Hi Rodinhooders,
Thanks so much for a fantastic experience at the Delhi Open House on November 9th. We had a great time presenting for the full house and were blown away by the insightful responses to our questions and hope to continue those conversations here!
Our company, FBPay, has created a product that gives anyone the ability to set up an online sale in minutes via their Facebook account. Try it out! Right now we allow you to easily set up a Facebook event with various methods of collecting payments (i.e. tickets or open fundraising) and plan on releasing more socially integrated sales tools very soon.
We have spent the last 6 months proving our solution works and have received wonderful positive feedback from our current small but loyal customer base. We’ve reached a point where both the product and team are ready for rapid expansion across india, but have had difficulty figuring out how to effectively get it out there. Hence we were perfect for this open house’s theme There but Not There.
As much fun as presenting was (and you can see the presentation below) the question and answer session with Alok and the audience at large was absolutely amazing. I found the experience far different then other conferences that I have attended because it was a conversation we had with all of you. I dont know if this is a specific TheRodinhooders characteristic, but certainly something we noticed and appreciated.
Some stuff we remember and our working towards from our conversations –
One of our biggest questions going forward was the investment in service quality. Our experience thus far is that quality isn’t a marketable differentiator on its own in India. So as we expand do we continue to give the one-on-one service to each customer or automate as much as possible. The former obviously requires a greater investment in staff but the overwhelming response we received was that this is how things work in India. We have to continue keeping our feet on the street and pushing a direct selling strategy first and keep a level of human service as much as possible.
Another question we had was how flexible should we be on price. Alok immediately said that price incentives to boost acquisition numbers is never a great play in the long run but when asked the question about haggling on price (we charge a flat 5% per transaction) the audience at large was pretty stumped. We all have to do it at some point but when do you put your foot down and say no, this is the price? Or at this early of a stage does getting the customer always matter more?
Check out FBPay and give it a spin. It’s free and really only takes a minute. Reach out anytime at rohit@getfbpay.in. Hope to see you soon!
