YO YO Honey Singh Strategy for Product Startups!

We are a product startup from Delhi NCR and to be honest, not big fans of Yo Yo Honey Singh. He started his music career as a Music Director in 2005 and for 7 years, was virtually unknown. Then, something happened in the year 2012 that catapulted him to overnight success and by 2014, his songs were in close to 15 big Bollywood movies and he wrote lyrics with legendary Gulzar!

In past 2 years, he has been in news all the time, with a Yo Yo Honey Singh song cropping up every few days. He did this by partnering with many established singers and by being in songs of various movies. With his signature voice and style, many might not like him, but one cannot just ignore him.What he did struck us as a great strategy for early stage product startups.In India, customer validation for product startups takes 12-18 months easily and as an independent platform, things get off the track all the time and the period only increases. By using YO YO strategy of piggybacking upon existing, established distribution network, a startup can:

Reduce their time to market drastically
Amplify their reach substantially in quick time
Carry out quick product iterations to reach product/market fit

Ours is a B2B2C product – a white label plugin for payment splitting and aggregation for use-cases like group-gifting, group-travel, group-event booking and crowd funding. We have partnered with multiple e-commerce websites in gifting, travel and crowd funding domain in just a span of three months.

We have learnt that while taking this approach, it is important to take a Selective Distribution approach and tie up with partners that cater to the Target Segment you would have targeted if you had not taken a YO YO strategy and had been an independent B2C product.This stems from Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing The Chasm” lesson where you must ensure that partners whose network you are leveraging, cater to end target segment your product is meant for, to facilitate organic word of mouth spread among customers.We have a lot to learn and we realise that on path to creating great software products out of India, we will have to embrace innovative and new approaches which sometimes, we might not learn from a Silicon Valley blogger but from Indian celebrities you might not generally like.

Guest Post by Ankit Singh, Aprogift

nkh

uhhh care to elaborate on any specifics ?

Honey singh didnt achieve this by just “being in songs of various movies” what does that even mean. Its like saying you should appear in MSNBC a lot and that can help you piggy back on the success of MSNBC to launch spread the word on your payment startup.

I think its more about how to get there. Honey Singh did have a strategy of how he got to bollywood, infact he had one before of how to get famous in the Punjabi scene as well. Thats the real catch, and the real learning which you completely failed to mention. I am assuming you know what the strategy was.
- Ankit
  
  Thanks for the interest. It’s not about being in songs of various movies but being on the channels that put you in touch with your TG – in this case the 18-30 age group who watch a lot of movies and a subset of them are Honey Singh fans and you are right, it’s not about being on MSNBC either as we are not targeting its viewers.
  
  The learning is – with a validated product, piggybacking on external channels increases recall and engagement only when it’s targeted. Hence, Honey Singh songs won’t be effective on Sanskaar or Aastha TV. He came out with Desi Kalakar album few weeks back and it takes long time to launch albums but Yo Yo buzz doesn’t die in-between as his name keeps cropping up in various Bollywood songs.
  
  You are right “it’s more about how to get there” as product has to be validated first which Honey Singh started out with specifically targeting college males with obscene songs (his first few songs) just like Facebook, targeting a niche market initially. Though, that is a topic of a separate post altogether!