Live from XMediaLab: Vishal Gondal, Founder and CEO, Indiagames Ltd.

From the program: While most kids were grappling with the realities of growing up, Vishal took a head start and started his first company – FACT, soon after finishing school at the ripe young age of 16. In 1999, he founded Indiagames, then a five member team. Today he leads a global operation with over 300 employees and offices in Mumbai, Beijing, London and Los Angeles. Indiagames is an award winning multi-platform games company, developing games for wireless, console and online gaming platforms, and works with top game publishers, handset manufacturers, Hollywood studios and mobile operators across the globe. Vishal is recognized as being instrumental in starting and growing the Gaming Industry in India.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. The problem is not only to find the idea, but to commercialize it. Even in India, just about everyone is trying to do that.

How do you know a good idea? Most people think good ideas are cool -- but successful is cool! So once an idea is successful you're bound to think it's cool. But popular is not always cool (shows a pic of shaven-headed Britney). From a business perspective, is it cool or is it commercially viable?

70% of Indians are under the age of 35. That completely changes the consumption pattern and that’s an interesting challenge.

Cool is the next big thing. How do we focus our energies to these over 800 million people in India under 35?

Unique is cool.

Stupid is cool. When someone says your idea is stupid, that’s a good starting point :-)

Trendspotting.
People need to look at what’s happening today and figure out what this group of people will be doing six months, one year from now. But it’s hard to do; the ability to create a commercially successful idea is far more complicated than we think.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Often people do things that look cool in the home market, but they ignore the cultural environment in India. In India there’s a very popular site for marriages -- parents put pictures of their kids up. That's a very culturally-specific phenomenon.

Customer-centric.
In India there’s a tradition where they say that a customer or a guest is equal to God. This needs to be part of the philosophy of a start-up trying to get a foothold in India.

Not a foreign import.
There was a company that bought a dancing game that was hugely popular in China, and everyone thought it would be massive in India. They forgot that while Indians like dancing, they like to see actresses dance, not to dance themselves.

Try out half-baked ideas, do rapid prototyping.
Go to market, ask customers, trial it in different ways. In fact, India’s major cellular company runs 25 different companies with 25 different CEOs, so that each one can make mistakes on a small scale.

Study consumer response in natural conditions.
Don't do a polygraph! Forget about what people say they’re going to do, what do they actually do?

Your mother will love your product -- discount it.

Find your angel.
India has a problem with too few angel investors in the market. Most Indian investors are doing it as CSR.

Beware of the MBA/consultant types.

Meet the superhero: the VC.

The best way to kill an idea is to have a board decide on it. Failure is a teacher -- you will fail a number of times. If you got it right, everything in one shot, something is wrong.

Finally, Indian strategy: jugaad.
Jugaad is a combination of being street smart, doing everything it takes to get the job done. Washing machines were released in India 10-15 years back, and they weren’t selling very well, except for restaurants who were using it to make Lassi (a yogurt drink).

Jugaad is finding new applications of old things -- roller skates being used in factories to get around. So the jugaad solution to Indian piracy was games on demand. Because it’s all pirated, they tried to give you all the games through the same channel as the pirates at almost the same cost, so there’s no reason not to buy it legally.

X-Start-Up (cross-start-up).
The opportunity now is to do a cross-start-up: Look at start-ups from New Zealand, Israel, Silicon Valley, India, and put them all together. The world is flat -- it’s not about silos, it’s about putting them together and seeing how you can have a new market open up. Also, with x-start-ups you can access VCs overseas who wouldn’t normally invest in companies from your country.