The problem that we intend to solve through Griggi is
Why should one need to use expensive 3G when someone is stationary (in a cafe / restaurant / newly moved apartment) while its much cheaper to use next-door-wifi
The solution that we conceptualized has another problem. It involves a significant effort from the neighbour who unfortunately is not the one with the problem. So why would he/she install Griggi unless the needy neighbour ends up gifting Griggi router to him/her.
There is also the fragmentation problem - someone might install Griggi hoping somebody might use it & eventually he/she would make money, while a needy person might be looking for Griggi at a place when none of the guys is offering their WiFi. This issue was also evident from the hacker news comments & comments on our home page
We knew that we would need to solve this problem in a more focussed manner. We decided that a good way to get started is to target cafes & convince them to have Griggi as way to provide free WiFi to their consumers.
A few friends agreed to help by passing on a few contacts of cafe owners with whom we can talk. One of the friend end up asking the inevitable question - how big is the market for Griggi. What kind of money we can make out of this.
It suddenly dawned upon us that we have not done this homework. We knew what we making is cool & has potential to impact a vast number of people. Afterall, we are Uber for WiFi. The very thought that every router should be running Griggi made us feel like Whatsapp founders.
Getting back to the problem, our first approach was to check how many routers are there. A couple of phone calls & the data came in - there are 30 million routers in India currently. So overall, there would be probably 200 million routers worldwide. We needed to estimate per router how many Karma GBs would be earned. We took, lets say, 1 GB per month. So 12 GB per year. 2.4 billion Karma GBs will exchange hands. In India, we can price 1 Karma GB at around $1. But in the US, it can be priced at around $10. Lets keep average price as $5. Total revenue $12 billion.
This looked like a small number. We came back home thinking probably its not such a big business.
Later in the day, we thought of estimating it a different way. Griggi is typically going to eat the 3G/4G data consumption. So lets try to see how much 3G data consumption is happening & potentially, that is the market opportunity.
As per NDTV report, 3G consumption in India in Dec 2014 is 85 Petabytes. That is 85 million GBs in a month which is 1 billion GBs in an year. Worldwide, this should be around 5 billion GBs. Total revenue $25 billion (assuming $5 per Karma GB on an average).
This looks like small market for now compared to 600 billion dollar advertisement industry, but guess looking at the way it is growing in developing countries, one could expect it to grow at a phenomenal rate. The advertisement industry is growing at much slower rate of around 4-5% per year.
What do you guys think ? Do the numbers look good ? If you could let us know your thoughts, it would be an appreciated help.