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An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

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Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#111

Post by ken »

algoshift wrote: post #86

Wait a minute... According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people. A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so,…

You could use the same math to show why cars are a terrible solution to transportation. And yet, we've got millions upon millions of cars, and relatively few trains and buses (at least on my continent). People don't decide how to live their lives by sitting down with a calculator and figuring out the most efficient method to serve the entire population of their country.

As the article pointed out, the biggest problem in this case is not technical. It's social.

Now that you've shown that the big machines are more efficient overall, how do you get there from here? I would even say that if you know from the start that you want a bunch of $500K machines, then bootstrapping -- what he's doing now -- is in fact the easiest way. Google has some massive datacenters but they didn't start by spending $50M on hardware on day 1.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#112

Post by algoshift »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #94
algoshift wrote: post #86

Wait a minute... According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people. A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so,…

Great analysis, missed a huge point though. A fraction of an industrial machine makes zero napkins. Your analysis is spot on, the problem can be solved more efficiently with a large scale production. The capital expenditure cost however is similar (43M vs 50M). You point out they huge disparity in labor costs $25M vs .09M but labor is 'free' in India (which is to say there is so much of it available that the price is…

> A fraction of an industrial machine makes zero napkins.

Well, that assumes that this is the only individual in India that could be interested in the market segment. There are plenty of people in India for whom USD $500K is not a lot of money, particularly if a solid case can be made for the investment.

He could have invested four years trying to raise money to buy a number of industrial grade machines rather than doing what he did.

Here's another interesting data point. According to this site (http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power...) the average nuclear power plant in India produces 200MW of power. Deploying enough machines to provide napkins to the TAM would consume around 6% of the power output of a single nuclear power plant. An operation based around industrial machines would require about 4%. It's interesting when you can measure things in terms of the percentage utilization of a nuclear power plant.

I looked through the various responses to my post. Lots of good points. Of course, the infrastructure in India is something I cannot have a good grasp of from my vantage point in suburban Los Angeles. When faced with something like this I always fall back to one of my favorite Mark Twain sayings: "A man holding a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way". This inventor held that cat by the tail. Hard to judge from the outside. I'll have to leave it at that.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#113

Post by sbov »

7rurl wrote: post #109
hackinthebochs wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America, for one. Sure its too a lesser degree, but taboo still.

Where I live in the US it is no more taboo then urinating or defecating.

My female friends (and girlfriend) are all okay with saying they need to pee. However, they will never say something like "I need to change my tampon". If they do, it will be directed at 1 person in hushed tones and because they're out or something.

Maybe yours are different though.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#114

Post by whatusername »

solutionyogi wrote: post #50
slurgfest wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the point is to make money, then he should sell the napkins just below the price of the competitors, keeping a healthy margin for himself. Of course, this defeats the stated purpose of encouraging usage by poor Indian women, but if the point is to make money...

Nope, the point is not to make money. Let's start from the scratch. The goal is this: Create affordable sanitary napkins for women in India. To achieve this goal, he worked hard to master the first step i.e. to be able to manufacture the napkins at low cost. Great. Now there are two approaches: 1. Sell machines to different NGOs so that they can create their own napkins. As I mentioned it requires hefty investment of…

Advertising, support, distribution. Much much easy when you have a distributed production/sales force.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#115

Post by recampbell »

Duff wrote: post #89
algoshift wrote: post #86

Wait a minute... According to the article and his website the machine costs $2,500 each, can produce 2 napkins per minute and requires 746W of power. Each machine employs a crew of four people. A full scale industrial machine is claimed to cost $500K and, from a quick bit of google-ing can produce 350 napkins per minute and requires about 80KW of power. Each machine seems to be operable by a small team of five or so,…

You're looking at one aspect of the problem, from the supply side. We've had industrial scale manufacturing of sanitary napkins for 100 years. Procter and Gamble can already produce these things for a fraction of the cost. But building and maintaining a distribution network, marketing the product and making a healthy profit drives costs up. This solution turns that problem on its head. Disperse the manufacturing loca…

Excellent point. Conversesly, the most likely is that Proctor and Gamble is perfectly positioned to enter this newly educated market and undercut this inefficient incumbent, destroying thousands of jobs in the process.

But we wouldn't have it any other way.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#116

Post by dragons »

urbanjunkie wrote: post #8

This is both inspiring and depressing. Female medical students not wishing to talk to a man about menstruation. The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women being unconcerned about losing their uterus. And of course, if you don't care about your own uterus, you're unlikely to care about litter, the environment, or pretty much anything. (ps, as someone who has spent a lot of time in India and w…

The fatalistic, egotistical and selfish attitude epitomised by women being unconcerned about losing their uterus

I agree that it's fatalistic. But it's the opposite of egotistical and selfish. People with healthy egos generally care a lot about whether they will their lose organs, or their lives. The women in question apparently don't. From the article: 'So what? How long are we going to live anyway?'.

And maybe their lives suck so much that this attitude is understandable.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#118

Post by nikatwork »

jackityquack wrote: post #47
masklinn wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, he could probably do more good for his country by selling his product. If you consider that his product is the napkin-making machine rather than the napkins themselves, he does. > If he creates a better industry, he can keep the profits in India. Profits are kept in india, instead of building his own giant he empowers others. All in all, your comment seems to make little sense and to have stopped at the secon…

I think wealthy Indians are better than empowered Indians.

I think healthy Indians will be both wealthier and more empowered.

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#119

Post by huxley »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #110
infinite8s wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the bottom billion in India make around $1-$2 a day, his estimate is off by about an order of magnitude.

India has 1B people and a GDP per capita of about $1400/year, making it a mathematical impossibility that the bottom billion earns $1/day. The minimum wage in India is 115rs/day, or 11.5rs/hour with a 10 hour workday, so it wouldn't even be legal to pay 5rs/hour (an order of magnitude less than the 50rs/hour algoshift postulated). Assuming the machine operators earn a median Indian wage, assuming 8 hour days, 6 days/…

According to the 2011 Census, India has 1.2 Billion people, so that rules out any mathematical impossibility.

$1 a day may seem extreme but in reality it's not quite as ridiculous as you suggest. In 2005, the World Bank estimated that 42% of India's population lived on $1.25 or less per day. In the interim years, the urban poor saw a 3.6% increase in income inequality and the rural 1.3%.

The issue of minimum wage in India is complicated, not all wage-earners get the either the national or state-level minimum wage (and women are disproportionally excluded). This article covers it in detail:

http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro...

Re: An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

#120

Post by alphakappa »

solutionyogi wrote: post #81
_pius wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely not create wealth by selling 25 cents napkins. Are you sure about that? If every (menstruating) woman in your village purchases their sanitary napkins from you every month because you've got the one machine within 25 miles, you may have a compelling small business, especially when adjusted for cost of living and ease of labor.

Now that I re-read that sentence, it's not well written. When replying to the parent comment, I wanted to clarify that these napkins will create wealth and help poor people move to middle class. I meant to say that you can not become filthy rich selling 25 cents napkins.

Filthy-rich has different thresholds in different parts of the world. $50k may be a middle class income in Arkansas in the US, but it would be a ridiculously huge amount in small-town India.
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