The 10 Month Cycle

As an entrepreneur, it is of paramount importance to understand your rhythm. It is easier to pace yourself if you can identify your own entrepreneurial cycle. I believe everyone has their own cycle as it depends on your chosen industry, market, business model and your own training and stamina. Knowing your rhythm allows you to not get distracted when you hear fairy tales or bad stories.

I believe we are on a 10-month cycle. Also the boundaries between different cycles are blurred. In other words, there is no clean end and beginning of each cycle and you can be ending one and starting another simultaneously. 

Cycle I: Creating the Concept

Early on we knew we wanted to do something about tackling poverty. But What? How? Where? When? were just some of the questions. We talked to many people, gained initial support from some very good people. Getting the business plan done was a process of discovery, setting up the company, building the prototype and getting the seed. We knew that this was going to be an epic battle against poverty. And most importantly we love the concept of "Solve Missions; Collect Credits; Get Gifts". Its on the cross-section of micro-finance, crowdsourcing and social good.

Cycle II: Developing the Platform

There are two ways of building a platform. You do it yourself when you are a designer/developer or you do it with a team of designers/developers when you are a business person. Being business people meant we had to gather a strong and diverse team that understood us as we tried to articulate the vision and translate all the conceptual ideas into mock ups, blueprints through regular calls, changing things, managing emotions, keeping an eye on the budget and most of all getting things done. 

Cycle III: Building a Customer Base

We are now in the process of launching a Multi-wave marketing campaign (we try something, learn and try again) starting today for 3 months. The marketing plan has three parts:

A. The Good Needs Friends: Here we are requesting people to invite their friends on majamba and we will reward them credits and gifts (the gift packages are very, very attractive).

B. Invest majamba credits in Good Companies: We are investing 5,100 to 51,000 majamba credits in companies so they can create their own missions.

C. Majambassadors: We are recruiting students on different campuses around the world to be brand ambassadors of majamba and identify new start-ups to support as well as coach other students to leverage the platform.

During the beginning of each cycle, the target looks daunting and it's like rubbing rocks to get a fire going! You have to learn and try again, and again...I can see some sparks...

Start Somethings New!

our best video, yet!

Our Pitch at Forum EPFL Start-up Day

Excellent feedback on majamba.me. Next step - building the multi-phase launch team.

majamba.me is live!

Thanks to family and friends, a major dream has been accomplished! By the way in the past 72hrs, slept for 8 hours!

Please join majamba.me and together we will erase poverty from our planet!

Is investing 100% of your advertising budget into social enterprises an effective way of marketing?

We are doing this experiment with the launch of majamba.me, the network that rewards good. Instead of investing money in Advertising, we will be investing in social enterprises via majamba credits.

Quick Intro to majamba
You see, when you travel, you get rewards; when you shop you get rewards, so we thought why not create a social currency network that rewards good. The more good you do, the more credits you get. And with your credits you can decide to get fair trade gifts (that's the investment in social enterprises) or reward others who support you.


Expected Impact
Well, for every member who joins majamba.me, we will be able to empower one person who lives around the poverty line (http://majamba.blogspot.com/2011/09/100million-members-100million-people.html), so we are focussing on driving membership starting 2nd of October.


I will be happy to share the results of this experiment...

majamba, the network that rewards good

Folks, this is our briefest video. We have managed to tell the story in 30 seconds.

Free Handmade Gifts!

Thanks To Dr. Deepak John Mathew, Nandini, Shyam, Alex and Jeannine. Here is the launch video!

100M Members = 100M People Empowered

Turning social interaction into social good

The basic idea behind majamba.me is to turn social interaction into social good. Now if we can convince 100 million members to join, we will be able to empower 100M people on the planet living close to subsistence level and make a dent on global poverty.

Here are the details behind the claim: 

1. People spend thousands on gifts during family events and festivals. Of course, we know how things go during Christmas. However economic uncertainty does impact gifting, donations and other altruistic actions undertaken by normal people. 

2. One thing that is UP during the uncertain times is the time people spend on social networks. Comparing notes and finding out new things, recommending, interacting and just passing time, yes, people are spending around 20% of their time on social networks. 

3. So let us say we were to find an ingenious way to reward people around $1K of handmade goods as social gifts for doing the social things they like to do on the Internet. 

4. Now imagine, 100M people getting rewarded $1K per annum. Yep do the math, that's around $100B of gifts. 

5. Let us take a scenario that these gifts are sourced from artisans and families that are living at subsistence level, mostly around $2.50 a day. Now an average boost of $1,000 of additional income will make a sizable impact on their quality of life. So $100B worth goods will have a positive impact on around 100M people living around the poverty line. 

Aha, you may be wondering who is footing the bill - advertising! 

Companies spend well over $600B on advertising and sales promotion. Now people are spending around 20% of their time on social media. So if companies start to put around $120B on advertising on social media and start to use networks like majamba.me that reward people for doing good. This will set off a virtuous cycle where more people will be getting gifts for free; helping each other; a services exchange will emerge; more companies will use these platforms (competition is a good thing as it expands the market quickly) to get their message to the customers in a cheap way and more jobs and dignity for the artisans of the world. 

Yes, you got it! It's just simple social innovation! Coming your way on the 2nd of October 2011.