Author Archives: Amit

Growth Hacking Video Links: The Call-To-Action that gets you best Click-Through Rates!

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I recently got this email from someone – they wanted me to check out a couple of videos and had put the video duration next to the YouTube link. Made me smile – I know this is a psychological trick to get better click-through (or open) rates.

How do I know? Because I have tried this out myself, did some informal A/B testing, and it works!. The open rates were significantly higher than what they would be without the duration cue! Sharing examples below

So – If you’re emailing a video link to someone, or sharing on social media – just add a small text with its duration.

But how does the psychology of this hack work? I’d imagine this is what happens –

When you share the video link, you have 3 segments of possible user responses

A – the people who’ll anyway click the link
B – the people who are “maybe/maybe-not” fence sitters
C – the folks who’ll definitely not click

By putting the duration next to the link, you’re building up the right user expectancy. In the short attention span world of today, you’ve given them an advance warning – the “outer limit to the time investment” they have to make in the video. And this cue is enough to make some of the folks in “B” click (which they would not have otherwise!). This is the incremental click-through rate that accrues to you and shows up in the overall metric.

I write this post for a couple of reasons. The first (obvious) one is to share the productivity hack, so others can benefit from it. But the second (and more imp) reason is to point out how small, seemingly silly (or innocuous) details in how the product is designed & built has a disproportionate impact on the key metrics. Attention to (the minutest) details was one of Steve Job’s superpowers!

DigiLocker as the Govt’s “Khata” app: Bangalore’s land records pilot project is path-breaking!

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India’s technology ecosystem has been rife with excitement about “Khata” apps. We have a bevy of new age, funded tech startups building “khata” applications – these are simple accounting, book-keeping or transaction recording systems for India’s 65 million SMEs, kirana shops etc to replace the paper chits/slips (or “khatas”) that shopkeepers tuck under their counter seats to record customer ledgers.

In the government ecosystem, the term “khata” (while having similar connotations) takes on a different but far more important use case – land records. It has been a practice to issue “paper khata certificates” as proof of land ownership in diff parts of the country by the respective state/municipal govts (since land is a state subject). As one might imagine, this is at the root of much of the forgery, corruption, trickery, malpractices (remember Khosla ka Ghosla??) that happens with land and real estate in the country. While baseline digitization of land/property records has been undertaken at many places (see this example from the Jharkhand state govt), the “paper khata” is clearly one of the weakest links in the chain.

In a path-breaking digitization project, the Bangalore Municipal Corporation (Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike BBMP) is scrapping the paper khata issuing system and instead issuing its digital versions into DigiLocker! The erstwhile paper khatas have been declared null & void, and its digitally signed electronic equivalents containing “46 kinds of information, including photo of the property, photo of the owner, property identity number (PID), apart from registration information” will be made available in the citizens’ DigiLocker accounts. The project is currently being piloted in 3 wards of Bangalore, but will be extended to all 100 wards eventually in a phased manner. Details of the project (christened e-Aasthi) are available in these newspaper reports.
khata bangalore land records
From a DigiLocker standpoint as well, this is a break-through development. Here’s why – DigiLocker has enabled digitization and citizen access of over 4 billion records spanning tax (PAN), transport (DL/RC), identity (eAadhaar), education (school/college/univ certificates & degrees) et al, but land/property records have largely been a non-mover. Some states have previously issued property related leave & license agreements, sale deeds etc. but that’s few and far between. In general, enabling property/land records digitization and subsequent citizen access has been a REALLY tough nut to crack. If this Bangalore project succeeds and citizens get ready, on-demand mobile access to their (digitally signed from source!) authentic property ownership records, that’s a giant leap forward! Undoubtedly other states will follow soon and these “paper khata certificates” can be a thing of the past.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed to see how this unfolds!