Dhingana Shuts Down

"All good things must come to an end" that’s what Dhingana team said in their good bye message. After giving a tight fight, Indian music streaming startup Dhingana has finally shutdown.

It reminds me about the shutting down of Music World, India’s popular music retain chain. After struggling to survive for a long period they gave it up too.

"One of the biggest challenges is working with music labels and lack of standardization in signing those agreements. Another issue is music piracy – India’s media and entertainment industry loses about $4 billion every year due to copyright infringement", TechCrunch reported.

Shutting down of Dhingana is actually the peak of the iceberg; the actual problem is deeper than what is visible. If Indian music startups and industry leaders do not come up with a realistic solution quickly, condition may turn worse.

On another note, a question to the budding entrepreneurs: Dhingana raised $7 million last year in Series B funding! A lot of people believe that it is essential for a startup to raise fund in order to survive. Then why Dhingana had to shutdown? Probably, funding is not the key to success.

Further Reading:

• Why Dhingana Didn't Click
• Music Streaming Service Dhingana Shuts Down
• Dhingana Shuts Down

Google Acquires Israeli Startup SlickLogin

Google is acquiring SlickLogin. The Israeli startup has been founded less than a year ago.

"Today we`re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a company that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and authentication should be effective without getting in the way," SlickLogin’s three founders, Or Zelig, Eran Galili and Ori Kabeli said in a blogpost of the compay’s website.

SlickLogin allows sound based account verification; you can hold your SmartPhone close to your computer and get your access details verified.

How it works: "SlickLogin can use a bunch of protocols to start verifying your phone’s position: WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, visual markers like QR codes, and of course, GPS. Their self-dubbed “secret sauce”, though, is their use of uniquely generated sounds intentionally made inaudible to the human ear. Your computer plays the sound through its speakers, while an app on your smartphone uses the device’s built-in microphone to pick up the audio."

This acquisition is likely to open up a new age of online security. On another note, this acquisition underscores two more important facts:

First, as the SlickLogin founders said: "We started SlickLogin because security measures had become overly complicated and annoying. Our friends thought we were insane, but we knew we could do better. So we set out to improve security while still making it simple for people to log in." True. Entrepreneurs face a lot of challenges. If you are a budding entrepreneur here is something for you to learn - many people would speak negative things about your idea, sometimes an opposite force would surface from your soul too. But if you are confident about what you are doing, there is simply nothing that can stop you.

Secondly, we are probably going to take a shelter to Shabda Brahman in this high-tech age!

Requirements Analysis for Digital Marketing

Digital Marketing (SEO, Optimization, whatever you call it) is not a ‘packaged diet’. You have to work with a strategist to get the right things done.

Like Software Development process, Requirements Analysis is the first step in Digital Marketing; it should be. If you are preparing Digital Marketing Strategy for your own product, your company or a client, you have to define the goals very clearly and then map the goals to definite action items.

I always had problems with SEO Packages. Even when it was predictive on how to rank in Google, I never believed that a premade SEO Plan can be helpful. What works for Jack might not work for Jill! I always asked my clients “What do you want to achieve with your website?” The answer determines what to be done for the client.

I remember speaking to an entrepreneur who just formed a startup; they were selling discount medicine cards in Canada. “We want to rank in the first page of Google”, they said. “Why?”, I asked. They had no answer. I helped them to find the reasons – “Probably, you need leads, you need visitors to your website?” They agreed. “Then why don’t you start with PPC and as the organic traffic increases, you can reduce your PPC budget and focus more on organic growth.” Organic growth does not come overnight.

A person with abilities to identify the business requirements should work with the client to understand what they want. And then, come up with the right Digital Marketing Strategy to achieve the targets in next 3 months, 6 months or 1 year. Often the requirements are mentioned in client’s own term – the analyst has to translate them into technical term and map each of the requirements to specific action items.

Here is a use case that explains what I said above.

Assume someone wants to generate leads through website. They want the visitors to fill out a small form and that’s it. The website is new and the company is targeting 1000 monthly signups in a year.

That’s the requirements written in English. Now, you have to interpret in your own language – something like this:

1. The website needs more visits
2. The visitors must fill out the form 

If I translate the requirements to technical term; it will look like:

1. Generate traffic
2. Enhance usability
3. Optimize for higher conversions

Then we need to set action items that will help achieve the goals:

1. Generate traffic: There can be two avenues; organic and paid. Sketch a plan to get the website indexed and keep improving ranks in search engines. You need to focus on both on-page and off-page stuff. PPC can help to generate traffic from day one. No matter how old your website is. However, you might need to create landing pages.

There has to be a daily, weekly and monthly list of deliverables. Regular monitoring will help you identify whether the progress is up to the mark.

2. User experience is important; Google prefers the websites that offer good user experience (I am sure Google has its own way of measuring it). This is a continuous process and you can always make it better – monitor user behavior, collect data and make changes based on them. There are tools that help you implement the best practices.

3. Conversion optimization is a vast subject; based on your Sales process, you have to formulate the right conversion optimization strategy. For the example we are considering, placement of the form, message around the form, font, color of the font etc. can lead to higher conversion. The optimization process for Organic and Paid traffic will be different.

There will be a list action items under these three categories. A strategist will make the list depending up on the present condition of the website and then move forward.

Lata Am

There are things which are so obvious that you do not need to mention them always. And even if it is not written anywhere, people should not have any difficulty to understand (unless they are robots).

Let me share a story.

Me and my brother used to take English classes after school. Our teacher was a convent educated lady; while teaching English she used to give us lessons on discipline, etiquettes, lifestyle and all. She was a great teacher indeed, a bit short tempered though.

There was a boy in our class, Mithun, who used to do mistakes every now and then. We were learning Present Continuous Tense that day. After explaining the chapter, Aunty asked us to translate a sentence from Bengali to English:

Aunty: Lata bhaat khachchhe.

We wrote: Lata is eating rice.
Mithun wrote: Lata eats rice.

Aunty tried to explain with another example; and the conversation with Mithun went something like this:

Aunty: ami bhaat khachchhi 
Mithun: I am eating rice.
Aunty: Lata bhaat khachchhe
Mithun: Lata am eating rice.

Enough. Aunty could not hold anger any more – started shouting – “Lata am? Lata am? Hmm? Lata AAAM?”

When Aunty gave the other example, I was almost sure that Mithun would make this mistake. Maybe Aunty expected Mithun to have common sense!

Product Companies Prefer In-house Digital Marketing Team. Question Mark.

SEOMoz dropped SEO to be Moz! Does it indicate that time has come for all to drop SEO? A big question mark indeed!

According to me, SEO has evolved and become something more than link building. SEO was never about link building; and this time, Google has made sure that the fact goes deeper into people’s mind – that’s it.

So Digital Marketing is the right word to use. Now, the question is: Whether product companies (including startups) prefer in-house digital marketing team or not? Some may; some may not – let me share my experience of interacting with some CEOs who head tech startups.

Darker Side of Outsourcing the Digital Marketing Department

1. How can the agency understand my product? Someone who does not know about my product, can never market it. 
2. Even if someone at the agency spends some time to learn about my product, what is the guarantee that person will not leave? (When asked that the same thing might happen for in-house team also, they said they would develop parallel knowledge leaders). 
3. Most of the agencies are not honest and do tricks to boost rank (to fool clients) which might have adverse effect on the website in the longer run. 
4. After 6 months if the agency does not deliver – who will lose money? We. 
5. We just don’t want to outsource – we hate the word ‘outsource’! We would rather build a team! 

Brighter Side of Outsourcing the Digital Marketing Department
(mostly my inputs)

1. You get started immediately – no need to build a team to get leads online. 
2. Select an ethical agency and you are done – there are plenty of ways of finding competent digital marketing agencies. 
3. Have someone in your team who understand digital marketing and can coordinate with the agency. Let this person become the knowledge leader from your side (domain knowledge and marketing knowledge). Outsource the execution part – lesser pressure on you. 
4. Team building is expensive and time consuming. It is very difficult to get talented resources in this field who will work for a product startup (in case). 
5. If the in-house team does not perform you will be in a greater mess; so let the activities be handled by those who know it (make sure they know it). 

So equal votes on both the sides. Actually, if you go out and check, you will find both types of product companies – those who outsource and those who do not outsource. However, there is a gap; and agencies can take the call and bridge the gap.

What do you think?