Dog is a man’s best friend!
And yet, for several decades in India, we have all seen animals becoming roadkill victims. We don’t do anything for our best friend. We feel bad about it and move on. Ironically, many of us are animal lovers. As a dog-owner myself, this story about Motopaws moved me. I read this in the book “I came upon a light house” by Shantanu Naidu. It is an excellent read and the heartwarming friendship of the legend, Ratan Tata and Shantanu Naidu.
Background
It all began when a millennial, Shantanu Naidu used to ride home on his 2-wheeler after his late-night shift. He often saw stray dogs, who were roadkill victims, lying dead on the road. He often wondered about their last moments being horrific and in some cases, there were little puppies whining after their mother was a victim of roadkill. He wondered what would happen to those puppies. That moved him to learn more about them. In speaking with his friends and acquaintances, he realized a few things – Motorists do not want to kill stray dogs. Instead they don’t see the dogs on time at night, due to which they are unable to stop their vehicle on time and the dogs are the unfortunate victims. Many streets also don’t have lighting at night, due to which these dogs are not visible. In many cases, these accidents lead to other accidents if there is another vehicle behind.Â
Product learning – Discover the opportunity
Many times, organizations make the mistake of building a solution and the focus is less about the problem to be solved for the user. In the above case, instead of just moving on, Shantanu decided to do something about it and he started inquiring about this with other people. In other words, he was trying to understand more about this problem. In this case, the story started with learning the problem first.
Solution phase
Shantanu and his friends came up with a solution – Come up with reflective collars. The reflective collar is nothing but a reflective adhesive tape stitched on top of a denim rag.
They used to get discarded reflective tapes from work. The idea being that the reflective collars would make the dogs visible from quite a distance and the driver would have the time to stop in time. They soon became a team of 15 people. These millennials started a campaign to get people to donate old denim clothing for their product. They roped in a tailor who promised to make 500 collars.
As word spread, the campaign became bigger. They were able to partner with owners of the local branches of Harley-Davidson, KTM and Triumph motorcycles. They now were going to have a launch day where bikers would strap as many dogs as they could throughout the city.
People started writing articles about their initiative and received positive feedback! The general public now knew about the reflective collars. People were thankful about this because many accidents were averted. In the next few weeks, the local media started reporting about this when these people narrated experiences about how they were able to stop their vehicle in time and not run over dogs.
Product learning – BETA phase
The product BETA phase is a limited rollout to test your product with a small audience. With this approach, you have the opportunity to shut down the product if it doesn’t resonate with the audience. Needless to say, it is also less expensive because you would have spent less money on it before rolling it out to the wider audience.
In this case, Shantanu’s team came up with 500 collars and got really scrappy with the materials and largely used donated materials for the same. They used personal networks to spread word about this event and were able to rope in people to strap stray dogs with reflective collars. They made the best out of what they could afford. They had one article published but the rest was due to the product itself. They focused on the outcome which was to prevent roadkill of dogs at night. They got feedback online from the general public. They had overwhelming proof that this product solves the problem that they set out to solve.
What happened next? – Finding an investor
While the initial launch was a success, Shantanu’s team knew that they needed to scale if they were to continue it further. They couldn’t after all sustain on donations. Being a Tata employee, Shantanu decided to reach out to Ratan Tata for additional funding to continue this initiative. Given that it is a known fact that Ratan Tata is an animal lover, he decided to give it a shot. A couple of months later, Motopaws got its investor in Ratan Tata. Now, Motopaws is an initiative that runs across 16 cities in 3 countries.
Given that Motopaws is completely a non-profit, there needed to be additional ways of funding it. So, there was a program “On the Sparks” educational program created for people to learn about entrepreneurship. The proceeds of this program go to sustaining MotoPaws.
Product learning –
You need to prepare your product for the long-term. Since this is a non-profit initiative, it was smart of their team to not just rely on donations but think of other ways to fund the program to maintain its sustainability. Coming up with a value chain of how things feed into each other is important.
Closing thoughts
Shantanu might have gotten lucky to find Mr. Ratan Tata’s backing but for sure he did count on the fact that he is an animal lover and is philanthropic. What he did next with this backing is amazing!
Learn more about Motopaws here!