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I think one of the reasons why startups are hard in India is the people's 'willingness to pay' is pretty low. Everybody wants things to be better, but nobody is
by catchmrbharath 14y ago
I think one of the reasons why startups are hard in India is the people's 'willingness to pay' is pretty low. Everybody wants things to be better, but nobody is willing to pay for it.
Consider the case of flipkart. If flipkart, at some point of time decides to not provide free shipping, then people won't buy from flipkart. They are ready to go to some local shop and buy the same thing, grossly ignoring the time they spent in doing that.
Having gone through the campus hiring process, I saw none of the Indian companies investing in something like interviewstreet for their hiring process. Most of the Indian companies asked you to write code on paper or answer multiple choice questions. They are not ready to take into account the logistics that has to go in to have such a system which would have costed the same as using interviewstreet.
Hence most of the Indian companies are mostly incorporated in the US, and the engineering is done in India. When Indians realize to pay for something that is valuable, then there might be some change in the startup ecosystem here.
- itsbits 14y agoi donno when is the last time u went to your campus...but now most of the companies hire interviewstreet for their hiring process..and few of them are Indian companies as well...
- catchmrbharath 14y agoI attended my job interview this semester. So I have seen very few companies use interviewstreet. They sometimes use some automated grading systems, but they have to be deployed on the institutes servers. This has led to a lot of delays.
- sigkill 14y ago>...thing, grossly ignoring the time they spent in doing... I fully agree. There is no concept of inherent value of time because it isn't quantifiable. I saved 1 hour by paying $5 to get it shipped, so what? What am I going to do with that one hour anyway? I don't have any hobbies that I find more valuable than the $5 I saved. I would just end up watching TV. I will not think of the discomfort it causes me to travel by public transport, or the operating cost of my personal vehicle (it seems that fuel is crazy expensive there nowadays!). Plus, if I go out to get that, it doubles as an outing too. Obviously the 'I' above isn't me but the average mentality that I have come across.
- cplat 14y agoI couldn't agree more. The bulk of the crowd I've met hardly even use the original version of the OS, let alone all the commercial tools (and that includes Photoshop). With IT ethics so bad, it's difficult to be profitable just targeting India.
- devdas 14y agoTime is cheap. Also, most people in the major cities won't have to go very far. People in smaller towns will either bite the bullet and pay for shipping, or pick up books on a trip to a major city.