s consider the workings of a call center in a nutshell
- For customer service an incoming number with multiple lines is needed. A switch is needed to operate the voice menu and route the calls.
- For tele selling even if each person has an independent line its not a problem
- The result of the call need to be logged in a computer program
To reduce costs, lets drop incoming at the outset. Becoming a telesales/outbound only call center reduces capital investment and hassles. Its an easier sale to businesses also especially if you create an incentive based pricing. If a phone company in Allahbad agrees to give multiple land line phones there is no need for local power to make calls. You can substitute with long battery cell phones at a short notice when needed. Now also break the process of logging results into paper and online. Create paper based processes which are later transcribed online. Since labor is cheaper in India, the western insistence of full automation need not be followed.
This for me is an good example of a bootstrapped Indian business. We have taken cognizance of a typical Indian problems and have created a ‘thought-business’ in the spirit of this blog. We could really make a detailed business plan out of this and not gloss over details but that is left as an exercise for the more dilligent/interested reader 🙂
Bootstrap in Bangalore 