Apr
15
India Post: Innovation In An 150-yr Old Organization
April 15, 2008 |
I don’t watch TV regularly, but a show called Startup Junkies caught my attention as I was channel surfing. Start-up Junkies takes you behind the scenes of a growing start-up company, Earth Class Mail, as it attempts to raise funding, build a team, develop a prototype and find new customers and partners.
In a nutshell, Earth Class Mail scans your snail mail and brings it online. For a subscription fee, you can now scan and shred your snail mail online. TechCrunch covered the company a while back, the comments to the post are very interesting. The pitch by Ron (skip to 13:50 mins of the video - sorry MojoHD doesn’t provide an embed option), CEO of Earth Class Mail, to India Post was entertaining. It is hard to tell whether the India Post officials really “drank the koolaid” or just being polite.
It’s hard to see any value proposition for India Post and the average Indian, for various reasons - including lack of internet penetration outside the cities (5.3% in all of India). Not to mention, India Post is facing increased competition from private courier services and is getting creative to boost revenues and keep its staff busy. In the past, they’ve even experimented with retailing and services, including delivering milk. I went to the India Post website and they do have an ePost feature. It’s email-to-snail mail or vice versa service, and that makes a lot of sense, again considering the low internet penetration.
If you’re currently living in India, would love to hear stories of encounters with India Post services and your experience using ePost.
Comments
5 Comments so far
Ramakrishnan,
Thanks for writing about Earth Class Mail and the Startup Junkies episode. What the 30 seconds of footage on our encounter with India Post executives in our booth at PostExpo doesn’t expound upon is the dinner we had that evening with India Post’s management team, and Rajeev Dujari’s (our VP of Product Management) trip to New Delhi which followed. Their interest was in the context of enterprise accounts like Microsoft and Accenture who have large offices in places like Delhi and Bangalore - not for the average citizen. The whole country only gets 1 billion pieces of mail a year… you can do the math. Many posts around the world offer digital mail services to enterprise customers… several billions dollars a year worth of such services.
We have not moved forward on India at this time because there are several countries with much larger mail volumes who also engaged with us later on, and so we are focused on getting these (geographically closer) European posts going first. While we’re not a “startup” anymore we still have to be judicious in allocated limited resources where there’s the greatest leverage today.
So far, so good :-)
Glad you enjoy the show, and thanks again for writing about it.
Cheers,
Ron
Well, I am actually quite surprised and glad to know that a government entity is actually trying something new. As with all new ventures, one crucial element is the ability to try something radical and stick to it - long enough for the adoption curve to pick up. And that’s something that the government can do quite well.
In India today, broadband is an issue, but dialup connections are available anywhere and everywhere. There is a single unified number across the country, and as long as you have a landline with BSNL you can connect. Even more spiffier is the fact that GPRS over Mobile is dirt cheap and offer a pretty okay connection.
Who knows, with the right mix, and especially if India post collaborates with the BSNL Mobile operator, they could do wonders.
Ron, thanks for stopping by and update on the follow-up meeting with Indian Post. I’d be curious to learn if Snail Mail is indeed a growing market, as online substitutes become more common?
Hi Rama,
Snail mail volume on a global basis is rising, albeit at a very slowed rate. First Class mail is declining 1%-4% per year depending on the country but advertising mail is generally on the rise, especially in developing countries. In Canada, for example, ad mail is rising over 6% per year. I was surprised to learn that India’s mail mix is already 20% advertising mail, for example (it is over 50% in the U.S. on average; and if you earn $100K a year than it can easily be over 80%).
Regardless of whether snail mail as a whole is rising or declining in any particular country, there are still 435 billion pieces of it delivered by 9 million workers every year, typically wearing the uniform of the largest employer in their respective countries. India Post, btw, has 515,000 employees to deliver 1 billion pieces of mail per year. The US enjoys automation investment and scale economies - USPS delivers 212 billion pieces of mail per year with “only” 800,000 employees.
Our typical customer has already gone paperless with as many mailers as possible before they signed up for Earth Class Mail service, but they cannot control everyone who sends them mail, hence the opportunity for our service. Same goes for enterprise, military, and government customers. We seek to help the world convert to paperless faster, not slower… but Step One is to get them to move their paper mail to an online, electronic platform, so that the incentive and the connection point is there for more mailers to switch to secured electronic document delivery. This also allows them to increase recycling to nearly 100% versus the national average of 20%-30% rate.
Cheers,
Ron Wiener
CEO & Postmaster General
http://www.earthclassmail.com
Ron, thanks for the additional info and best wishes for the venture.