I did not know at the time I was distributing these flyers or leaflets - some 15 years ago - that what I was doing then would become the origin story for Onemyle.
Early 2008, I started a library called JustBooks in Whitefield, Bengaluru as a personal project. I had no prior experience in running any kind of business and was a regular IT software developer writing code and managing coders building things for financial services industry.
JustBooks was just a personal interest project - not meant to be a serious business venture.
The image below is the first leaflet of flyer that we distributed in Jun 2008 to inform the neighbourhood that a new library is opening in the vicinity.
As you can see from the design - images, fonts and copy - I and a local printer just made this with some google search and stock images. The message that I was really keen to get across was "When was the last time you took your kids to a neighbourhood library"?.
I printed few thousands of these leaflets and met the newspaper distribution boys at 4am near Marathahalli junction (that doubles up as the newspaper distribution hub for the neighbourhood at 4am). Got them to insert these leaflets into the newspapers that go out to specific apartments/layouts or sub-localities.
As it turned out, this was the only marketing that we had to do for JustBooks. We got our first set of members in the first few days and then word-of-mouth took over and brought us a couple of thousand members in a few months.
JustBooks then became a serious business.
Fast forward to 2024, we are now looking to solve for "Hyperlocal Digital Marketing" through Onemyle.
The big insight for me from the JustBooks journey (we grew from that 1 personal project library in 2008 to about 60+ libraries in 12 cities before I exited I 2016), was that the simple experience of designing a marketing message and letting people in a neighbourhood know about it through leaflets/newspaper insertions gets lot more complicated on the Internet.
First up, there is nothing called "Whitefield" or "Koramangala" or "Marathahalli" on the Internet. Second, there are no newspaper boys or distribution-mechanisms carrying content or anything useful to specific apartments/sub-localities that you can ride on. And third, while almost everyone in a locality is accessible through Facebook or Instagram or Twitter or such social media, the locality as a whole is not accessible. I will explain the third part in greater detail in a different post.
In all the 60+ libraries that opened since that first one in June 2008, we faced the same problem of effective hyperlocal digital marketing being very hard to execute.
"Making access to neighbourhoods more convenient" is the goal that we set for ourselves while building Onemyle. We are just getting started on this journey. Looks to be seen how this plays out.
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