Sushrut Bidwai

Below is the letter written to Mr Sachin Bansal of Flipkart.com on Jan 12th 2012, around 11 days ago. I have changed names of customer service agents.

Hi Sachin,

Thanks for sharing your email address. This is a long letter, just want to make sure I am communicating everything. Though there is gist at bottom, if you would rather skip.

I bought a laptop and few other things in mid Oct and they were delivered in third week of Oct 2011. After using laptop for few days, I realized that it crashes a lot. I investigated the problem at my end and found that the fan stops working some times and that causes overheating and crash.

I reported this problem and talked to customer support. I was supposed to leave to Bangalore for a business trip of 10 days and hence had asked them to accelerate the process. But only on 23rd Nov, when I was already in Bangalore, I was informed that laptop will be replaced. I was also told that laptop will not be replaced, as per the guarantee, but rather I will get store credit or refund.

I asked the support agent, Mr S that I can only return the defective laptop once I reach back on 2nd Dec. He told me call *him* once I reach. I called flipkart on 2nd Dec and was told S will get back. This same thing continued for next 3-4 days. But neither S, nor any one else from flipkart support got back.

Finally next monday ie 6 or 7th Dec, I was told that reverse pickup will be arranged in next 48 hours. Nothing happened till 13th Dec. Finally I decided to publicly ask for this and then I was told reverse pickup will happen in next couple of days. Again I had to leave on a business trip to Pune, actually for a week, but I cut it short. Not having a laptop was affecting all my business really hard now.

I decided that enough is enough and now I want to be compensated. If flipkart is giving “replacement guarantee”, it has to honor it. And I decided to not co-operate for reverse pickup. The reverse pickup person banged on my door when I wasnt home, for 45-60mins causing serious discomfort to all neighbours and extreme embarrassment to me and rest of my family. We had to answer lot of question, causing further mistrust. Plus our neighours told us that he was using profanities while leaving the building against me.

Even after that, I agreed to the terms offered by flipkart. Terms were, flipkart will ship replacement laptop *immediately*, costing Rs 800 more than my purchase price and I will co-operate in reverse pickup. I had given time for delivery guys to come and pickup the laptop.

Please note that Mr J, customer support staff, told me that replacement will be shipped immediately, that is first thing tomorrow.

Delivery people did not came on given time and hence I called Mr J. He told I have to wait till they come, cancelling in effect all my plans. And if I dont do that replacement will not be shipped. I asked him that replacement was suppose to be shipped immediately, how is that dependent on everything else? He told me no, replacement will be shipped as soon as delviery guys confirmed receipt of defective laptop.

After this I completely lost trust in flipkart. I have purchased more than Rs 150,000 worth of things from flipkart.

After a couple of days, after looking at my tweets, Mr J emailed me that “Flipkart is committed to refund/replace your laptop. And new laptop will be shipped when defective one reached Bangalore warehouse”

Please note that - Mr J first told me, laptop will be shipped next day. They it will be shipped as soon as reverse pickup guys send receipt. Then he said it will be once it reached Bagnalore warehouse.

After that - I finally bought the same laptop, which flipkart told me they cant procure from any sources. I had to not only spend more money but put it on an expensive EMI which will cost me 15K more, as I did not have that kind of cash left.

Then, flipkart told me they have shipped the laptop!! I told them I already bought it. So they went ahead and added some Rs 43,000 store credits to my flipkart account!!

There is no way I can trust an organization like that. I understand this can be one of case, but there is no way you can affect some one like that and still not ready to compensate appropriately.

In a gist -
1. Flipkart guaranteed 30 day replacement, which it did not honor.
2. It never processed for 2 weeks, till I started talking about it publicly.
3. Customer staff kept giving me incorrect information, on purpose
4. All in all it wasted more than 45 days of my computing time.
5. Its delivery guy harassed me, used profanities.

I am an entrepreneur, like you. You can understand how much precious computing time is when you are about to start a new venture. I wasted an entire month. I am completely snowed under now, late with all necessary business stuff. My reputation is down the drains, as I have not been able to keep up with promises. And thats a huge huge opportunity loss. I was supposed to move to Pune from Nasik by 10th Dec, but had to delay solely because of this laptop issue.  <was-not-in-orig>I had already signed lease agreement effective from 16th Dec, meaning I lost Rs 4500 directly because of Flipkart. </was-not-in-orig>

Tell me what I should do? Should I just take the refund and go away? Or isnt it my duty as a consumer to make sure businesses are penalized when they do some thing like this and fight for that?

Misc customer service, fail, flipkart, sachin bansal

I attended Techsparks Pune event on Saturday, and here is brief review of the experience.

Keynotes -

Both JustDial and Quickheal are amazing stories. Both journeys are of real startups, which have gone through the extreme amount of pain involved and determination needed to build companies which impact world. Most events I attend, founders who have built companies for couple of years and flipped them with out creating long lasting impact come and speak. This was a refreshing change. Kudos to Shradhha and her team for putting together such fabulous speakers.

I have used both of these products many times and hearing about efforts behind them is truly inspiring.

Panel -

Panel was very well balanced with entrepreneurs, technologists and investors being represented. But quality of questions was not great. I think events like this can find better ways to conduct Q&A. Perhaps let people tweet their questions and moderators will ask best questions from tweets. Or can pass along questions on piece of paper to moderators and then ask best questions. I am sure Yourstory team will figure out a better way to do this.

People -

Even though each event is driven by content and people, but its people you are there to meet. And there were lot of enthusiasts in the attendee. Met some of the best entrepreneurs. Lots of useful connections, discussions and exchange of ideas. Given the quality of people this event pulled, I am sure there next editions in other cities are going to be great success as well.

Heck I might even attend one more event before the grand finale in Bangalore!

So if you are in Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad - Do not miss this event.

Misc conferences, Pune, review, techsparks

To provide context - I was running a services company for 30 months. We worked on various kind of projects. Consumer facing e-commerce app, enterprise apps, financial services products, backend infrastructure of of a gene testing labs, mobile apps. So a wide range of projects. Product startup I am doing now is, Prolinkd, an Internet app for B2B search and sales.

Following are the differences I observed so far.

Lack of business goals understanding -

Even though often I have pushed the companies we worked with to share business goals they are trying to achieve, its not possible to understand everything from where you are. Its mostly refined to a point before being handed down to you to execute. Most of our clients helped in understanding every little thing about business goals, but there is only so much time. Your main objective is reduced to executing technology so that next version can be rolled to market as quickly as possible. So you tend to get into habit, even if unknowingly, to just take up specs and execute on them.

Where as in product startup, every person has to know what business impact will be for things they are working on. At least at very early stage and for very early team members. For example - In services work, when certain decisions were made to change deployment infrastructure, even if I personally understood why the change, I had no further incentive to share this with the team working on it. If they ask you of course share. Now I have to share everything. I was just talking to the guy who is writing up deployment scripts and reiterate multiple times about how critical deployment scripts are. As a product startup we have to iterate quickly. If a customer reports a bug, we will need 10 mins to fix it most times. But if we dont have sound deployment scripts we will have to wait another few hours to apply the patch. And when you can orient some one to think in these hard business terms, they understand things quickly and make sure they take their time but do a great job instead of just good. I sit with our server guy and do the math of calculating cloud costs and better ways to utilize our very little runway.

Make no mistake, even while running a services company I tried to do all these things. But you as a manager have so little information that it becomes difficult to share that half knowledge.

Control

Even though for all projects we worked on, we owned the technology side of it. But still we had very little control on choosing. I debated multiple times with a founder on how mongodb is far better suited for his needs than any RDBMS application. I had to end up letting go of the deal. Most services guys would not do that. You are getting a customer, you bring him in and get things done best to your capabilities in given constraints. I learned that hard way.

In product startup, if we are not happy about slightest of things, we wont release it. No matter what internal deadlines are. We were suppose to launch yesterday, but we delayed by another 2 weeks as I am still not happy with 3 major screens and their UI. We have already done entire UI twice. And will do it for as much time as it takes. When you work for some one else, you are not at liberty to take such decisions. You are given a deadline, you ship. Even if code is not well designed, you make peace with yourself that you will come back and re-factor it. Unfortunately pressures of next release will not allow you to do so most of the times. And since client has never seen the code himself, no matter how much you make him aware of that fact, he will still go ahead with next to-do item.

So essentially you dont have control to take decisions which will make what you are doing from good to great. And since decision makers are not aware of the fact that what they have got is just good, they can not take decisions for you as well.

Highs and lows -

As a services shop our highs were defined by new deals and lows by losing out on promising new customers and letting go of existing. As a product company my personal highs are when we nail down UI for a particularly complex feature. Or when we nailed down our middleware/backend architecture. Customers is of course important aspect. But as a services business I required 5 small sized deals to reach a particular revenue target. To achieve same target (with 3 times more profit), I will need at least 800 paying customers. You can not keep obsessing about losing one or two of them or celebrate every time a new customer upgrades to paid version. 800 parties in an year would be overkill.

But most important part of that comes from philosophical change. To win in services business, you need great sales skills. So all your focus in on that part. So your highs and lows are tied with sales performance. Where as in product space, you can win with having a great product and not screwing up sales. So your highs and lows are bound with product performance and not with sales.

Attitude

No matter how much you try, your thinking of human resources becomes very different in a product company than in a services company. For example - we right now have 3 interns executing a module which makes it easy for product manager and developers to monitor our product. Almost everything can be re-done through this interface, so that we can analyze everything. Each significant event which can not be tracked through mixpanel, is tracked. All back-end actors spit out important logging information and all these are loaded up in the admin module. Anyways enough technical details. Point is - during services work, I generally made interns work on some internal tool or just prototyping some idea. As for me they were non-billable entities. Where as now they are suppose to contribute. If we are investing in their education and training they are suppose to give. And we will be using that admin module everyday. So they got to work on something real which will be used and we got paid back having a working thing we really needed! Now interns, trainees are not just non-billable entities, but contributing members of the team!

Satisfaction

For almost 3 years I lost my sleep obsessing over new deal we are looking to win. Or new people we need to hire to service the demand. Or waiting for confirmation on release status. Those were good reasons to lose sleep over.

Now I am founder and product manager. So I lose sleep when I am just not able to understand and depict how to implement certain features. There is one screen I still have not done any work on and we may just drop it from first set of features, as it anyways does not belong to MVP. I lose sleep when a prospective customers gives me feedback about product, which really makes me think. These are great reasons to lose sleep over.

Implementing Concepts, Startup clients, product, Services

Few times I have observed that people tend to barge into decision making process where there are not supposed to. One of such important domain in technology budget.

Agreed that startups will have tight budgets and have to optimize the budget. But that does not mean Mr CEO that you should decide who will call shots related to it. Just give your budget to CTO/VP Engineering and let him make calls. That is HIS job not yours.

There are numerous other reasons why such decision making powers should be given and later respected. One of the more important reason is that - Only a tech person will understand the continuous importance of having good programmers/developers in the team.

When a non-tech person starts making decisions which are related to technology like hiring of programmer, partnership with outsourcing vendor, then such decisions are more likely to go wrong. This person may not have understanding on cost of losing out relationship with a good programmer, development partner. As it is not his direct responsibility to deliver next release.

So all such decisions, communication should be always and always handled by a person who’s direct responsibilities and ability to deliver can be compromised.

Sure you are CEO of the company but that does not mean you are in charge or even capable of doing everything your company requires. So focus on things you are truly good at and let others take decisions and manage relationships in there focus areas.

Process, Startup CTO, decision making, Startup

Global warming or not, the city of Nasik which was till early 90’s (even late 90’s) was cool even in summers is experiencing very warm summers since last 2 years. Already in April we saw temperatures as high as 41C and May is still to come. Due to this weather we faced few issues which directly affected work.

1. Network equipment gets so hot that we experienced continuous packet drops and network drops.

2. Overall productivity of people.

I posted a query of Pune OpenCoffee club as to cheap solutions that can be applied. Here is a list of things people suggested. But before that a bit more information about our office.

Office is located on top floor. Its like a big hall with only one room separate for conference. There is very un-even distribution of people and machines in office with most of the folks sitting near east side of the office with west side kept empty for lunch and cricket. Due to my personal bad decision even inverters are near the crowded section of the office and hence this particular section was un-bearable to work in during peak heat hours few days ago.

Suggestions -

1. Flood roof with water.

Too much wastage of water and impractical.

2. Cover roof with grass, carpet or similar material.

Roof is a shared property and hence carpet etc could be stolen. There is a hospital in the same building and hence lot of people use roof.

3. Coat the roof with a special chemical like Dr. Fixit Heatshield or Surya Cool Cement

We received quote of around 55-60,000 Rs for doing these things. Since our’s is a rented place, we thought investing so much amount of money on something which we may not use for long is not a good idea. And hence parked this suggestion till we found some cheaper way.

4. False ceiling - Again cost + investment from long term was not favorable. Also would have taken much longer time and work would have affected while construction goes on.

5. Install more exhaust fans - We installed one and will be installing another one this weekend. Effect is pretty good.

6. We have north-east windows un-curtained. So suggestion was to put up vetiver curtains on these and water them. We are doing this. Cost of doing this was approximately Rs 2700. Result is very nice. Not only the place is cooler, it smells really good.

7. Put some matkas painted white on the roof. This will help in reflecting the sun rays and will reduce heating up of the roof. We bought 20 matkas, cut them in half. Painted them in white and put them around 3-4 feets from each other on the terrace. It does not cover entire area but covers the crowded and most affected portion. Reduced temperatures significantly.

8. Install ACs - Right now we do not have any ACs in the office. Reason is - cost + energy bills + inverter cost to keep them running during power outages (5 hours per day now with 2.5 hours slots). This was and is our last option. When we grow out of this office, we can take ACs with us, so investment is justified. But right now looking at the overall effect of measures we took, I dont think there is immediate need of ACs. Though we will always have the option open.

Hope this helps.

Misc heat, Ideas

Many people have written lot of things about Apple and Steve Jobs and there policies. Adobe Vs Apple. HTC Vs Apple and Apple app store policies have got worst press in history of technology products. But with 50 billion dollars in bank, they are of course not interested in listening. Here is my take on this problem.

Generally - when I buy a product I own that product. I can do any thing with that product. If I buy Nike shoes I can wear them on denims, shorts or with no cloths on. Nike can not bullshit me about what attire I should be wearing with those shoes. Similarly when I buy a PC, Netbook or Phone I should have complete ownership of that device. But Apple is exactly not allowing me to do that.

I am 28 and a programmer/hacker so I understand technology and would like to play around with my phone. Even if I can not recompile kernel of my Windows or Symbian machine like I can do with my Linux or Android machine, still I can do pretty much everything. I can install any app I want. I can install any softwares, third-party tools. I can run programs in any other language. I can watch porn if I want!

Apple and its terms and conditions now specify that we can not cross compile from LangX to C and run it on iEgo devices. Err.. why not Mr Steve Jobs? Whats exactly wrong with that? You are selling a phone and a phone experience or are you selling Objective C to developers? Why do you want to lock in people to a technology which you think is good? Next what - no SMS lingo when texting? All texts need to pass through spell-check before then can be sent out? Or no use of x-rated words in texts?

I can not install any app I want, I have to always install apps from app store. This is the most idiotic thing ever! Plus apple will take down any apps when ever they feel like.

The biggest problem is - Apple thinks users and developers of iEgo devices are witless dumbs and cant decide whats good for them on their own and need to police them always.

I personally never bought an iEgo device myself will never do so.

Misc apple, iEgo

Till about 10 days ago total amount I had spent over ecommerce website in India was = Rs 1,200

In last 10 days it is = Rs 10,000 .

Change - Flipkart dot com.

Before I started using it, for getting books I had to go to Pune as lot of books are not available in Nasik. Now I receive them in about 3-4 days after ordering.

Things to learn -

1. Very simple user interface.

2. Excellent stock.

3. Great consumer experience.

4. Once you have created account you can order books using credit card in around 2 mins max.

If you are an entrepreneur venturing into this space, you have loads to learn from flipkart.com.

Disclosure - I am not at all related to flipkart.com, havent met any of their team members ever and have not received any special gifts for give this shout out. This post comes straight from the fact that I just ordered entire LOTR collection in 2 mins while waiting for a conference call.

Uncategorized

Now this blogpost is not related to topics I generally write about, but anyways.

So some of the things that I would like twitter to do in 2010.

1. Ownership of my twitter page and stream - I should be more in control of my twitter stream. Since lot of people use twitter for professional purposes like getting business, putting up a strong profile to engage with tweple. So I should be able to customize my profile page. And by that I mean not just ability to put up a background page. But a bit more like widgets where I can put up rss feed for my blog. Click-able links to my linkedin profile, company website.

2. More features on conversation - This may not be possible or easy to do from technical standpoint, but what I would really like is to save a multi-part twitter conversation for future reference. Some thing like a favorite button, not for individual tweet but for entire conversations. And ability to play it back.

3. Analytics - If twitter implements my feature request 1, then analytics for all the links I publish. From where people are visiting my profile or my tweets and where they are going from my profile. Analytics related to retweets. Also analytics for links I tweet.

4. Stability - Please twitter, use that 100 milion you got in funding to provide a much much much more stable platform. I know its tough and very challenging but hope you can do it!

5. Spam control - Better way to keep those spammers out. May be implement superior crowd sourced things like if 10 people block a id you review it or something of that sorts. We want a clean followers list and currently burden is on users to keep it clean.

Misc 2010, twitter

I came across a post today and found it very useful from a lead developers stand point. One of the reasons why IT has come to become what it is today is - lot of “managers” or “decision-makers” still think of product development as classical engineering. IT is different. Growth of IT is dependent of productivity of people and not productivity of machines. Most of the other engineering disciplines are centered around making sure that machines are kept busy as much as possible so that manufacturing lines are optimally utilized. This does not hold true for IT.

Productivity of software development is directly proportional to productivity of people developing it under given process and technology environment. I am not saying Lisp, Haskell, Clojure, Python etc are the only way you can make people productive. Nope. But there should be balance between product you are developing, technologies used for them and processes designed for the same. But most important thing is - understand the people you have and structure your processes based on that. Or think about the processes you want to follow and hire people who fit into them. Technology may not be the silver bullet here. How you leverage people and processes might be, in my opinion.

Process Engineering, IT, Process

Search owned most of this decade. Information search, product search, images, news, location based and so on. New decade will mostly be around numbers, statistics. Google is already moving towards it from trends we see this year.  We should expect this market to get really competitive and to come of age in next few years.

Misc Data, google, internet