Innovation, solving the most common problems brilliantly!

Background: A couple of days back after a really long day at my start-up I found some time to unwind myself and started watching TV, I found our desi cult movie “pyaar ka punchnama” playing on a channel and got stuck with it. I have literally seen this movie at least a dozen times but just cannot get over with it, there is always a new angle to laugh at. After this movie was over I literally thought how I should summarize this movie as after all this was not a big budget movie and as far as I know I didn’t received any national awards too. Thinking over it for a couple of minutes I got it, somehow the word innovation crossed my mind and I just thought that “pyaar ka punchnama” is a true innovation in the best possible manner. This movie has taken the most common problem among the dark hormone species and executed a script so well around. Though I am nobody and don’t want to preach at all but I had learnt couple of key lessons from this movie and just thought of sharing it with friends like myself who make a living out of innovation.

Simple is the Best: “pyar ka panchnama” is a movie based on a simple and most common problem across guys, nothing actually against any gender in particular but the most common emotions among all males during that active hormone age is so well captured in this movie. I got the point that it’s is not how complex your idea is which matters but what matters is how widespread and common the problem is.

Execution is the Key: Every scene, every dialogue in this movie is delivered so well. Even the song “ban Gaya …” is so well thought of and every time the background sound of a crying dog :). Just thought myself once the one has identified THE problem the next key lesson is how well we execute that idea. There is nothing as bad as having a fantastic idea and executing it very poorly, well we all have done it many times right!

Good Products don’t need much promotion: I am hardly aware that I have seen any advertisements, big hoardings, promotion in a TV show about this movie at all. The only time I came to know about this movie was when one of my close friend mentioned its name and asked my how come I had not seen it. This movie is a cult movie across time and will remain so, and it did it with zero advertising budget, BTW during the commercial breaks I saw at least 6 or seven commercial advertisements for various ecommerce companies and I am still confused what is one trying to achieve by those several times a day commercial advertisements. Is that an effective way for customer acquisition J

Money is the last factor for a good product: As per wiki at the end of 50 days at the box office. The movie has grossed Rs 17 crores in box office, satellite rights and DVDs against a budget of Rs 7 crores. The overall collection for the movie was around 30 crores on a meager budget of 7 crores, almost the same ROI as bahubali :) . My belief that money is the last factor for creating a really innovating product or a company got reinforced, you definitely need some seed money to lay the foundation but it’s not the battle of the VC wallets which will take one thru. The sequel for pyaar ka punchnama is coming up in this October and really waiting for my next lessons and some amazing good time …