360 Inn Pricing Philosophy

Today i would like to talk about pricing for services offered by 360 Inn. As many of you know, we provide camping , trekking and other adventures in Kodaikanal. Most customers find our pricing reasonable while a few others negotiate with us.

Some customers see camping as a truly invigorating experience while a few others see it as a cheaper alternative to resorts. I thought i will clarify the amount of work that goes into delivering the camping experience we offer at 360 Inn.

First of all, camping for us is not just picking a random site and halting for the night. We typically discuss with customers their preferences over a few calls and get all details regarding the type of terrain they want for trekking (distance, hilly, steep) , the camping areas they prefer (waterfall, river) and the activities they want to engage in at the campsite. Once we get these details, we get our team in Kodaikanal to work on the details. We dont rely on any of the agents in Kodai city as most of them have no idea about real trekking routes and are typically cheats (they take tourists through a road trek rather than the forests). Our team does not have IITs or IIMs working on a plan but a group of villagers who are basically illiterates but who are experts in trekking routes in the Kodai forests. Unfortunately, these guys are exploited and have no source of income other than agriculture. Based on customer preferences they head out into the jungles to check out various terrains that meet customer requirements. In some cases, these guys walk about 22kms in a day to identify terrains. Lets say i get about 10 routes , i look at a few and finalize one of them for the customer. And what do i pay these domain experts? I either give them a tip or make sure they get a minimum rate for a customer trek, something that they truly deserve. And more often than not they take my word for the rewards that i promise to offer them.

We typically take a day to get back to customers (after getting their trip requirements) to ensure we can offer the best price(with some discounts for groupsize as well) . This leaves us with no scope for further negotiation. When we price for our services, we factor in all cost components such as guide cost, transport, Forest permit fee, campsite lease( many campsites that we finalize belong to villagers who lease it to us on a daily basis) and a few other fees (including a service fee) to go and stay deep into the forests which is again a very common requirement from our customers. Moreover we are the only firm that can get you to stay deep in the forests as we have very good contacts in Kodaikanal. Please note that most of our costs are fixed and if you are looking for cost benefits you must have a groupsize of 4-10

Over the last few years we have been gradually building an eco-system of people at 360 Inn who can offer you a great vacation in Kodai. I realize the potential of these villagers and am frankly amazed by their knowledge of the jungles. More importantly, i know that they can add an element of thrill to your vacations. But this requires us to acknowledge their skills and efforts and compensate them appropriately as done in the West where these kind of skills are highly valued. I must admit iam just a middleman here who is floored by their skills and would like to build a successful firm leveraging their expertise while at the same time ensuring that they have a good source of income.

For that to happen, you , as a customer, must value us not as a 'run of the mill' vacation operator who offers mass discounts but as a professional organization that works hard as a team to make sure every customer requirement is met. And at the end of the day if your requirements are met and these domain experts dont get paid what they deserve we might not be in a position to offer you the kind of services that we can offer today.

Having said all of the above, we at 360 Inn dont believe in negotiation because we charge a very reasonable price and employ highly skilled people who can guide you through an adventurous, insightful and enjoyable vacation in Kodaikanal.

Who are we, you might wonder? A while back we were disillusioned customers who were let down time and again by money hungry travel agents who offered the regular tourist stuff without any value addition which was the launchpad for 360Inn. We can only hope that you will agree with our philosophy !

thanks
shyam

Entrepreneurship as an outbound activity

Hello all, today i wanted to share my views on entrepreneurship. Iam currently teaching entrepreneurship at a few business schools. While iam confident about teaching the conceptual aspects of entrepreneurship the same is not the case with the practical aspects. Entrepreneurship, according to me , is a very eccentric course. Its something like this, lets say you want to become a tiger trainer. You can train yourself to be so using a dummy tiger.Other options are to train yourself with a domesticated tiger in a zoo or a real tiger in the forest. Iam not sure what your chances would be with the latter approach!! Similar is the case with entrepreneurship. A "dummy tiger" kind of course in the classroom is no match to the majestic animal in the woods!

So why this analogy? Does that mean any entrepreneurship course wouldnt work? Not so ! One needs the right environment to learn entrepreneurship. An environment that is hostile, where you have to earn your respect using your street smartness rather than your academic skills. Let me give you an example . Almost all schools mandate that students purchase books for compulsory reading before class. This infact works against entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is a practice in out-of-the-box thinking, multi-tasking ,negotiating and risk-taking. Its about working with limited resources and limitless constraints. For such an environment books need to be shared and students must learn to negotiate time frames for book reading.

One of the most critical aspects of Entrepreneurship is risk. Irrespective of what you learn in entrepreneurship, if you are not a risk taker no course can help you. Moreover, risk is not a concept, its an experience that has to be accrued. I want to talk a little about why i think this is so important. In 1999 i took my GMAT in the United States and decided to apply to a few top 10 MBA programs. I had scored 680 and finally received an admission letter from the Stern School of business NYU in the fall of 2000. I decided to go ahead with the MBA (fully funding myself) inspite of several of my friends warning me that the IT sector was in a period of bust and i could lose my job anytime. I was also warned that a part-time MBA will not boost my career in any way. But i was very clear what i wanted and how an MBA would help me and went ahead with it for which i have no regrets today. During my 2 years of studies there were many occassions when i had to manage with just 200 dollars while the rest of my salary went towards tuition fees. Lets now talk about real risks ! My 6 years on my H1B were approaching ( i hadnt applied for a green card as i wasnt interested staying in the US) and i risked deportation from overstaying . I had initially planned to complete my MBA by fall 2002 knowing well that my visa would expire in Dec 2002. Unfortunately my plans backfired and i had to negotiate with my company to apply for a GC so i could continue beyong 2003 and finish my MBA. A lot of things happened in the nick of time and i just made it !!

This exercise in risk was such a valuable lesson that no course in the world could have taught me, not even a top 10 B-school!!! Nor can i teach this to anyone. However what could be offered is an entrepreneurship course in the wild! . As far as iam concerned risk taking, negotiation, multi-tasking and out-of-the-box thinking can ever be taught. But if this course can be organized in a place where all of these skills can be practised while learning , it will be an experience that will be of immense potential. To be specific, lets look at negotiation. There are many courses that teach negotiation. Can these courses teach you how to negotiate with an auto rickshaw driver or an agent in a tourist place. I dont think so ! These guys have acquired negotiation skills through practice and the only way one can beat them is by practising, not in a school environment but by dealing with them in the real world. This has to be done and can be done. Its something like a budding tiger trainer learning to train using techniques on a domesticated tiger. And then slowly starting to deal with real tigers that come into the zoo.

The key is to teach entrepreneurship as an outbound activity in the wild where exercises could be organized for risk taking in the wild, real negotiation with village natives and multi-tasking to carry out day to day activities such as cooking, logistics and reading. How does this help you might ask? Because nature is the biggest challenger. It is as unpredictable as a tiger or the stock market and forces you to think out of the box. If the entrepreneurial concepts that you learn in this outbound course can be applied successfully in such an environment you know you have won half the game ! If you can deal with it you can deal with any kind of uncertainity in the world. This gives you the confidence that you have taken risks before, you have stayed in the wild and evaluated how good you are . You will begin to ask yourself, 'whats the worst that could happen if i leave my job? I wouldnt get a monthly salary, right?' The other half of the game would be won if you dare to take the risk to be an entrepreneur. Thats all it takes to be an entrepreneur !


shyam krishnamurthy

Cost-Effective website using blogs and widget

Lets say you have purchased your domain name and have decided to host your website. The fundamental question you face is, what hosting package do you opt for? Is it worth paying for the monthly or quarterly hosting package? If so, what will be your ROI. Lots of users typically opt for the default starter page to test the market for their business before signing up for a package. This option works for a few businesses. What about the rest? they end up in a catch 22 situation waiting endlessly for their first customer .

I would also like to talk about website analytics. Do analytic tools really add value? My take is these tools cannot offer much value unless the user clearly understands the significance of site metrics that these tools provide. For eg; time spent on a site or no of hits or page views could mean anything. Time spent on a site could mean either that site navigation is complex or the site is interesting. The more the site pages, higher the permutation and combination of possibilities. Sometimes i feel that google and yahoo try to sell tools that solve the problems that these firms create in the first place.

I faced a similar situation a while back until i started using Google blogger to blog about my firm. Though blogging is a good option to market your firm, blogs are hosted under the blogging tools domain (for eg. blogspot.com). However if you obtain your own domain name (say at a cost of 4-5 $) or so, google blogger provides an option to host your blogs under your custom domain free of cost. This is a truly amazing feature !!! So when you use the custom domain feature of blogger, you can host all your blogs under your domain name and not under the .blogspot extension. If you spruce up your website further by adding widgets you have a fully functioning website free of cost. Infact very few visitors might be able to figure out that you are using blogger's custom domain option as your website. Here is a link to setting up the custom domain on blogger.

Now lets say you have set up your blogs under your domain name. So anyone clicking on your blogs would be re-directed to your custom domain. But in the hyper-competitive world of the internet, your blogs are just not enough to draw visitors. This is where firms like google and yahoo come into the picture, offering to host your businesses for a monthly or quarterly charge. They give you options to have multiple pages, folders and tabs on your site to display your content. As you start building content on your site, you realize you need analytics to get feedback on the quality of your content and thus improve your site traffic. Google and yahoo offer users enough memory to scatter their content across multiple pages and tabs and then sell analytics tools to analyze time spent on each of these tabs or pages?.Does this really solve your problem ? does it really help you improve your traffic?

Instead lets say you spruce up your blogs (under your custom domain) with widgets. Widgets are basically freely available HTML based applications that can be installed under your custom domain. You can check out my site 360 Inn to see how blogs and widgets can enhance the interactivity of your web site (using the custom domain option). Now coming back to analytics , if you look at my site closely, you can figure out that this a free blogger account under my custom domain. I have a single page where i have displayed all the information about my business including my contact info and my profile. By avoiding multiple tabs and pages, i have tried to simplify navigation for my visitors. Moreover, i dont need any metrics such as time spent on my page etc. All i need to know is, how many visitors came to my site (page) and how many converted ( meaning called me up or emailed me). The % of visitors who converted is enough information for me to decide whether i need to modify my site content or my pricing. Few more metrics that are important and freely available are no of inbound links and no of outbound links. These metrics tell you the number of visitors who came to your site from external links and no of visitors who clicked a link on your site. Basically visitors who find your site relevant and useful.

If you look at 360 Inn , i have used a linkedin widget to display my profile and a chat widget to talk to me. These widgets allow my visitors to view my profile information as well as speak to me from within the same page itself. Moreover, google blogger itself has various types of page elements to upload photos, slideshows and other interactive content within a single page so site navigation can be tremendously improved. If these capabilities are leveraged, a user might not really need analytics tools to enhence their sites

Finally. iam not saying that analytics tools do not serve any purpose. For small businesses that have limited budgets, buying a custom domain would be a great option. Blogger or other blogging tools have lots of options that small businesses can leverage to build their content. And dont forget widgets. I truly believe that blogs and widgets are the future of E-marketing as they are very personal and interactive. They talk to your customers and engage them in a dialog unlike traditional websites.

Here is a cool website that provides Free Widgets


Shyam Krishnamurthy

Local Search

today iam going to talk about local search. I would certainly agree with most observations that this is a tough market to crack given the specialization. Moreover, monetization is difficult in a segmented market as advertisers are going to be reluctant to spend unless they see significant ROI whch is tough since a local search engine can never attain critical mass leave alone attracting enough users . However, if specialization in vertical search can be successfully leveraged by horizontal search engines such as google or yahoo, we have a model where local search can benefit customers, advertisers and publishers by delivering scale as well as segmentation.

So lets begin with how local search could be defined. Unlike generic search (google), local search typically involves a user who is looking for information to make a decision. Something like a car buyer who wants to buy a car but is not very sure as to what car he wants to buy. So the user's decision could be influenced by a search engine on various dimensions. User could buy a economical car based on research of various models in the city( auto vertical), wait for a new model which is to roll out in a month in the city (news) or decide to buy a specific car because that car garnered the most positive reviews for safety (social) or go in for a hybrid car due to environmental issues (health) . So the user basically uses local search to do research that empowers him with information to make a sound decision. In order to make an appropriate decision the user needs to be able to have all the information that he needs at his/her fingertips.

Given the fact that most local search engines are specialized , the user would have to hop on to more than one site to get all the information needed. Which would mean an auto vertical , a news site , a health site and a review based social network. All this for information related to a specific object or keyword which is a car. So more the specialization in verticals the more the websites that need to be covered to make a judicious and well researched decision.

So what is the outcome of all this?? a search engine that can integrate all the verticals in a way that these are displayed on a single page so a user can easily navigate to verticals of interest and make a decision on a single site. Lets take Yahoo for example. The user performs a search on Yahoo for honda city and gets to a page where he/she sees information categorised according to various verticals but all related on the keyword cars. A section displays list of car retailers in the city while another section displays car reviews. Two more sections display honda city specific car deals in bangalore and the news regarding a latest honda model to be unveiled in Bangalore. By providing the user an intuitive way of understanding and assimilating information , Yahoo can convert a potential buyer into an informed buyer which would certainly result in a purchasing decision.


Now lets look at it from the advertiser's perspective. The potential for targeted advertsing is really high since advertisers get to a niche audience and still leverage Yahoo's scale. Moreover, whenever the user clicks a specific vertical (on a specific section), for a given keyword, relevant ads can be displayed . For eg., when a user clicks on the 'Health vertical' section for cars regarding environmental pollution, Toyota hybrid car ads for city based deals can get a pretty good CPM. Hence a combination of horizontal (keyword based) search and vertical segmentation can work wonders for advertisers.This is the value integrated local search can provide to customers, publishers and advertisers .


I believe the key to cracking the local search puzzle lies in understanding the gamut of use cases that need to be addressed, one of which being aggregation of relevant information from multiple verticals and putting it in perspective for the user so he/she can make an informed decision. Use cases could typically include one or more combinations of verticals such as reviews, maps, locations, news, finance etc. Possibilities are unlimited. However the key is an execution strategy that can integrate all these verticals based on the user keyword in such a way that experience for the user is seamless.

That is the power of local search!