Jahnavi– Walk us through the idea behind starting Digiboxx?
Arnab– It’s actually one of the most frequently asked question so my answer will not be a new one. So, when we are moving towards a completely digitalised country like what is happening in India right now, we are talking about almost 700,million digital users as we speak. There are almost 1,000,000,000 mobile phones sold right now. Almost the entirety of the digital structure was somewhat provided by organisations which are not from India. So when you see the mail services, your hard disks etc. , they Are all literally non-Indian. We believe that when a company has to become completely Aatmanirbhar, it is extremely important to have their own infrastructure, so that nobody can switch them off ever. When we started researching, we realised that though India is growing at an immense speed, there are various organisations which are not from India who have been providing the infrastructure here and then we realise that this is something that we have to solve. We realise that this entire digital invasion is driven by phones. People are clicking photographs, making videos, et cetera, they’re ensuring that all their information is available with them on their phone. And we all know that phones are super expensive, if you look at it typically almost 80% of android users actually buy phones which have a lot of storage. Out of which almost a total of 12 GB goes with the built-in system. So the remaining storage is kind of less, which can also be proven by a study which pointed at the fact that almost every six months Indians are running out of their phone memory. So, they end up buying new phones or change their SD cards. This is really a challenge as the available solutions are pretty expensive. Either you buy a microSD card or go to a Google or a dropbox to be able to store your data. This was the major problem that we wanted to solve and this is how digibox was started. Digi box is basically an application which you can download on your phone and we provide you storage starting from 20 GB for free and then the remaining, we provide 100 GB of data at just Rs.1/ day.
Jahnavi– Are all your storage servers based in India? If yes, tell us about some benefits for the same?
Arnab– Yes, they Are. So, for us to be digitally, Aatmanirbhar, of course, one of the things that we had to do was figure out or infrastructure, which is owned by Indians and follow the law of the land. The advantage of this are many. Starting with the fact that data localisation is one of the largest problems which the world wants to solve. So, the entire sovereignty of data, which essentially means that you own your own data. This is a huge concern and a huge issue with advanced countries where they have the data protection bills already published. Everybody is trying to protect their own data. In India, we do not have any data protection Bill as yet. The new one is being brought out as the old one was slashed out in the Parliament. So, digibox is actually a first step towards that where we are localising the entire data storage. And not just transactional data etc., but every information about our customers stored in India. So, we can say that data sovereignty is a large advantage.
Secondly, I think there is a concept called latency which essentially means that how fast the data loads on your phone and when it’s locally available. So, we’re probably faster when it comes to servicing the needs of people.
Third, because we have built the entire solution in India, ofcourse we’ve made it very cost effective and we’ve kept various facets of Indian ness in our product. Our product is extremely simple and available in eight Indian languages other than English and because of this entire thing, our latency is also one of the better ones. So to answer your question, these are some of the advantages that we have to offer.
Jahnavi– There is always a concern for latency issues in cloud storage and sharing, how does Digiboxx meet the users expectations?
Arnab– I think the latency issue is solved because we are locally storing and so we are definitely faster from other servers. So that definitely helps but we are basically meeting the need you know very simply by ensuring considering we’re Indians and we need to understand this country and we are almost the ‘last moment’ and trying to do the things we are actually trying to maximise things as much as possible. We have kept that in mind that we have our servers and we have planned them in such a way that helps us to be faster. Very recently we launched a product called ‘digi photos’ which also ensures that your photos and videos are in auto sync completely. It not just allows you to do more, but does everything automatically. There are also various future services that we have in mind which will focus and bring in efficiency for our users.
Jahnavi– What makes Digiboxx unique from all the other competitors including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive and more?
Arnab– Quite honestly, I’ll have to answer this a little differently because our business is pretty similar. When we compare something, it is actually always different from the other. Let’s say comparing both of our homes, it’s going to be immensely different. So , although our business is similar, I think the entire experience that we have to offer is extremely focused to the country and its requirements. As I mentioned before, I think what we have done is something which should make people use digibox. I think, we’ve made a very simple product and considering Indians who are the ‘late tech adopters’ , we often come on board and catch up super fast. We understand the people here and so, we have cut out the entire frills from the storage. If you login to our product versus others, you will understand that why we have focusing on the simplicity factor. Because, we kept in mind the Indian audience. We can’t say that we’re a unique business, but the way we’re approaching the business is pretty nice.
Jahnavi– Take us through your personal business journey and how Digiboxx affected your life in a better way, what are your future plans for Digiboxx?
Arnab– I think, considering I’m an engineer who turned a marketer and then I became an entrepreneur who had been planning businesses for way too long, in all this I’ve realised that there isn’t much for MSMEs. Though India is actually a land of MSME, we often talk about large organisations and we focus onto how they are a significant amount of employment is being created by these large organisations. But, we also have to keep in mind that things which are happening around, with major companies like twitter, meta etc. having massive layovers etc., there is one segment that is actually holding the Indian inc which is being held by the micro small medium businesses. Because, each one of them would be probably employing anywhere to numerous employees and this proves that there is a massive amount of employment in these organisations. When I looked at the businesses which are currently thriving in the country, we realised that there isn’t really much available for the msmes in the country when it came to digital services. Typically, these businesses are low on margin but are very stable as the organisations are being held by entrepreneurs very endurably. But, they don’t really have enough resources to be able to do larger things and when you go to their offices, you’ll not find swanky lunch being served on a daily basis and so, there is a balance somewhere. As an entrepreneur, I felt quite compelled to build digibox as I realised that it is actually a solution that does not really burn a hole in the entrepreneurs life but it gives everything that any organisation needs which is what the vital thing. Lastly, there are also solutions which are crafted for various types of businesses and so as an entrepreneur, i think when digibox happened and when we realised this gap, and we were fulfilling it, I think I felt great about coming up with a solution which can help a lot. Our major focus in the future is going to be the msme segment though we have a lot of customers who are a large organisations, we are still going to focus onto the meme segment.
