For a mobile first nation that loves missed calls, here’s something product managers need to know

Sometimes you find a market, and at other times, a market finds you. Truecaller has over 200 million active users globally, of which 150 million are in India. Maybe because we are a trust deficit nation when it comes to technology, we stay cautious to know our callers. And with Truecaller, the wisdom of the crowd helps verify and validate the genuine while singling out spam.

Introspecting on their huge user skew towards India is interesting. When asked what’s the biggest failure and learning from it, Google’s then CEO Eric Schmidt, said “Not realizing that a mobile number is a unique way people use to identify themselves, and not an email ID”. This was in context with the failure of Google Plus as a social networking platform, which used Gmail as a means to sign-up.

This is particularly true in developing markets like India, where many prefer to use file transfer apps to download apps rather than use an App store (which requires an email id to access). While every Android phone warrants an email id to get started, I’ve seen retail store vendors using generic email IDs they created to on-board several hundred customers.