Starting Up by Rahul Pathak

Q: Hey Rahul - thanks for joining Askablogr! I saw your post about your recent India trip and was curious: do you have any specific strategy tips for U.S. managers wanting to tap the Indian market?

Posted by Chris DeVore

A: Great question Chris. Also, I’m looking forward to trying out the Askablogr service. A few things jump out when thinking about tapping into a different markets.

1. Get a local contact you can trust:While it’s valuable to have an outsider’s perspective, I think it’s very important to also have good, trusted local contacts. Each country has a different tempo and there’s the official way things get done and the real way. It really helps to have someone you trust helping you manage relationships on the ground. 
2. Understand Local Nuances:Porting business models is tempting, but it’s important to also understand where things are different from what you’re used to. India’s consumer web use is still largely metered and dialup based. Also, more and more people are using their phones as their primary point of connectivity. This has major implications for how you might choose to do business. Another point that came up on my trip - copyright law. India’s copyright on things like movies is 30 years shorter than that of the USA. If you’re in the content business, you’ve got to understand this.
3. Be Patient:With any new endeavor, there will be obstacles. I think all the complexity is amplified when you’re going international. India will be a pretty big challenge from anyone moving from the USA. Having said that, the growth out there is insane and as you’d expect, infrastructure is straining to keep up. I think it’s a market that you can’t afford to ignore. Going global is similar to a local site in the US going national. Go market by market - establish a beach-head, build critical mass, repeat.

I came back from my trip pretty inspired by what I saw and also very aware that the pace of change out there can only mean increased competition here. It’s definitely a fun time to be doing business.

Switch to ‘Comic Sans.’ Ok, that’s not true. The power font of choice is Calibri .

Usability News has a fascinating article about the impact of the font of an email on the reader’s perception of the writer of the message. The article is dated January 9, 2007 and the results are really interesting and worth a browse. The three fonts tested were : Calibri, Comic Sans & Gigi (Study funded by MSFT Advanced Reading Technology Group.) While we would expect fonts like comic sans to be taken less seriously than other more formal fonts, it’s really interesting to see a rigorous approach to the subject. (I realize this is probably old hat to people in the offline publishing world so my apologies if I’m boring you.)

The table below lists the fonts that were chosen as most suited for email in an earlier study:

The study goes on to talk about the perception of the writer and attempts to correlate it to font choice. The conclusion from the paper was that font choice impacts things like the perception of stability, practicality, professionalism etc. These are all things that we know anecdotally.

As a side note, if you’re still sending out rainbow text in Script, please stop.