Dollars & Sense

Jugaad’a Do What Jugaad’a Do 🚀

India last month joined three other countries in the exclusive club that has put a craft on the moon. What’s unique about India’s accomplishment is that it did this at a fraction of what the U.S. spends on space exploration, shares Ben Cohen in The Wall St. Journal. While the U.S.’s NASA program has a $24b budget, India’s ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) budget is just $1.3b. India, which started its space program in 1963, is able to do more with less because of its philosophy of “jugaad,” which in Hindi means cheap and unconventional ingenuity. In our culture, we may call it hacking or bootstrapping. 

In practice, this translates to India moving space parts by bike or even oxen. Their first office was a church. In contrast to larger space programs, the ISRO makes fewer prototypes and concentrates on just a few projects.

I find their jugaad inspiring. We’ve exhibited this same trait and we can benefit from continuing to do so. For example, when we started Shop Local, we had to manually setup a client’s Online Store. One couldn’t simply sign up and get an instant Online Store. (Trivia: a retailer would sign up on solarek.com—we were years away from owning ShopLocal.org.) I would email a Sync request to a brand on the store’s behalf, and when the brand emailed me back I’d manually Sync it to the retailer's account. Now all of this is automated and requires no staff oversight. In essence, we had a nascent “space program” that mixed high and low tech. They worked out of  a non-traditional office (see: church); we started out of my apartment.

Maybe our biggest jugaad: When we asked our hosting company’s owner about our Syncing service idea in 2007, he said it wouldn’t work. We did it anyways. Today it saves retailers $3.6m on labor costs annually and helps them sell 18% more. The ISRO would be proud. 

The Indian team's rise hasn't just been filled with lucky shortcuts. They lost two space vehicles in the 1980s and 90s. Failures are steps to success. Our platform was hacked in 2019 (due to an Adobe glitch--not our's), and that helped us make our platform more secure.

India’s space engineers would feel at home working for Shop Local today. Our bootstrap approach continues. We don’t have a user testing team; we launch a new feature after a few techs have tested it. We concentrate on a few areas, including gift registry services. Since we have limited tech resources, we have to choose our projects wisely and not adopt too many peripheral projects. One way to winnow our projects and concentrate on what is important is our Backpack (BP) to-do lists. One only does what is at the top of the list. This prevents us from having too many partially completed tasks. 

India is competing for celestial glory against countries with much larger budgets. We, too, are underdogs. Shopify, Square, and BigCommerce are massive e-commerce B2B providers with much larger development budgets and hundreds of programmers. We're also competing with large online retailers, such Amazon and Zola.  Thanks to our jugaad, we find ways to do things for pennies on their dollar. For example, our Syncing service is one solution that helps us outmaneuver them. Having limited resources sometimes helps us find the more efficient solution.  Point in fact: Syncing was created because I was just one person tasked with updating too many websites.  Limited resources breed solutions. 

India has more space missions on its horizon and we, too, have our goals. Much like a decades-long push to land on the moon, we’ve been planning for years to launch a registry marketplace and an app. Each week we’re taking small steps towards accomplishing these goals so that one day we can take that giant leap.

Team, thank you for the jugaad you've practiced to help us launch great software features.

..........

Read The Wall St. Journal article about the ISRO's recent landing: 
https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/india-moon-landing-chandrayaan-3-budget-dda2e71?st=z589eutia9l6yla&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
 

Tags:
Space program jugaad frugal bootstrap India Ben Cohen

View Post on Shop Local

---

---