How to Find Unusual Users for Your SMS Application

Sushrut Bidwai (@SushrutBidwai) writes two interesting posts on how you can find unusual users for your SMS application, if you only know where to look --

Why can’t you reach to customers in villages/taluka places who have mobiles but don’t use SMSes? You can. I know you will say that these people can’t type SMS and literacy rates are low. Yes, they can. I do lot of field work and I know that a lot of them (30% approximately) can. So who can send them useful SMS which these people, let's say farmers, can use for there advantage? Traders. For example, Nasik exports grape to global market. Lot of farmers who export them are not literate but are rich and have mobiles. Now you can bridge these farmers in Nasik to exporters in Mumbai using SMS channel. How? Go to traders in Mumbai and see how they work. For every day they will call n differnt farmers telling them todays market price and if they want to sell for that market value. Otherwise farmers go directly to markets and sell it for available market price. So you can help farmers get good pricing for there goods and you can help traders in managing their supply chain using SMS channels. (link)

My father, who worked in Maharashtra irrigation department, told me that the District Collector communicates with them using SMSes! Reach to them. Go and talk to these people and make them see how they can use SMSGupshup like platform (SMSGupshup is branded wrongly, so first build a me-too product with much better branding). These large monolithic organizations require sending of memos (often one-liners) and receipt of memos. See if you can make them use SMS for the communication. (link)