Hylo — HyperLocal App for going local — 1 of many in the chronicle.
Here I intend to chronicle the development of the product — HyLo — HyperLocal product which intends to digitise most of the activities in a small periphery.
Let me start with from where we are coming from, we started this journey from a retailer point of view. We wanted to digitise most of the stuff at the retailer side, inventory management, order management et al. We could do it also, but adaptability to tech in that link is a bit of a challenge. So we thought of another angle to solving their other problem of losing their market share to biggies in retail and bring them back to the first one. In all of these if you notice digitisation is the key thing which we are trying to bring in all the legs. And thus accountability, traceability and ease.
So going digital, is an aspiration for most of the local vendors, small entrepreneurs or service providers, which they initiate with a digital vendor and gets stung badly by the cost implications and heavy-duty tech jargons which they may not be able to handle. So they just shut that thought and live with a feeling of how they are the losing business to digital giants. And this black hole of “going digital” always bothers them.
Now from the angle of their consumers, they are happy to have these retailers around and most of the on-the-fly purchases still go to these stores. A kind of trust and friendship is developed with these stores and service providers, sometimes the compromise done with the price and even quality is overlooked. The feeling is it is anyways our corner Mallu Chetan!
But would they be happy to have these stores online? The answer can be two-pronged. Initially, I always thought the personal touch which these stores given to you with a phone call or a greet when you walk-in makes me go back to them. So by moving them to an App, I would lose the above. But my team was insistent on helping me understand the other aspects of it. Once these stores are digital, the credits which they manage can be digital and thus traceable. If ordering is going mobile, traceability, decipherability of the order (Pronunciation in Indian languages are a pain!) and reordering becomes easier. Definitely, it adds the convenience of ordering by anyone at home and advantage of bringing all the orders into one account.
Say an elderly at home or the house help wants to order in your absence, they can manage to do it with the vernacular application available or being guided by voice-based search and visuals which otherwise can be a bit daunting through a phone order.
Now my question still remains, why would a person use an app just to order stuff in the locality, He as well then login to Amazon and complete the whole shopping. Here HyLo’s avatar as a community builder comes into play.
Hylo integrates commercial stores for sure, it also brings in home entrepreneurs who might be home chefs who want to provide one meal in a week or the one who wanna provides all the meals in the week. It also brings other small vendors who might be sourcing products from farmers and selling them with minimal margins. It can be a counsellor in the locality who can spare an hour in the week to another neighbour to untangle his thoughts. Or it could be a trained physiotherapist, otherwise cannot go to work, but can take this as an opportunity to be at her job, while not travelling for work.
Another aspect which we want to bring in HyLo is the “sharing “ as a community aspect. We would like to partner with organisations like NGOs or @FeedingIndia to syphon excess food in the best condition to the needy. This above sharing is sharing in a more organised way. Another could be as simple as lending ur one hour to autistic or elderly care, which you could put up in the App and a neighbour can opt for it. Or it could be sharing a ladder or printer between neighbours. Or book sharing. Everything which I could think doing locally with regards to entertainment, community engagements, commerce and connecting with people, all comprehensively can be done on this App.
Go HyLo is the mantra!
More to be covered in this space by this series.
Happy to bounce ideas on the applicability in your area and what use case would be appropriate to be implemented with this as the base.
