The local doorbell you pick up in a store in India offers you a choice of tunes.
The good old ding dong, or something fancier if you really want music every time your doorbell rings.
So, who would think that putting a camera into a doorbell helps?
Here's where it gets interesting.
The camera in the video doorbell connects to your wi-fi and you can see who the visitor is on your phone app.
No need to walk to the door and open it.
In fact, you don’t even have to be in the house when the bell rings. You could be anywhere in the world
You could answer the bell from your phone and the person ringing the bell would think you were at home
In just about 4-5 years, the company managed to snare 97% of the doorbell market in the US.
And cut down burglaries by up to 55% in some areas.
Early in its launch phase, the doorbell barely functioned. Frequent connection problems to the wi-fi and hundreds of complaints.
But the entrepreneur persisted - doing the service rounds and sticking with it.
Ring, the company was acquired by Amazon in 2019. For a billion dollars.
It was probably access to households that swung the deal
Does Black Hat Marketing exist?
In conventional marketing, the problem is demand creation. And exactly the opposite for illegal products.
"The Wire' TV series came out in 2002. It wasn't another cops and robbers series. Went where plots don't venture.
In India, only bootleg versions were available in shady shops.
Now it streams on Hotstar. Or Disney Hotstar. All 60 episodes over six seasons.
It tackled a fundamental dynamic.
The product being sold was in great demand but illegal
There were insights on recruitment, management and strategy right out of business books. But the pyramid was inverted.
Nothing was out in the open.
Instead of transparency and openness, evasion was at the heart of the enterprise
Street sellers of drugs used code without ever mentioning the product.
Customers would be supplied only through a trusted network.
It was a one way street. No second chances. And terrible consequences.
Money exchanged hands with the product almost as if it was a magician's trick
'The Wire' worked because it portrayed two sides - everything was grey.
The law was always watching.
The trick was keeping the evidence out of sight.
And erasing the trail.
The hierarchy and reporting structures were recognisable
Except that no records were kept.
Black Hat marketing. Business through a dark lens.
The coconut scraper design deficit
We got iPhones right. But scraping the inside of a coconut still defeats designers.
Thousands of years ago, humans broke through the husk and shell of coconuts to feast on the mildly sweet flesh.
Initially, it was carved out with a sharp implement.
Then as recipes expanded, it was ground to a mash on a flatbed stone using a round pestle.
For ages, this was the standard implement in Indian houses to make chutneys or curries before grinders replaced them
Men still believe the old way was better
The other option was a wicked contraption of a curved vegetable cutting knife with a serrated semi-circular edge attached to a flat, rectangular board
Housewives sat on it and cut vegetables in expert movements and used the edge to grate coconuts
Designers didn't stop trying. Manual scraping by rotating a lever with one hand, holding the coconut with the other.
But the base lurched around on a kitchen platform, refusing to stick. And each version disappeared into the 'Not solved yet' file.
The latest iteration has a vacuum base. A motor spins the blades and the coconut only needs to be held in place. But it's not there yet.
Mother Nature is probably having a quiet laugh somewhere.
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