In the era of discounts and cashbacks, one of the most commonly used and abused word is UPTO.. Get upto 80% discount and 100% cashback (*max discount & cashback Rs.50 😛 )
ASUS seems to have decided to take this concept and run with it. Not just does it’s latest Zenfone 3 Max off upto 3 days of battery life but it also offers upto 5000mAh battery as well. What does upto 5000mAh really mean? Well, your guess is as good as mine.
So here’s my questions…
If you want to gift a car to the person you love, especially on a valentines day. Which one would you chose from the below, A or B?
I am hoping you would go for B, right? Isn’t that the obvious choice?
Today, I came across the below advertisement in the newspaper, which if you think about is would make you laugh or maybe cry if you are at the receiving end of this gift. Why would you gift someone you love, especially on a valentines day.. a iphone 5s which is 3 generations old now? Does this even make any sense? This might result in a breakup!
So today i saw the papers, 1st page ad. from Paytm which was offering upto 100% cashback on transactions, then i turned the page over to see an ad. by Freecharge offering FLAT 100% cashback across lacks of stores. This made me read the headlines 2 times. Now ofcourse there has to be a catch to this madness.. right? Sure enough, there is.. at the bottom, barely readable text which stated that the maximum cashback will be Rs.100. Totally misleading.
Travel websites have been doing this for ages, giving 50-70% cashback on tickets, only to realise that the maximum amount never crossed few hundred rupees… and now, paytm, freecharge is doing the same thing.
Makes me wonder when these companies say that they have millions users, how many of them are actually active users and not just a one time signup who thought they were getting a deal of a lifetime and ended up with Rs.5 as cashback. 😛
A few days back, i saw a spike in the traffic coming to Satthwa.com and realised that Satthwa has been a feature story on IndiaToday… felt happy and grateful.
I experienced the Internet back in 1998 for the first time, back then there were very few websites (especially Indian websites) and “design” was not something that was a priority. Soon I got fascinated with HTML and started learning it by myself… back then I had downloaded a software called the coffeecup html editor and surprisingly it is available till date. Prior to learning html, I had learnt photoshop as well and it came very handy when i started designing websites. Till this date I use photoshop to make mockups, logo etc.
Now that you know where I am coming from, it’s no surprise that when it came to launching Satthwa, I designed the logo, but creating a label and that too a professional looking label was a little out of my league. I thought of hiring a design firm who could not just create label for me but design the packaging etc. The quotes which I got were way too much for a bootstrapped startup to afford. Hence I decided to take this as a challenge and do this on my own.
I had just finished reading “The Lean Startup” and thought, why not try an incorporate it’s principles in my design strategy… the thought itself was very hard for me as i am something of a perfectionist who wants everything to look perfect at launch itself… rather than incremental improvements.
At the time of the launch, I did not even know how many bottles i would be able to sell and how long it would take to sell as the was a new brand with no track record and was priced much above it’s competition. Hence the decision become all the more difficult to launch with a professional looking label which would create a brand value or go with something which is simple and can be launched without any delay.
I choose to go the LEAN way and launch the product with a simple designed label and then improve on it at a later point of time.
Below is how the label looked and the bottled looked back in March 2016 (Time of launch)
Here is the new label design, changed somewhere around July-August 2016
If you see from the front, you will not see much of a change as the main changes is in the background design, text almost remains the same. The not so noticeable difference is the quality of the paper used, lamination which is now a part of the new label and die-cutting to give it rounded edges. However even this might not be the final version as I constantly think of ways to improve it further.
The take away from this article would be that no matter how much you would want things to look “perfect” when you launch, there will be always scope for improvement.. Do not let this delay the launch, keep improving it incrementally.