Praneeth Group: An exception in Hyderabad Real Estate !!

Pre-Script : I have no investment, stakes in the company that I am writing about. I am a customer, who owed a positive recommendation and doing it here..

Across cities in India, Real estate is considered a volatile, unpredictable and unprofessional industry for the major part, with an estimate of more than 50% of builders being small timers and very un-organized. However, there is big stakes and money and we see people from other professions and industry, making entry into real estate, testing their luck. Of the three cities that I am reasonably familiar with (Blore, Chennai and Hyd), my personal impression was that Hyderabad had too many un-organized players and given the political volatility in last few years (resolved 18 months back ?), investment in real estate and home buying was far harder here. 

I took up my personal journey to buy a home in 2011 and after a lot of search with my moderate budget, I got to meet Praneeth group and Mr. Narendra K, mid-2011. With people, I am a gut-driven person and I could relate to Mr. Narendra and his team, fairly quickly. They looked raw but sincere every inch to make things happen for their customers. They were selling customized budget homes in and around Bachupally and I booked a home, early 2012 amidst so much uncertainty, in the city.  With a modest 1 apartment experience and a small gated community that they built by that time, last 4 years (2011 to 2015) has been a interesting journey for them, going places.   

This is where I bought my home and been living in it for last 6 months and happy and thankful to my gut for guiding me right in 2012. An objective analysis of the builders are pluses and minuses are below:

Pluses :

• Committed and grounded MD
• On-time delivery of most projects (mine was ahead of time)
• Accessible staff and willingness to help
• A relationship for life (not a one project stand-off)

Areas to Improve:

• quality monitoring during the execution
• technical expertise of staff

Last but not the least, it is joy to see how they stay in touch with their customers, invite them for project inaugurations and execute their referral programs sincerely. 

Latest of their events is the T20 cricket tournament that they are currently conducting within all the 9 ventures that they have built, so far. The group made an awesome cricket ground in their on-going project, Antilia  and welcomed all customers to enjoy the cricket in the Hyderabad winter. This is a testament to true professionalism and customer service, which is so rare to find in real estate. Hence, it is a joy and fair pay-back to a business group, doing their job well.

Go Praneeth Go !!

Shopping Guides and Product Discovery Platforms : Front Doors to e-commerce - Part1

It is an awesomely exciting time for e-commerce in India, with booming sales, strong brands and true technical innovation in the form of deals, shipping and payments. For the most part, customers are happy, companies are upbeat and investors are eager. However as the financials show and numbers prove, this happiness and supply surge is coming at someone's cost and these e-comm companies are burning the money to make the stakeholders happy, in the short-term. 

Let us assume everything is hunky-dory and each of these companies develop their own uniqueness, niche and their loyal customers. The segments could be in terms of verticals or some other dimension, on each of the platform. In a steady state, which is what, these companies hope to get to, pretty soon (12 to 24 months ?), the companies won't need to acquire traffic and customers through deals and other lossy offerings.  Sanity prevails and customers would start the more natural process of buying, which is 

    vague desire --> research --> selection --> buying destination

(contrary to the current state of  deals --> compare deals --> buy by price margins)

Hence, as soon as the deals dry-up and normal market dynamics prevail for the major part, we should start seeing a more logical/analytical buying patterns. This is when the product discovery and buy guiding sites would come in to play. IMO, while such service is not hard for e-commerce and other powerhouses to reproduce, the magic is that, these service got to show-up as a unbiased and independent service and hence they would play the true front doors for all of e-commerce that would be conducted within a geo or more broader.

I remember looking for a phone few months back with some preferences of OS and a specific budget in mind. The big G was the 1st stop (vague desire) to find more details and one of the top result took me to an interesting landing page (research step), which gave me a nice snapshot of some of the choices in my budget and gave me a sneak peak with a rating like score. (see right)

This looked like a wow to me, where a 3rd party site dispassionately rates a product on attributes that I care (OS/Battery/Camera or more) and assists in the simple yet effective process of logical buy decision. 

MySmartPrice Product Page

As I explored more such product discovery services, what caught my attention were two other portals. The first is mysmartprice and the second being buysmaart, which have their own uniqueness in the process of helping in a buying decision.  mysmartprice has a good view of "where to buy" and exhaustive specifications, but it seems be miss the selection and comparison of products.  However Buysmaart.com comes across as savvy/sleek enabling an easy compare and decide UX. However, buysmaart seems like a newer kid in the block and only owns the mobile phone SKU, as of now.

Sleek and Intuitive UX of Buysmaart

As these services seems to have nailed the process of steady-state buying psyche, we could even see a dramatic shift of shoppers starting at Google to a product discovery site like smartprix/buysmaart, in their journey of buying. I see these services playing the all important role of being front-doors that the buyers knock at.  

All in all, a great season for shoppers in India, where from the very thought of wanting to buy a product to service, accessories to second sales it is all, at the comfort of home and very competitive supply heavy market to shop from.,

Happy shopping and Happy Holidays !!

Carrying chosen loads only -- Being a free spirit

From the times I remember, one of the guiding light for me on judging what is good and bad has been about, 
I am below the mean or above it ? 

The mean is the popular belief or accepted norm by the society around me/relatives etc.,  It took several decades (surely more than two), lots of great friends, books to understand that, judgement of such sort on right Vs wrong, worth Vs not-worth was only stupidity. Now, when I start looking around and look-back into past, the only analogy that comes to my mind is that, who puts that load on your head ? Is that your conscious choice OR society decides and puts that on you..

Making my argument more simpler, how do you make crucial personal, family or career decisions ? Is that our inner deliberation or external factors like peers, relatives and popularity. For eg: Should I send my kid to a CBSE school, Montessori or HomeSchool him ? I tend to believe that 6 or 7 out of 10 of us decide based on what our neighbours do or relatives say than understand the topic deeply and remove any factor of peer pressure or popularity in making that decision. I am not just saying that reading up on the topic is significantly better than verbal opinions but deeper read and eliminating the boxes (peer pressure) from our heads will do us and our kids a world of good.  Often, I see the boxes we virtually carry as the Pic here. We carry those boxes so unknowingly that we never realize and also these boxes literally hide our body and face that we don't have a identity and only those boxes show-up, for us,

Contrary to that situation, if we were to carefully pick and chose which boxes to pick and align those boxes (Decisions and actions) to what we fundamentally believe, we exhibit our identity and don't succumb to societal pressure  pressure. The pressure of needing to be above mean is so high that, if we go to a new social setting, we are forced to carry these BIG/NEW boxes, we never cared or even knew before. What I mean by that : Assume, we go a house warming ceremony of a relative and see their new big bungalow or their Benz and starting feeling that you are below the mean and chase that new burden, which was never your independent need or want.  Imagine the boxes your are signing up to carry on your head !!

Epilogue: It is not easy to live life completely by our own norms and terms. However, the hope should be to head in that direction.  Being free of peer, social or financial pressures is so liberating and one doesn't need to carry the boxes on their way and at a colleagues home or at a Mall.
This brief write-up is inspired by a great soul and a dear friend, who lived life that way and became a martyr and a role-model to many of us. Read more about Malli here.

Way out for the great Indian e-tailers !!

The Indian e-tail space is one of the most exciting space to watch for the last 2 years. Be it from a customer standpoint or from a tech-savy person watching start-ups in India, there is so much to get excited and proud about. These brands made global name for themselves, making global giants to stop and think and making Indian buyers to buy, when there is almost no need to buy :). Be it Flipkart, Myntra, Jabong or Snapdeal, they seems to be taking the lions share of on-line retail sales in last two years and pushing the GMB numbers, up and further up. They created great buying experience on the web and followed it by making even better mobile buying experiences through great apps. From the state of almost no Indian product or consumer Internet company between 1998 to 2008, each of us should take immense pride in what the above players were able to do for themselves, for the Indian pride and lastly for the Indian consumers. 

As we take a closer look at the balance sheets of these companies, you will see some surprising and unpleasant facts about their ease in burning PE money at a very fast rate in the last 4 to 5 quarters. Again at the outset, this seems not unusual from the way the Amazon's of the world build, expanded, got customers and turned around to start making profits. I am sure, they had a long-haul plan for themselves and slowly and alarmingly slowly, to get ashore. (Courtesy Techcircle for the Pic above)

However, I see a few factors to be very different from Amazon's play in US/EU markets Vs the Indian markets. They are :

1. Market Uniformity in developed countries and vast diversity in India
2. Value for better service in West Vs large scale value-for-money consumer base in India (customer loyalty)
3. Evolved payments Vs Cost of CoD, CoD induced returns
4. Cost of logistics when Indian e-tail needs to reach 3rd and 4th tier town

Having said that, not all of the above are unsolvable. Logistics and making CoD cheaper is something that e-tailers can start building as common platform for everybody and compete on numerous different grounds. For example, a Special purpose vehicle is spun-off by Flipkart, Snapdeal and Govt to build CoD solution by India posts. This should use the on-ground advantage and make money movement faster and cheaper and every e-tailer can on-board to that platform at a cost, solving this for all players. Also, It is time CoD is not a free for all. Either charge for CoD or eliminate that option, based on history.

One more huge opportunity is to build brand outlets (or Franchise) in the small and medium towns, enabling e-tailers to reach buyers from these towns and small cities super easy and reaching the next 20 millions new customers. Helping semi-urban users with payment and delivering to these outlets would really help the e-tailers reach the next 20 millions customers with lower shipping costs (Pick from outlet in a town should be very easy),  Beat the local competition in those towns who have more expensive logistics and lastly break the Internet access barrier in those towns.

Harder problems are really around building loyalty and moving buyer decisions away from price comparison to quality and service. Unless that is solved, e-tailers will continue to fight and play that cut-throat game of deeper discounts and stay under the water.

The current approach of deep discounts, deals and Price wars seems to beat the basic logic of business. From the approach of taking smaller profits (Saravana stores Chennai approach) to readiness to take bleeding losses seems like a point-of-hard-to-return. I remember a good analogy of newspapers in early 2000's where TOI used to enter a city with 1/3 rd the price and make a huge entry. The story is rosy up until here. Their logic was that readers get used to reading one newspaper and they will stick to TOI, even when they eventually increase the prices, later. They were proven completely wrong, city after city where the price sensitivity beat addiction to a paper, hands-down. I have strong sense that, this may not be any different for these e-tailers. Hence, dreaming of winning by elimination may not necessarily work.  

To compete and win over the deep pockets of MNCs and other established players, each of the e-tailers need a USP and some magic that they need to create. However, playing the Valuation game with steep discounts/heavy losses is what is unsettling, to me.

To conclude, there is absolutely no free lunch and if you are getting one, it is grabbed from someone else who labored for that lunch. Over simplifying the whole chain, when goods are not produced for lower price, transportation costs exist (even higher), wholesalers needing their own profits, the consumer can't get the goods at such lower prices. Who is funding the discounts ?  If someone is funding, why are they funding and how do they plan to recover that money. Who is to lose in this game of valuation and are the small investors slated to pay for in this game where the ball will be controlled by the hidden switches/croupier ??  

Are we figurative or liberating, in our protests ?

With all the public debates in India around sexual harassments on women, Government apathy to security of women and cultural overtones which are constraining women's freedom and choices, my general feeling has been a lot of empathy and trouble. As an urban educated male, I can understand, sense and see the pain and concern of my women colleagues and other women friends. The debate around "India's Daughter" was endless with almost the whole country divided in the lines of  "to-ban or to not-t0-ban".  Hopefully the new media helped the cause and nullified the Govt enforcement significantly.                         

Coming to the core of the topic that I want to bring up here, It confuses, concerns and disturbs me watching the aggressive opinions and videos, which touch a lot of surface area with no clear call-to-action.  As a country, we have come a long way from the times of Sati, Polygamy and many dated beliefs causing unfairness against women in general and Indian women in particular. In that context, we could claim to have come a long way and right way but this journey is neither done nor complete. The Debates and Law enhancements should continue to improve equal Opportunities, fair treatment for women in all strata, in our country.   


However, what disturbs me at one end is the "all-men-are-evil" types of attacks and other utopian belief that the whole country has to become utterly safe and policing needs to happen at every corner of the country. Given our population size, literacy rates, socio-economic parity, political will and age-old cultural beliefs, it is a tall order to assume that the whole country quickly becomes safe for women (not even for men, if you ask me). We have got to understand and acknowledge the need for caution and care and do the due diligence, as and when needed. While the specifics of what comes under care and caution depends on many factors, my point is about the need for care and caution and not assume doubtless safety. Care, caution and awareness to the safety of a place that we are heading to and time of the day are the need, not just for women but for everybody who cares for material, mental and physical safety. Like one of my learned friend said, you would never walk alone in Durban downtown, after dark, irrespective of your gender.

Second part of the problem is the process and approach of addressing the core problem. There is a huge temptation to make strong statements about choice and freedom than understanding and addressing the core problem. What I mean by this is, should the conversations be more focused on  understanding the types of abuse, segmenting and understanding the data and lead towards remedial actions and Laws.  I was recently reading an article in the Hindu, where the Chennai Police seems to made huge progress in bringing down the crime against women in the city. It was a multi-pronged strategy of making complaints easy for victims, expediting trials on such crimes etc.,. While some work would surely be happening on that front, a lot of symbolic and expressionist noise gets made. It is just two weeks back that there was huge rage about the documentary but neither the prime time TV nor any other forums seems to care to follow-up on crux of the issue. Be it final fate in the  Nirbhaya case, ill-use of Nirbhaya fund or reviewing the Crime against women in last 26 after that horrific incident in Delhi. Without these follow-ups, I just see the whole gaga as yet another TRP drama.

Lastly, IMO the need of hour is a societal change in the way each of us react and help victims of violence on our roads, inside homes and in the public places.  There was an awe-inspiring example of two women successfully responding to a situation on Bangalore roads, few weeks back. We need more of them and each of us mimicking them with compassion and empathy. This change which has an amazing ability to scale and make our homes, schools and the whole country relatively safer. It is hard for me to imagine that, we will have police in all of the above to stop an abuse, assault or worst-case a rape. 

While the interview and statements of the convict in Tihar Jail are utter nauseating and shameful, the placards saying "it is my body and my choice" are as insensible and non-pragmatic..