Zippr turns one!

June 15, 2015 - 4 minutes read

July 31st marks the first anniversary of Zippr as a formal entity. While we had been working in active skunk mode for a few months before that, we formulated the team on this day last year!

This has me thinking about the evolution of Zippr and how far we have come from being just an idea way back in June 2011 where my good friend Aditya Kesiraju (a.k.a Dak) and I spent significant time getting our first thoughts together. At the time, he suggested the name “Ten20″ which in US police code means “location”. For folks that have ever seen “World”s wildest police videos” would have heard What”s your 1020? which translates toWhat”s your location. It was not until much later in May 2013 that we rechristened Ten20 as Zippr (meaning a smarter Zip code).

We spent many sessions in June-Aug 2011 talking about the feature list and I thought it would be fun to share that journey (because who doesn”t like a little trip down the memory lane).

That summer, we spent enough time to give us clarity on the initial requirements and the move towards a MVP started. We spoke to a bunch of people, cab drivers, food delivery and the idea seemed to make a lot of sense, especially in a country like India where the postal format is inconsistent and requires lots of additional information to be useful. We put our “best” design skills to good use to come up with initial wireframes as well.

The Philosophical Question

After doing some market and financial modeling, we had two big questions staring at us. Where are we going to get the $$ to do this? and Why is no one else doing this? The answer was obvious, that in 2011, this idea was too early to sustain interest for smartphone adoption and mobile internet usage to penetrate the general audience for Ten20 to make sense. This meant we had to invest significant $$ to educate the market about the new address format and iterate on the product until we got the fitment just right. In hindsight, postponing the idea of Ten20 was a great decision because that allowed us to study the market, and know when the right time to move forward.

Nov 2012 and the Rajan Anandan Talk

I attended the ISB Digital Summit in Nov 2012 and kicked-off with a Keynote by Rajan Anandan (which btw, is my all-time favorite talk) where he talked about imminent mobile explosion. His command and confidence on where he saw the industry heading and its impact on the daily life in 2013 and beyond was very profound and I immediately wrote to Dak that we are now ready to move forward. Thanks, Rajan!

013 and the Evolution of Zippr

I restarted the pursuit of Ten20, started talking to a bunch of friends/family to get their thoughts together. Folks like Anirudh who was incubating his startup out of our office was a great partner to brainstorm ideas and move forward. In fact, credit for the name “Zippr” goes to him. We moved forward with our first engineer hire in Feb 2013 and able to get our first prototype out in June.  The journey thus began.

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