The mobile industry has always attracted resourceful and resourceful people who wanted to bring something new to it or just make money. Some innovations thunder all over the world and forever change the way we think about telephones, while others fade as quickly as they flare up. You will learn about one of such incredible cases today, about an industry from India that appeared suddenly and burned brightly, albeit for a short time. This is an amazing story of a missed call business.
It was 2003. Praveen Kumar, a 29-year-old simple school teacher from the Indian state of Bihar, bought his first mobile phone. He lived in one of the poorest parts of the country and could not afford to use his cell phone for simple conversations with friends who also saved up for new gadgets. “It was very expensive ,” says Kumar. One minute of an outgoing call cost about eight cents, and the teacher at the time was making only $ 8 a day. That is, 10 minutes of talking on the phone would cost him a day's salary. "We had too little money to say everything on the phone."
Then Kumar, together with his family and friends, came up with a simple scheme. When they needed to contact one of their own, they called, but immediately hung up to leave the missed call. This served as a kind of signal. “Everything was decided in advance ,” says Kumar. - "We said, for example, when I come for you, I will leave the missed call so that you leave the house."
Thus, with the help of missed calls, friends used their phones as pagers. This was done by many in India in the early 2000s. Before the cheap smartphone boom hit the country, missed calls were one of the most popular means of communication, because they were free, unlike text messages. This was especially important for those who were counting every rupee spent. Very quickly, such an unusual way of communication, one might say, became fashionable. Because of this, the number of calls in the country at the beginning of the 2000s fell to a record low worldwide. A missed call is fast, convenient and, oddly enough, informative. He could mean "I miss", "Call me back", "I'm there" and much more. Since a missed call did not require literacy, it became a lifeline for a third of India's population. who was still illiterate at the time. Later, in 2008, a study was even conducted in the country, according to the results of which more than half of the inhabitants constantly called someone, hanging up before the interlocutor picks it up.
When the missed calls spread throughout the country, various major publications began to write about it. The Times of India wrote in 2009 that Indians love to "hang up quickly"... The media hype caught the attention of Bangalore-based ZipDial, which decided to take this communication and change it. The company created its own hotline, which customers could call and drop the call without waiting for an answer. After that, their phone received automatic text messages and even calls that told people the results of the latest cricket matches, tweets from celebrities, played Bollywood songs and even suggested where to buy shampoo for the promotion. It was a gold mine for brands looking to reach an audience of people without internet access. This way, companies could learn about the preferences of potential customers in order to create the most appropriate advertising for their products.
At that time, only a few percent of India's residents had access to the Internet. Smartphones were incredibly expensive, and 1 GB of mobile data could cost the average Indian three days' salary. Plus, the internet connection speed was very slow. Missed calls made information more accessible to the majority of the population, who did not have the opportunity to obtain it from other sources. All that was needed was an ordinary push-button telephone. Well, remember those with always sticky buttons and a pre-installed snake? ZipDial co-founder Sanjay Swami says: "For many, ZipDial was the first connection to the Internet."
Sanjay Swami
When the technological revolution reached India, the impenetrable wall of paid services in the country collapsed, very cheap smartphones appeared and at least some way to go online. Today, missed calls are outdated, and WhatsApp and normal Twitter have replaced them.
The founders of ZipDial expected that technological progress in the country was inevitable, and their business on missed calls would sooner or later lose its relevance. However, during the period of operation of the service from 2010 to 2016, 60 million people used it. Active users made about 5 million calls a day. The story of the rise and fall of ZipDial demonstrates not only how fast India's technological leap has taken place, but also how IT companies can intelligently perform in such a harsh environment, when most of their customers do not have Internet access.
The idea of building a business on missed calls belongs to Swami and his colleague Valerie Wagoner. They invented it in 2009 during a night flight from Delhi to Bangalore. Wagoner is an American who lived in California and worked at eBay, but then moved to Bangalore to work at the mobile payments startup mChek, which was founded by Swami. On the flight, they discussed how difficult it is to track the behavior and needs of Indian consumers due to the fact that 95% of all purchases are made offline and with cash. And at that time, they realized that they had forgotten about one very important way to monitor users, which had been heard all this time. Some clients of mobile operators in India already had the experience of sending short codes to certain numbers in order to receive the information they needed in different areas. Then Swami and Wagoner thought,
Valerie Wagoner
Software engineer Amiya Patak soon joined the duo, and the three of them founded ZipDial. It took Patak only a week to learn how to connect offline users to a server connected to the Internet. The implementation of the idea turned out to be surprisingly simple. The client called the hotline, the phone rang twice, and the call was automatically dropped. Within a couple of seconds, information came to the subscriber's number in a message or an automatic call.
“The beauty of the missed call system was that it was ubiquitous by then ,” says Wagoner, who became CEO of ZipDial. Subsequently, the hotline became so popular that it began to annoy mobile operators. Missed calls occupied almost a third of all phone lines, but did not generate any income.
The prospects of the company increased every day as the user base expanded. India at this time was already preparing for the boom of the first cheap smartphones. According to World Bank statistics, over the five years from 2006 to 2011, the number of mobile subscribers in India grew from 166 million to 894, which was about 70% of the country's population. “People had mobile phones even before they got their first bank accounts ,” says Wagoner.
The idea worked incredibly simple: the customer called the hotline, the phone rings twice, and the call is automatically dropped. Then the subscriber's number received the information he needed in a message or an automatic call.
ZipDial appeared at a very opportune time to test its system. Then, in South Africa, the 2010 FIFA World Cup was held, and the co-founders of the company decided to provide the residents of India with the results of the matches in text form in response to their missed call. The system worked well, but subtly until the developers forgot to update the data and users inundated them with complaints. “Until then, we did it as a hobby ,” Swami recalls. - "When we are at our complaints began miscalculation, we said, oh my God, people really are highly dependent on this service!"
2010 FIFA World Cup
ZipDial's finest hour was the 2011 ICC Cricket World Championship, when the service acquired the largest number of customers. The system continued to work in the same way as last year. Clients called the hotline and received the results of the matches in the message. “It's just crazy development ,” says Wagoner. - "On the day of the first match ZipDial processed more than 4 million calls."
Shortly thereafter, the service launched a massive advertising campaign to attract leads. Advertisements for the service were everywhere, both on street billboards and on TV. There were broadcasted hotline numbers where customers could call to find out the information they were interested in. “Ultimately, in ZipDial, we had to solve the problem of connecting offline subscribers to the network in order to be able to transfer the information they needed to customers, whether it be content or some products”, says Wagoner. In 2011, ZipDial got its first serious client in the person of Gillete. Together with the brand, the service tracked recipients of one million free shavers in over 10 cities in India. The next two years brought the company more than four hundred new advertisers and partners, including such giants as Pepsi, Procter & Gamble and Disney.
In the early 2010s, ZipDial in India was much more popular than social media. By 2013, Gillete had 2.4 million active users thanks to the service, while Facebook in India had just 1.63 million. Disney also used the service to attract new subscribers. The giant managed to collect 2 million users using ZipDial, 90% of whom did not even have access to the Internet, let alone Facebook pages. On average, there was a big increase in new subscribers 13 times a month, which is incredible even for large developed markets.
Due to missed calls, SMS messages quickly disappeared into oblivion. Now brands in India have only used this method to advertise their products. Many Indian media outlets have commented on the success of ZipDial, and some telecommunications companies have even begun collaborating with it. In the six months from summer 2012 to early 2013, the service's profit increased sixfold. In general, the business based on missed calls has earned 5 billion rupees in its six years of existence - about 94 million dollars.
How you made millions on rejected calls
Missed calls, surprisingly, have proven to be a powerful advertising tool. ZipDial has even filed two patents for several ways to use them. Some of them allowed you to activate and block credit cards using missed calls or exchange business cards between two users. But it remained as an idea. But the missed calls for voting in all sorts of reality shows have taken root and were used not only by ZipDial, but also by its competitors from other companies.
In 2013, the Unilever brand, which was also one of the service's customers, even teamed up with its main competitor, Ozonetel, to develop an innovative way to use the power of ZipDial. They launched an on-demand mobile music service called Kan Khajura Tesan. To listen to songs at Kan Khajura Station, residents of India's impoverished states of Bihar and Jharkhand, where days without electricity were common, had to call a hotline. The call, as usual, was dropped, and in response the robot called back and broadcast songs from Bollywood films, various anecdotes and, of course, Unilever ads for 15 minutes. “It was not easy listening to the songs at the time ,” says Prashant Harsh, a 23-year-old student and regular listener to Kan Khajura. -"To buy them in the store, you also had to pay for the memory card, which was too expensive."
Kan Khajura Station attracted people in large part because it could be accessed anytime, anywhere, unlike radio and TV. Moreover, the broadcasts were absolutely free, and the content was always the freshest. The service could also adapt depending on the actions of the customers. So, for example, if the listener ended the call before the end of the broadcast, the algorithms shuffled the playlists in order to give him something else in the next session. Thus, the station worked like a cross between radio and music selections in various specialized applications like Spotify. Kan Khajura eventually became the most watched "radio station" in Bihar, with about 50 million listeners across India.
By 2013, missed calls made it possible to attract a huge number of people to the Internet and social networks to which they did not have access. ZipDial began to actively collaborate with Twitter at this time so that offline subscribers could “subscribe” to celebrity tweets. It all started with the account of Shah Rukh Khan, Indian superstar, king of Bollywood. With the help of a missed call, users could receive tweets from his feed to their phones via SMS. ZipDial then became an official partner of Facebook, which specifically for India added a missed call button to its platform so that users can get the information they need for free without having to pay for mobile traffic.
ZipDial collaboration with Twitter
The founders of ZipDial, as the founders of the new industry, have always said that they are "not just a company that deals with missed calls . " Of course, it would be incorrect to call the company that. As Wagoner told a newspaper in 2013, they wanted to position the service as " Google Analytics for the offline world . " She said that ZipDial has always strived to "learn as much as possible about most consumers long before they even connected to the Internet."And this information remained relevant for a very long time after customers made a call. The service received a huge amount of data, and in a country virtually disconnected from the Internet, missed calls became an ideal tool for collecting this information.
Wagoner said that the founders of the company understood the transience of their days of service. They were well aware that very soon social networks would prevail and cheap internet would reach India. But at the same time, they still had "a good five or seven year window when people did not yet have the Internet on the scale, thanks to which they could completely abandon missed calls . "
But then no one knew exactly when India would be able to seamlessly connect to the Internet. “I had a friend who described the ZipDial model to me as an ice cube in the sun: many use cases for the service should disappear over time ,” Swami says.
This ice cube started to melt back in 2014. Anil Kumar, the creator of a matchmaking app (yes, there are some in India) recalls how pleasantly surprised he was to see new smartphones in the hands of young professionals in his office. “I thought then: wow, am I paying you enough so that you can afford to buy a smartphone?” The cost of such gadgets at that time was almost half of their monthly salary, and, as Anil notes, this indicated that smartphones would soon turn from luxury goods into everyday things.
The faster mobile devices spread across India, the more affordable they became. The process got even more active when Chinese and own Indian brands like Xiaomi and Micromax entered the market. Their devices cost only $ 80, so they were in great demand. In 2013, the total number of smartphone users in India was 117 million. Compared to 2012, this is 55% more.
“I had a friend who described the ZipDial model to me as an ice cube in the sun: many use cases for the service should disappear over time.” - Sanjay Swami, co-founder of ZipDial.
“We anticipated these changes and built them into the development of the ZipDial platform ,” says Wagoner. The service has now begun to send links to the desired videos in messages so that users do not have to search for them for a long time on their own. And messages in WhatsApp were supplemented with return SMS coming from the service. In 2014, much of ZipDial's work was aimed at making it easier for new smartphone users to live on the Internet. Many big names like Amazon, Flipkart and Uber have partnered with the service to send messages to users with links to their official apps. “Today people will say go to the App Store or Play Market and download my app ,” Swami says. -“But at the time, it was much easier. You just had to give them a suitable phone number. "
In the same 2014, the trinity of Wagoner, Patak and Swami came up with new opportunities to move to the next level of connection of Indian users to their service. The company did not want to lose cooperation with well-known brands and an audience of 60 million, so it decided to continue interacting with them at least through a mobile application. But all of a sudden, the founders received an offer to buy their service from Twitter. He wanted to acquire ZipDial for $ 30-40 million. The deal was to be the first purchase of a tech company from India.
Part of the ZipDial team prior to its acquisition by Twitter in 2015
The deal said the company could use ZipDial technologies to "make great content more accessible to everyone . " Selling the service made sense for himself as well. With the money and Twitter sales force, the service was able to bring missed call technology to a new market, albeit at the cost of working with just one brand.
The founders of the service received the offer of their dreams and could not refuse it. “At that time, we did something remarkable for the Indian startup ecosystem ,” Wagoner recalls. - «ZipDial was at that time a shining example of technological innovation in India."
Welcome screen for the ZipDial mobile app
In 2015, Twitter increased the amount of content available through the ZipDial, allowing users to receive tweets from more Indian actors and politicians. But the next year, more than a year and a half after the purchase of the service, Twitter decided to radically change its direction of development and focus on the main product, closing many of its subsidiaries, including ZipDial.
“One of the last things I did as a director was to fire everyone at ZipDial ,” said Wagoner, who was by then Twitter's senior director of development. "Anything that was not related to the main activity of the company was closed, sold or taken out."
From that moment on, the service completely ceased its work. But by then this should have already happened given the rapidly changing mobile industry in India and the growing number of active Internet users. “We would not have built the same company in 2016 that we built in 2009 ,” Wagoner said. The service's founders anticipated, but could not say for sure, how quickly India would abandon the missed call industry. Following ZipDial, the radio station Kan Khajura ended its existence, which existed until 2019. Today, no one drops calls to get information about the results of sports matches, but back in 2010, a whole huge business was built on this. And his amazing history will be remembered for a very long time.
