I happen to attend a networking event at ‘Orrick’ yesterday, where I met founders of four great companies in the social collaborative consumption domain. Think of craigslist with payment processing and trust for collaborative consumption. Then also saw a news piece from India about a second car in the market for $2,500 from Bajaj.
The problem with these products made for the low price markets typically in the developing markets (‘bottom of the pyramid’) is that it is of really poor quality, me-too products. Large companies looking for short term profits are dumping poor quality products into the markets virtually destroying it for good quality products.
Think of the eBay revolution in late 90s creating a million small businesses from garage or apartments. Think of Amazonproviding high-quality fulfillment system to millions of small businesses making them compete with walmart.com with only superior quality products.
eBay and Amazon helped the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ with high quality products powering their users to compete with goods from Fortune 500 companies.
Majority of the products for the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ aims to solve only a piece of the puzzle, and does not think about rising them up the pyramid. Why?
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Sridhar Karnam 