Why we invested in Blink
I met Som, Ankit and Chandu at our Delhi studio towards the end of last year. They had launched Rewind — a neatly designed earphone cord manager, that had gone viral with millennials in India. Having quit their jobs at Google, ITC and Tata Steel, the trio was now looking to take their learnings to build devices for a connected world. Seeing product designs being consistently validated by the market, the team was resilient on building an Indian consumer technology platform — starting with Blink, a smartwatch.
What was immediately striking about the founders, and continues to be their distinguishing feature, is a laser-focus on problems in the consumer experience and the manner in which these can be mitigated through an obsessive focus on this experience. More particularly, these two insights:
1. Fragmented digital interactions need unification
User interaction with digital products is very different in India. Digital user experiences are being built after observing what has worked in foreign markets and we’re at the beginning of figuring out what indigenous principles are. A common thread Ankit highlighted was that Indian digital products and services tend to push information outside of apps.
E.g. if you order a product from an ecommerce website or a meal to be delivered, you’re likely to get multiple notifications (via SMS, push and email) from the merchant, your payment processor and delivery vendors at each stage.
To be clear, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with so many notifications (ok, maybe the top one is unnecessary). The reason they’re becoming commonplace is so that every kind of user — including those without email or data access — does not miss crucial information. The perceived problem is that this information is in silos and cannot be easily actioned upon. Furthermore, as our digital interactions move to the offline space (e.g. with point-of-sale systems), the increased friction of loading up apps, validating OTPs and authenticating brings down the quality of the experience.
Blink’s goal is to create an interface which can not only unify different digital touch points and create one comprehensive experience for consumers, but also present information being pushed to consumers in a format which makes it actionable.
This has necessitated for Marvin OS to be built from the group-up and fundamentally reimagined experience to interact on a small screen on the wrist. You can guess how:
2. Selling smartwatches is all about the design and brand
While unifying notifications is an interesting perspective, the founders were grounded enough to realise that for an unknown startup to be able to sell this promise to a consumer, they would have to absolutely nail product design and brand positioning.
At the end of the day, Blink will be in business by selling devices. In the context of shipping a first batch of smartwatches, good software simply ticks a box. From the beginning, the perspective echoed by Som has been that the customer needs to really lust after and fall in love with a beautifully-designed piece of hardware. Through countless iterations, they have cycled through an endless number of case designs, material combinations and fretted every last option of how the glass blends into the case.
In previously shipping Rewind, albeit with a far less ambitious scope, they had become a mini-Internet sensation through a well-positioned value proposition and a Kickstarter campaign that went viral. The purpose of great distribution is to do proper justice to an impeccably designed product and fetch user attention till the product (and its functionality) can speak for itself.
It was clear, every time Som corrected the words I used to talk about Blink, that the same delicate eye that they had for design would be meticulously applied to a carefully-crafted marketing campaign. For instance, take a look at this teaser:
Now tell me you’re not excited!!
Ye mera India
The smartwatch landscape has been typically dominated by US or Chinese companies. In fact consumer hardware is a space that Indian startups have typically stayed away from. It’s been truly impressive to see a small team of twelve people go from idea-to-market in 12 months, all while simplifying a complex product problem.
What’s most exciting to me about partnering with Blink is being part of the journey of an indigenous company with the audacity to build a world-class product.
I’m counting down to launch-day — don’t you think it would be phenomenal if a home-grown consumer-tech company could push the boundaries and build products beyond global benchmarks?
I, for one, think it’s about time…
