Zen and the Art of Surviving India's Startup Crash

Zen and the Art of Surviving India's Startup Crash
bloomberg.com

Good-quality Internet/smartphone penetration is not as deep as you think. If you think it's a market of 1B people, you're sorely off the mark.

Then there's the issue of language. 10% or less of the population speaks and understands English.

Past that, there's the issue of credit cards/digital wallets and willingness to pay for online services (not just goods).

Finally, while there's a massive middle class that does access the web on their phones, most of their usage is limited to facebook, whatsapp, and the like.

There are likely less than 50-75M english-speaking, smartphone-enabled, credit-card/wallet-enabled consumers.

With time this will get better, but for now I feel like irrational exuberance has gone a little too far in funding 4-5 similar startups in a single category.

Startups we've seen use funding to attract customers. They offer attractive deals, and when they're done, the same customers move on to the next startup. Startups will be popular as long as the price is right, and as long as there is funding.

There are going to be some successful startups in India that won't be in the limelight. They'll be small and won't take over the country, or the world.

It's not that bad; I've met folk who make ~$200 month use 3G on their phones (mostly for downloading movies).

It's not clear how to make money off such a poor (but large) demographic (other than say, manufacturing-export).

> Then there's the issue of language. 10% or less of the population speaks and understands English.

There also exists no tangible educational resources for these 90%. At this point, however, inexorable Anglicization, is really the only direction staring India in the face; anything else will basically destroy the current system of power/governance.

Even the so-called "Hindu nationalists" don't want that; neither do the organizations that ostensibly "fight" for the native languages (and there are just way too many of these). Not surprisingly, there is rather a big effort to console the rebelling mass by giving them reservations in private corporations, on the basis of linguistic origin in addition to the usual caste-pawning.

It'd have been less farcical were this acknowledged, and India went full-steam on its agenda. Even if this were to take place, the pace of this Anglicization would (as it has been) by necessity be extremely slow, often producing many more people with no grasp of any single language, and by extension also without much proficiency with logic/reason.

Ergo, India, as I have been persuading (irritating) folk on HN, is quite literally doomed (in the short term). The English-speaking mass might've been a force to reckon with were it separate country, but it is widely spread over and often governed by people who are the most stupid/unenlightened/corrupt political elite (see education) I've ever seen (or can imagine).

Indian cities are bubbles of reality of a particular self-selected class, which is often more familiar with the US than a village 50 km out. News from within the reality distortion field is not the best indicator of anything. It'd be like SFO folk claiming to make US into a $100 Trillion economy (even this would be a under-rated comparison, since India's nominal GDP is just $2 Trillion).

Note: When I say India, I actually mean India-Pakistan-Bangladesh-Nepal-Bhutan.

Myanmar/Sri Lanka may have better futures; so might Nepal-Bhutan (too early to tell).

Why restrict yourself to do business with only english-speaking people?