Move To India With Six Friends And Get Free Netflix For Life
September 19th, 2006 Davis Posted in Disclosure - I own stock in co. mentioned, Netflix |
SeventyMM is a DVD by mail company that is trying to tap into the emering DVD market in India. Recently, the company announced that they have received $7 million in additional funding to try and help build a movie service similar to Netflix only in India. The service itself runs about $8 per month and currently they offer about 10,000 title to residents living in Delhi and in Bangalore. The service is very similar to how Netflix operates in the US, with subscribers building an online queue and then using prepaid envelopes to ship their movies back and forth. What makes the service so interesting is how they are using word of mouth to spread the service.
Rather then engaging in witty commercials or heavy online advertising, the company has instead decided to implement a referal program where if you recommend the service to a friend, then you will save 1/6th of your bill each month. As long as that friend remains a member, after 6 referals, you will start receiving your movies for free.
I think that this is a really smart idea for growing their service, but am not sure how costly it could end up being. Currently, they only have about 7,500 subscribers, so using the program to leverage word of mouth could really boost subscriber growth, even if the incentive program only ends up being temporary.
With a little over a billion residents, India could be a very hot market for the DVD industry. Given their clear obsession with Bollywood films and their emerging middle class economy, there is a lot of potential for the company that gets it right. SeventyMM may be a young company, but they’ve already attracted $10 million in venture capital backing as they attempt to reach their initial subscriber goal of 1 million people and with 7,500 customers are off to a good start in trying to replicate Netflix’s sucess in India.
October 17th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
[…] Part of the reason why is that it takes a very efficient postal system in order to properly run a DVD by mail program, but also because the growth has been so significant in the US that Netflix hasn’t needed to turn to international markets for expansion. Where Netflix has been reluctant to provide service though, other companies have sprung up to fill this void. One of the more interesting companies has been SeventyMM, which in addition to having some pretty interesting promotions and some healthy growth expecations, they also apparently have a connection to Seattle as well. Apparently the company’s managing director is Raghav Kher who is a former Microsoft employee and an entrepreneur left over from the dot com days. […]