Why Wishradio.in won’t work

It’s been almost 13 months for us at wishradio.in, part time and 3 months for me, full time. In the first 9-10 months we were building the product, getting the UI right and ensuring that we had enough content and features to engage users. The last 3 months were spent validating the concept, business proposition and use cases.

Let me start with defining the Wish Radio concept. It was intended to be the Trip-Advisor of eCommerce – a portal that would aggregate the 700+ eCommerce stores in India and point users to the right store when they searched for a particular product category on the portal. And then it would provide everything to help make the purchase decision – reviews, ratings, social recommendations and deals. It also built in a shopping related social network – so users could ‘Follow’ the stores that they liked, see the stores their friends were reviewing, post wishes on what they wanted to buy and ‘radio’ their wishes to friends and stores, in the hope of them getting fulfilled.

Sounds good? It sure did all these 13 months that we spent putting the portal together technically, whetting the concept with eCom stores and online shoppers, and executing the marketing plans. But now we’re almost convinced it won’t work. Here’s why:

1. Online shoppers want to see products, not stores.


They don’t like seeing store fronts because to be honest, they don’t care. I realized this the hard way when I landed on a store that had mini stores inside it. And I was bugged! Why show me another store – just show me the products directly, I wanted to tell the store team! So there was no way that users would come to Wish Radio to see store fronts, however unique, differentiated, value-for-money the products in them were.
We could have changed our UI (and business model) to reflect products but there are many portals already attempting that, and trying to build sustainable revenue models around the concept. Check out Sweet Couch, Fancy, Svpply. The challenge before portals like these is that they are discovery portals that people check out when they have time on their hands, or when they want to generally browse around for interesting products. When they genuinely want to buy something, we suspect it’s Amazon or Google to find the best store at the best price.
And we don’t know of many in this discovery space, who are home and dry on a revenue model that’ll keep them ticking. No point being a me-too in an area that’s yet to see success, we thought.

2. Stores want to see traffic. Period. Branding and connecting with consumers doesn’t mean much until it translates into traffic and check-outs. 
One of our biggest assumptions as store-focused portal was that we would be offering stores a unique opportunity to build their brand, something none of the product-focused portals did. In addition, they would be able to customize responses (or deals) to individual wishes posted by users as well as respond to negative reviews – and hypothetically, build a lasting relationship with their shoppers. The business model was built around the stores taking this up even as traffic would start building.
We learnt that business comes first. Branding can come later, if required. If business was ok, then branding could be skipped altogether because resources would always be stretched. All the stores told us that they would consider investing time (I didn’t even come to money) on Wish Radio when they saw sufficient traffic. Some were point blank saying this would not work, others were willing to ‘help-out’ a fellow start-up but none of them bought into the concept.

   (image courtsey: www.mediasuite.co.nz)

3. Users need to see significant value before adopting.
We had always positioned ourselves as the ‘Trip Advisor or Zomato of eCommerce’. But there is one big difference. Both Trip Advisor and Zomato bring offline to online (hotels and restaurants respectively). Here we were trying to bring online to online, though with focus and a layer of curation. So the results that users would see on page 5 of Google would up on our search landing page.
We realized pretty soon post user conversations that this proposition doesn’t provide enough incentive for adoption. After all, the information was already there on Google – we were just aggregating it.

4. Building a 2-way B2C network is a chicken and egg story.
Users would like to see stores, personalized deals and responses from stores – that would have been our differentiator compared to other aggregator and coupon sites. Stores would like to see users active on the portal. And while the users and stores played tack, Wish Radio would fall through for lack of resources and time.
All our mentors tell us that B2C is tough – it’s either a long wait while the portal picks up traffic or you have to have funds to advertise consistently for a while. And that gets compounded in a country like India where new concept adoption is relatively lower.
Waiting for 3-5 years before seeing sufficient, if any, revenue takes a lot and we decided we were not up for it.

So that’s it. It’s not easy to speak of Wish Radio in past tense. All the excitement of conceptualising and building it over the last many months, quitting to work on it full-time, speaking to stores and users to validate and refine the concept, drawing up and executing marketing plans … its been a fun journey trying to get Wish Radio to fire.
Realizing that it most probably won’t work is tough but the learning has been tremendous. I would have learnt as much about self-motivation and handling challenges as I would have about entrepreneurship and business building. For all that I have learnt from it, I perhaps wouldn’t even want to trade the failure with success, as much as I wish there was some way to make Wish Radio work.