Majamba will be launching at Paleo'12

Now it's not everyday you get a call - inviting you to launch your start-up at one of the biggest festivals in Europe that welcomes 230,000 fans every year! That's exactly what happened on Tuesday and today we signed the paperwork. It's official, we will be launching Majamba at the Paleo.

We have done the Majamba technical launch, the commercial launch, and other test launches to see whether the platform holds up. Now this is the real thing. We are ready for the BIG TIME. We will be going live with the Swiss launch of Majamba. The festival will start on the 17th of July 2012 and we will be there rocking with the fans.

If you are lucky enough to have a ticket already, we will see you at Paleo. We are cooking something special with Enea, Mattia, Maya, Fed, Diego, Nico, Rajiv and with Jeannine and Alex's guidance. We will be announcing something new soon...Free Hugs and Much, Much More...

An Awesome Sense of Accomplishment

Compassion: Norbulingka Institute, Dharmsala, India 

We have just completed a giant roller coaster trip of Northern, Central and Western India. Here is the route we followed - La Sarraz-Geneva-Zurich-Delhi-Dhramsala-Delhi-Jabalpur-Delhi-Mumbai-Ahmedabad-Delhi-Zurich-Geneva-La Sarraz. We met new friends, thanked old friends, received blessings from elders and reconnected with cousins. Overall, we are blessed with an awesome sense of accomplishment and here is why?

1. In every city, we received re-confirmation that what we are doing is something good: Building a global market for handmade goods is clearly seen as a positive thing. And building a platform where anyone can discover good people, projects and products is very challenging because creating the human network of social enterprises, advertisers, Majambassadors, developers, designers, marketing experts and support teams (lawyers, accountants) and early adopters takes time & perseverance.

2. We met with three incredible people in Dharmsala, Mumbai and Delhi, who have agreed to become Majamba Ambassadors (Fellowship Track). We will be announcing their names soon.

3. We met with five social enterprises in Dharmsala and Ahmedabad that will be publishing a part of their catalog on Majamba.Me

4. We thanked the development team in Ahmedabad for their hard work and valuable advice.

5. We were blessed by our family in Delhi who took the time to visit us for a dinner honoring my mother who also enjoyed the first of a kind party.

6. And we sat down with my Uncle in Mumbai who advised us to tweak the business model; create a sharper value proposition and complete the foundation (team and platform) before launching the marketing campaign. Currently planned for October 2012.

Wandering in India

Wandering in India!

In the next three weeks, we will be meeting people who are doing good around the world and are based in India. Looking forward to sharing some good stories with you. Our goal is to boost our fair trade catalog with more products. As well as meet people who can provide leadership to build a community of members who do good and get goodies.

Who are the thinkers behind Majamba?

Part of the Majamba team (who showed up for the photo shoot)

Thanks to Enea, Maya, Fed, Jeannine and Mattia (who are in the photo) as well as Nico, Diego, Shyam, Chandan, Deepak, Aslam, Narendra, Chirag, Anil, Jaldip, Nandini, Rahul, Fabrice, Bhaskar, Chris, Jeff, Damien, Timm, Marc, Tom, Noel, Joe, Mathias, Alex, Ramakrishna, Manish, Mike, Simon, Sebastien, Laurent, Dipankar, Caroline, Thomas, Sandy, Didier and many months of research, planning, development, user testing, partnership management, integration, more development, launching test campaign and polishing - I am pleased to report that Majamba.Me is fully functional. In the process I have invested all my life's savings, received recognition and investment from the Swiss Government, made some very good friends and found a way to end global poverty. 

What is Majamba.Me?

Majamba.Me is an innovation that turns social interaction into social good. Majamba.Me is the world's most rewarding way to introduce yourself. As a member you create a visual profile page. You select a photo that tells your story. You can add a few words and your social links. Your visual profile is the front page of your world on the Internet. Its your social resume, your social card. And the more views your profile on Majamba.Me gets, the more Majamba Hugs you get and you can use your hugs to get fair trade gifts for free. Thus creating jobs for the hardest working people on the planet. 

What is the Goal?

Once we achieve 100M active users, we will be able to have a direct impact on lifting 100M from poverty in a dignified way. The Majamba.Me platform is in open beta and I am inviting a few selected friends and family to try the platform, create a profile, share with friends. Our lead social enterprises is SEWA.ORG and our goal is to sign up hundreds of social enterprises. 

Why do this?

Today, 3,260,000,000 people try to live on less than $2.50 a day. Today, most of the ways of supporting them (donations or micro-loans) either destroy their dignity or burden them with a cycle of debt. Moreover the Internet revolution is passing them by because most of the 3.26 billion people living around the poverty line cannot read, write and most of them do not even have electricity. Sometimes, the only skill our friends have is to produce handmade goods. However, most of the time, they do not get a fair deal for their efforts, hence the cycle of poverty persists. I want to leverage my MBA, my business experience, the Majamba.Me platform as well as all my energy to make a dent on global poverty. 

What can we learn from the KONY 2012 Campaign?

Thanks to Nico, I had the opportunity to check out KONY 2012 video. Wow! Thanks Nico.

First of all, a little background - KONY 2012, is a campaign to bring an African rebel leader - Joseph Kony, active in and around Uganda, to justice for his crimes against children, whom he recruits for his rebel army. The campaign has various sub-campaigns - a twitter campaign, poster campaign and a petition campaign - anchored by a 30-minute video on YouTube. The campaign has been started by a San Diego based activist group called Invisible Children made up of three filmmaker friends.

Now why is this important? It turns out that these folks launched a video campaign on the 5th of March with a few thousand hits and then on the 7th of March went completely viral. We saw it it yesterday when there were 15M views and now there are 40M+ views. It is important because there are focusing on Peace, Love, Respect, Dignity and they are writing the book on social media campaigning with a very small budget. Well done!

What can we learn from them?

1. Do your Groundwork: For several months (even years), they kept an archive of all their videos and photos of their actions towards their chosen cause. They built a base of supporters at schools and community centers through a variety of awareness events.

2. Use Classic Building Blocks: They got the right building blocks - great logo, clear message, poster, flag, bracelet, website, Facebook page, Twitter account and of course the YouTube video! The numbered bracelet, missions, action day and action kit all add to the sense of community.

3. Make it Personal: By putting his own son in the video, the narrator of the film has made the story "real". It's a classic Hollywood ploy - used in Blood Diamond. Showing 30,000 children suddenly has more meaning when you realize it can happen to someone you care about.

4. Seed the Campaign: First the video was transmitted to the base. Then the base were encouraged to share the video with celebrities and lawmakers. All the building blocks were there. And the viewer (or celebrity team member) was emotionally ready to do something...and then LUCK happens. Oprah, P. Diddy, Justin Bieber and others and their twitter accounts started to forward the link to their followers. And the rest, as they say is history and fodder for the social scientists, the journalists and people like me.

What does it all mean?

We are now entering the new world of social activists as rock stars. Suddenly the guy or girl with a cause is the rock star, not just the guy with the guitar or just a pretty face. These are the activists joining the music, TV, sports, film, politicians and Internet entrepreneurs to truly change the world for good. One things is for sure, there will be more social activist stars. Because once the people like one, they want more...

From Curious Bystanders to Engaged Users: What did I learn for $20

The Journey

This week we completed our first product (Majamba Page) on the Majamba.Me Platform. And as planned we invested in a marketing campaign to launch this product. Yes, for the first time we invested $20 (Twenty US Dollars) in advertising. As you can see from the chart the traffic soared. Here are some major lessons:

1. Curious Bystanders vs. Engaged Users: We realized that there is a big difference between curious bystander (those who are interested in seeing how well we are doing or not) and engaged users (those who are interested in the utility of the site). We have to learn to engage the users by continuously improving the experience, enhancing the benefits and providing access anywhere (all devices).

2. Follow Your Path: We are now getting ready for building the VC Fund for Majamba. We now have the platform and the metrics. We need to get the financing sorted out for the next round. The next round will include recruiting good people. People who believe that there is more to life than just money; People who believe that a little start-up can indeed change the world; People who are good at what they do.

Now I finally get to use my super duper MBA!

Crossing The Bridge

Traffic Oct'11 - Feb'12

Today thanks to Federico, Diego, Aslam, Chirag and Narendra, we went public with Majamba Page, the world's most rewarding visual profile page. We started our marketing campaign. We are humbled by the response. Thank you. Moving forward we are going to focus on the following:

1. Best User Experience
2. Priceless Rewards
3. Access Anywhere

Who Are You?

Majamba Page

Are you the sum of all your tweets? Maybe you are the sum of all your status update neatly displayed in a timeline? Are you a Black and White resume with a serious photograph? Are you the blog entry? Are you what you share - a photo, a news clip? Are you the one waiting for someone to write your bio on Wikipedia?

We are currently preparing to launch the Majamba Page, the world's most rewarding page. Majamba Page is your profile page on the Internet. Here is the best part - the more views your page gets the more rewards you get!

Check it out - www.majamba.me

Do let me know if love it or hate it or want to improve it...