Author Archives: Amit

Digital Spring Cleaning Checklist!

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As our lives increasingly go digital, it is useful to periodically run a status check on our online assets and relationships. I recently did my annual online services (subscriptions) spring cleaning. It threw up multiple surprises & uncovered leakages.. sharing a quick checklist here

  • Unused Subs: Found 2 subscriptions I’m paying, but not using.. promptly killed!

  • Broken Subs: Found multiple sububscriptions that got broken by the RBI credit card issue took some time, but painstakingly resurrected each one!

  • Dual Billing Shocker: Turns out my Audible a/c was being billed both by Amazon India (in Rs) & Amazon USA (in $). So weird – emailed customer support, they acknowledged the problem & reversed the US dual billing. What a relief!

  • Android PlayStore Billing: Realized this has ballooned into a sizable, slippery list. Found one paid kids app I was unaware of. Seems like the handiwork of my 10yr old daughter… led to some family drama:)

  • Foreign news sites: Foreign news publication Economist, NYT, WSJ have HORRIBLE a/c settings. Confusing navigation, bad UX & findability. My WSJ account has no record of my invoices of 2yrs! Some of these services have been applauded for overcoming their print legacies and growing online subscriptions strongly… I’d guess that turnaround is largely confined to news consumption interfaces… they still have a long way to go on basic hygiene stuff.

  • Free Subs: But credit where its due – NYT has offered 8 months free subscription (Nov21-Jun22) due to RBI billing issue (in India). Thanks NYT. Guess every cloud has a silver lining… some good finally coming out of the RBI CC mess:)

  • Only Monthly Billing: Not sure why, but some services only have monthly billing (e.g YouTube premium). Hello.. its 2022, the Big G cant do quarterly or annual bills?

  • Unsubscribe Flow UX Dark Patterns: Came across UX dark patterns in unsubscribe flows of multiple services! Customer retention ninjas at work:)

  • Indian Subscriptions: Its heartening to see Indian startups catching up. I am paying for multiple Indian services now… this was zilch 2-3 years back!

Last but not least, replugging my old rant about the need for a meta news subscription service (instead of signing up individually with each). Hasn’t the world made any progress on this?

Recommend everyone does this spring cleaning once in a while… you’ll end up saving some $$, besides getting on top of things!

MapMyIndia IPO

To be a defacto technology superpower, India needs a 1000 MapMyIndias!

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MapmyIndia goes public today… this is a big day not only for the company, but also for India’s tech ecosystem. Here’s why

  • This is a “defacto” tech product company that started making digitalmaps in 1995 (before Google was even born) #NotMeToo
  • I emphasize the word “defacto”, because this isn’t a technology enabled play like ecommerce, nor a foreign market focused Indian SAAS startup… it’s a technology platform company that was born/bred in and for India [this is my earlier essay on how India lacks platform companies]
  • It’s a clear market leader in India’s B2B mapping space, as opposed to B2C where Googlemaps is the default choice
  • I also think going forward (on a decadal timeframe), given the emerging geopolitical landscape around big tech dominance, security, privacy, sovereign data protection laws et al, this is one space among others, where foreign players will be at a disadvantage and gradually the ball may start tilting towards Indian players

Incidentally, I wrote about MapmyIndia (15 yrs ago!) way back in 2007 when this blog Webyantra had a diff avatar and was amongst the most widely read blogs about Indian internet & tech. I had forgotten about it, but Rohan’s tweet brought back distant memories!

The stock market pundits will have endless commentary about the IPO – valuation, pricing, low free float, OFS, growth/profitability prospects given Googlemaps etc. But none of that should take us away from the bigger tech picture here – this is the IPO of a homegrown, India originated, #NotMeToo, India centric technology product company.

Congrats to Rohan and his parents for painstakingly building MMI out over the years… they saw this coming 26 years ago! Here’s hoping a thousand MMIs bloom in India… if we want our nation to be a technology super-power! #ProductNation

(Pic credit https://twitter.com/BSEIndia/status/1473139794238578691)