What's the point? I live in India and I was in Sikkim in Feb - a highly mountainous state close to China.
I had 4G/LTE no problem.
I worry more about this when I'm traveling in Europe and America.
$200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
71–80 of 109 posts
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#72What's the point?
I live in India and in Feb I was in Sikkim, a mountainous state near the border. I had 4G/LTE. You can get 50GB of mobile data for like 3 bucks.
This problem has been solved.
I worry about not having connectivity when I travel in the US/Europe. It's far less developed there.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#73This is an interesting case study, but my research on acquisition channels that consistently work for founders [1] has shown that sponsoring blogs/web-based "real estate" is hit-or-miss (and doesn't work) for most founders. Here are some dev SaaS examples: 1. SnapShooter ($1k+/mo), a tool to create daily backups of DigitalOcean droplets: " I tried sponsoring blog articles with a little bit of success." [2] 2. BugFend…
It depends highly on your acquisition channel too. Twilio and Stripe famously target developers knowing that in a lot of organisations they don't make the final decision but have a lot of "pester power"; it's a risky, but big pay off strategy. I'd imagine (ie no data) that companies with that strategy may benefit more from sponsoring developer events/newsletters?
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#74where can I buy a laser PoP, or rather two of them and practice doing this myself from my roof across town to my friend's roof? Does someone have a list of materials to buy? I assume I might need a few more things than just the PoP lasers.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same question, why not “laser focus” your efforts on convincing one technically proficient investor with deep pockets, rather than having to convince 100s-1000s via crowd-funding? Is it that investors need to provide the roof top too, so it’s a way to reach out to property owners?
Great question. There's a few reasons. First, It's taken ~20yrs, the Indian government, 15 telecom companies and more than $200B to bring ~600M out of 1B Indians 4G. Broadband deployment is more expensive and currently only 20M Indians have 10mbps or greater 'broadband' connections. Even at Wifi Dabba's dramatically lower deployment cost, the price tag to connect 500M Indians is enormous and we're not willing to wait…
> Even at Wifi Dabba's dramatically lower deployment cost, the price tag to connect 500M Indians is enormous and we're not willing to wait 20 years.
I think I understand, and it's similar to how railways in the US were built. Savvy investors won't cover the tsunami of small region losses you'll need to scale quickly. They'll only want to fund dense, urban markets with the lowest risk.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#76I enjoyed similar success with a DF sponsorship back in October 2015 (I’m guessing his audience has grown significantly since): I purchased a sponsorship my book ICONIC (shameless plug at http://www.iconicbook.com ) for $9,250. Looking back on my stats I approximately tripled that in direct sales, but I’m sure the actual return was higher as I’m certain some folks went to Amazon instead of my site where I was selling…
Good lord, he must be making a fortune off his site.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#77Wifidabba (dabba = “can” in Hindi”) is a pretty awesome idea.
I wonder how lasers work when obstructed.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#78The project is very interesting and I hope it succeeds, yet from a financial perspective I do not understand why to fund it through retail investors/franchise model/crowd debt funding. From an investor's perspective there is limited upside with full default risk, yet the risk is hardly addressed. If the risk really was low, then why not self-fund the first X PoPs and convince with data on customers, ROI etc.? See als…
This is exactly why the JOBS-act style crowdfunding model doesn't work, and may harm small-time investors. If your business is low-risk, you self-fund or bootstrap. If your business is high-risk but has a decent team you can just raise from a VC. It's only high-risk, low-reward ventures that can't raise from a VC that will seek funding from a boatload of zero-value-add small-time investors.
I think this probably falls into a very niche category of high-risk but "I get to brag about owning a piece of piece of broadband infrastructure 8000 kms away" assets. As it stands right now, investors are essentially purchasing novelty, not a risk-assessed financial instrument. It would be cool if they can make this into a legitimate funding model though.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#79Wifidabba (dabba = “can” in Hindi”) is a pretty awesome idea. I wonder how lasers work when obstructed.
They do not. However, it's a grid, so one assumes they can reroute traffic so long as only one laser is obstructed.
Re: $200k in sales from a $6k advertisement
#80What's the point? I live in India and in Feb I was in Sikkim, a mountainous state near the border. I had 4G/LTE. You can get 50GB of mobile data for like 3 bucks. This problem has been solved. I worry about not having connectivity when I travel in the US/Europe. It's far less developed there.
A 4G hotspot for regular desktop work is simply unreliable due to latency and network congestion issues in major Indian metros. Also, you can do a whole lot more with 1 Gbps of bandwidth v/s 40 mbps.