Hello Change-makers,
It is the start of a new financial year. And it seems, the world has turned upside down. No one could have predicted it, but nonetheless it is here.
It is the first time ever that the world has witnessed a global health crisis coupled with a potential economic slowdown. This is a first even for the companies who survived and grew through the last two financial crashes.
Right now, the world is getting sicker day by day. And it will last for a little while. Weeks, maybe even months. However, this too shall pass.
Once the dust settles, the whole world will have a choice, to either drag down in depression or to heal quickly, stand up, and come out stronger.
And at Impact, we choose quick healing and quicker rebuilding.
As the world gets unhealthier and unhappier, a the job of a startup that is solving for the world’s health and happiness becomes even more important.
So it is our promise to make ‘Impact — Everything Health and Happiness’ for the world in this new decade.
In this letter, I will share how all of us at Team Impact plan to live up to this new responsibility and embrace this new opportunity in front of us.
Today, Impact is a strong community of 510,000 change-makers and we completed this financial year with a 330% growth in our community-size and 300% growth in business from our previous financial year.
For the coming couple of years, we have a robust product, business-product and business roadmap ahead of us.
But before we jump into the future, let me tell you about our last 3 weeks.
The last 3 weeks have been crazily intense for us, as much as they have been for anyone else.
It all began on March 14 2020, when we all attended my co-founder Khandu’s wedding. The conversation around covid-19 had just started to spread. So we decided to work remotely just after it.
On 19th March our PM announced about the Janata Curfew, and after a quick team discussion just after the announcement, we all sprung into action.
Within 2 days, we launched a new feature called Indoor Workouts for our community to continue to stay active even during the 1-day curfew.
Soon after, our PM announced a 21-day lockdown across all of India. At first, we were worried that this would affect our outdoor workout numbers. Instead of worrying a lot, we decided to double down on work to make sure that the dip is small and short lived.
On 24th March, we launched a 21-day #lockdownstep challenge (ie. a growth hack above the new feature — indoors) on social media, asked our community to take a video of their indoor workouts and challenge their friends to do the same. We got a lot of videos of people walking, jogging, dribbling footballs, doing zumba, even doing hand stands with Impact App.
By March 29th, we also had a covid-19 relief cause on our app and this was our third tactical move to ensure that our engagement and users continued to grow.
And here are its results!
We also changed the positioning of our business product Impact League from a vitamin for our clients’ health to a painkiller at this unique time.
We are currently communicating with our existing and new clients with the subject line, “How to Engage your Employees in the Time of Covid-19?” And it is fetching us better responses than ever before!
In the past 6 months, we grew steadily and quickly to achieve our desired goal of hitting 500K users by March 2020.
This is all thanks to our Dream Team, each of whom worked have worked relentlessly for the past 6 months, effortlessly moulded into the new remote-working culture and started pulling off quick miracles from day 1 of the new work-style. In parallel, we also started scaling up and skilling up for what is coming next.
So what is coming next? What lies for us 1, 2 , 3, even 5 years ahead in time?
It’s definitely going to a new world with a new lifestyle where companies with a new mindset will adapt and evolve to survive. But what is this new world, what will be its defining factors, and what do we have to evolve for?
For that, we need to go back some 66 Mn years, when life on Earth was completely different. Much of the world’s current land mass was under massive oceans. Flowering plants were Earth’s latest innovation. And Earth was a monopoly of dinosaur domination.
But their reign was not to last. It ended with a huge bang. A 10 km Asteroid, the size of Navi Mumbai — crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The collision literally rocked the world — releasing 2 Mn times the energy of the largest nuclear bomb ever invented. Its Impact — a Planetary killer.
A series of followup ripples like mega tsunamis, massive earthquakes, global firestorms and hundreds of volcanoes swallowed the Earth. The sun disappeared behind a huge cloud dust for a decade.
These changes were so rapid and so extreme that dinosaurs were unable to adapt. Soon, they were extinct.
For our species, this was great news! While dinosaurs were large, slow and inflexible, the small furry mammals — our early ancestors were far more nimble, resilient and flexible.
They took the opportunity adapted to the new earth and never looked back.
So what do we see as today’s asteroid on the world? Some would say it’s Covid-19, some would say it is economic slowdown. But it’s actually none of those.
The real asteroid hitting on all companies of the 21st century is Exponential Technology.
And especially in today’s time, the big companies with their mega-size and slow decision making who do not adapt to exponential technologies to come would become the dinosaurs. Soon to go extinct.
And the tiny, nimble, agile, flexible mammals who will adapt and use these exponential technologies will define the upcoming decade. They are the Exponential Entrepreneurs.
So what is exponential technology? Exponential technology is any technology that is halving in complexity and cost and doubling in its power, scale and reach in regular periods of time. The shorter the period, the faster it grows.
In the 1980s it was pharma-tech, semiconductors and graphic user interface which brought health-tablets and a computer to every home. In the 1990s it was the Internet which digitally connected the world over those computers. In the 2000s it was the multitouch display, chips and sensors which brought about the smartphone revolution. And in the 2010s, it was nano-tech as well as social media, instant-messaging and moment-sharing, the latter ones being built over smartphones and the internet.
So if we observe carefully, the next decade of exponential technologies either ride on or disrupt the previous ones.
According to experts, there are six exponential technologies that will define the 2020s. They are
1. 3D Printing — to replace in-plants subtractive manufacturing with local additive manufacturing
2. Networks & Sensors — which will truly connect us all in an internet-of-things world
3. Infinite computing — which replaces all human logical calculations with machines, that will only speed up our progress.
4. Robotics. — the machines who will create the machines who will create goods and commodities for our daily use.
5. Artificial intelligence — adding the mind to the machine (with a few humane rules to govern) they will be much smarter and capable to take us to new heights
6. Synthetic biology. — a synthetic lung today would’ve truly made a difference
The true power does not lie in these technologies themselves, but in their applications in the real world. And in the months and years to come, we at Impact will apply the most apt ones to achieve our objective of ‘making the world healthier and happier’. This is the fundamental principle driving us to learn and skill-up to apply one or more of these six exponential technologies.
Gerd Leonhard, a futurist, speaker and author reminds us all that technology by its core functioning is meant to be exponentially evolving, where as humans are deep wired for linear thinking, linear working and linear growth. I agree with him on the first, but not on the second part.
As humans, if we consciously retrain ourselves to think, speak and act exponential in our work, we can quickly build the infinite mindset to become exponential minds. And once our mind accepts & learns to think exponential, half the battle is won.
How we, at Impact, will exactly use some of these exponential technologies and apply them at Impact will be clear after 3–5 months of study and research. This will be our team’s learning journeys in the coming few months.
On the execution front, our product and business building journey in the next 24 months for Impact App is going to be as follows,
Impact’s Product Roadmap — Cause marketing, Donations, User-generated-content in Teams and Leagues, Post-workout Sweaty selfie to share, Wearable-integration, Meditation for a cause, Referrals and Rewards, followed by making Impact Vernacular to take Impact global.
Business Roadmap — Selling Impact Leagues and Impact 365s (B2B HR), Cause marketing packages (B2B marketing), community donations (B2C 5% processing fees), marketing health and then wellness products for the community to purchase in-app (B2C).
User-Growth Roadmap — Scaling up community challenges like #lockdownstepchallenge, executing Open leagues like ‘Lal Singh Chadda League’, ‘Digital Dandi March’ ‘Women for Change’ and others, paid online (Tiktok, Google, Instagram, Web-articles) and offline media growth (newspapers, magazines, hoardings).
To achieve the same, we are in the middle of raising our growth round of funding and are in the midst of multiple ongoing conversations for the same.
This round will be to help us grow as planned in FY 2020 and 2021, after which we will begin to thrive big on our own.
During uncertain times, one thing is certain that we all need to go on the Offensive. Counter-attack. Change our narrative, embrace the new normal and adapt with agility.
During the last recession (2008–2010) these were some of the small startups that were started or were redefined were
Uber — Airbnb — Slack — Pinterest — Whatsapp
Some of the most iconic companies of the next decade will undoubtedly be launched or redefined in the coming few months.
The ones that sail through this storm will win this decade.
And IMPACT is going to be one of them.
Right now, most of us are anxious and afraid about today’s reality and tomorrow’s uncertainty. Soon after, there will be day after tomorrow. And people will start caring more about their health, about our society and about our environment at large.
By that time, we will be ready to take that care and turn it into Actions. Important Actions. Enabling everyone to…
Regards,
Ishan Nadkarni
Co-founder, CEO - Impact App
PS — The 66 Mn years dinosaur-asteroid’ analogy & the concept of exponential technology’ is inspired by the book ‘Abundance’ that I’m currently reading. Full credits there to authors Peter Diamandis’ & Steven Kotler’.
