Six Sharp Practices Followed By New Age Startups

Here are six sharp practices followed by new age startups: #1. REDBUS This bus ticket aggregator buys five seats in a bus with 45 seats. When four out of these five seats are booked on its app / website, RedBus flashes a warning saying “only one seat left”. I heard this directly from the horse’s … Read more

Zepto Becomes The First Quick Commerce Unicorn

Zepto just became the first unicorn in the Quick Commerce space. Zepto, an India-based grocery delivery company, secured a $200 million Series E at a $1.4 billion valuation in a deal led by Stepstone Group. – Axios Pro. Compared to UDAAN and a couple of other startups that became unicorns in six months or so, … Read more

Unpacking “Embedded Finance” From Consumer POV

Whenever a new term enters the hype cycle, it’s fashionable for people to bandy it about all the time, sometimes correctly but most of the time loosely. Embedded Finance is one such term. In this post, we will unpack the term, specifically from the consumer point-of-view. A consumer goods retailer in India offered installment purchase … Read more

Musk Twitter Will Take Per Article Sales To The Next Level

In Why Publishers Don’t Sell Individual Articles, we saw how readers want à la carte (buy individual articles) but publishers offer only buffet (all-you-can-eat subscriptions). (While this post can be read independently, it will make more sense after reading the previous post.) Of late, some publishers are not even offering one-month subscriptions. Either their minimum … Read more

Why Publishers Don’t Sell Individual Articles

When it comes to per article sales, everybody points to ready demand, takes supply for granted, and focuses on the fulfilment, mainly micropayments. This has been going on for years during which many micropayments have come and gone and demand has skyrocketed as more and more media outlets have put their content behind paywalls, but … Read more

Utilities: New Source Of Subscription Trap

Media, OTT, SaaS and other recurring-revenue businesses generate revenues from subscriptions funded by credit card- (or debit card-) based standing instructions that automatically charge the cardholder’s account every month. As their consumer, if you want to stop a subscription, you’d want to click a cancel button on their website or app and be done with … Read more

Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops? – Part 2

In Are Digital Natives Losing Their Data Chops?, we saw six examples of digital natives showing signs of losing their data chops. The litany of such new age tech companies seems to be never-ending. In this post, I will cover eight more examples. #7. BREADCRUMBS The SDR from this San Francisco-based lead scoring startup fixed up … Read more

Why Doesn’t UPI / A2A RTP Provide Scam / Fraud Protection?

There’s a lot of buzz around cybercrime. Not a week goes by when we don’t hear of someone or the other losing money to scammers and fraudsters via UPI and other A2A RTPs. Let’s consider the following ubiquituous cybercrime described in Why Is It So Hard To Catch Cybercriminals?. Joe uses UPI to buy something … Read more

Convenience Needs A Measure. Exhibit A: Text Blaze

I received the following notification from a product I’d recently signed up for: You saved 3 minutes this week by using Text Blaze. Underwhelming, right? I thought so, too. Text Blaze is a nifty Chrome Extension that works like a keyboard shortcut but for autofilling your online content. I was immediately attracted to this San … Read more

Variants Are Making Phishing Attacks More Lethal Than Ever

Phishing attacks typically stoke greed or fear, just as many genuine business pursuits do. Not surprisingly, they enjoy a fairly high success rate. At 3%, it comes close to the conversion rate of leading ecommerce websites like Amazon and Flipkart. Surprised to learn that phishing emails have a success rate of ~3%. That's as high … Read more