Entrepreneur Profile: NextDrop

In the past two months, I have spoken to countless entrepreneurs in almost every sector and at different stages from ideation to growth. I have been impressed by many but one has kept my attention: NextDrop. Before I share why, I want to briefly introduce NextDrop.

What is NextDrop? NextDrop distributes information on water delivery to urban residents via SMS. Anu Sridharan, a graduate student from Berkeley,  and her team have worked to achieve 25,000 subscriptions in less than a year.

How does NextDrop work? Customers pay a monthly subscription fee for NextDrop's service and receive a text message whenever water is available. To ensure that customers receive timely and accurate messages, NextDrop partners with the local water utility and the valvemen who quite literally turn on and off valves that provide water to certain areas. After he turns on or off the value, the valveman calls into NextDrop's automated phone system.

Why is this important? Currently, urban residents in Hubli receive water once every 5 days or so. In addition, information on water delivery is usually disseminated to households through the local newspaper and as you guessed, that information is likely untimely and inaccurate. Less well-off households deal with this uncertainty by having the wife or children stay at home to collect and store water.

Access to clean water, much like power, is likely an afterthought, if that, for most people in the developed world. In India, no municipal water utility provides 24/7 access to water for all households. If you have never experienced the uncertainty of water access, Mary Fritz, a WDI Fellow who interned with Wello, shares a very real and first-hand encounter with this uncertainty when the water purifier at her apartment broke in the relatively developed urban area of Bandra West in Mumbai.

What is the impact on society? In my previous post about social impact metrics, I explored some of the challenges faced by for-profit enterprises seeking social impact and the need to proactively seeking to define, measure, and track social impact rather than assume that their service automatically leads to social impact. By acknowledging that the Customer is King, NextDrop is proactively gathering data to both understand its customers and incorporate social impact into its core operations.

  

Why is NextDrop my favorite social enterprise? Throughout my many conversations with entrepreneurs, I have noticed a few recurring themes that distinguish some enterprises compared to others. My conversation with Anu has now inspired me to write my final blog post on these themes. You will have to wait for my final post but in the meantime, I want to share one theme: transparency. To be frank, NextDrop is not perfect and has been unabashingly open about its mistakes and missteps since its inception. With each misstep, however, NextDrop has also shared its proposed solutions and lessons learned. This transparency is why NextDrop is my favorite social enterprise. Oh, and my personal interests in women-run enterprises and any entrepreneur using technology for social impact (rather than for technology's sake) may also play some role in this.

Obstacles are faced by all start-ups, social or otherwise. NextDrop's willingness to share its trials and tribulations with the world is rare for entrepreneurs, social or otherwise. Returning to my first blog post, I spoke about my experience at the Impact Investing in Action conference co-hosted by Village Capital. During one of the panel discussions , one speaker rightly mentioned that the players in this space need to share both its successes and failures to move the impact investing industry forward. In my own experience, I have seen little in the way of sharing failures. My hope is that other entrepreneurs will embrace NextDrop's transparency while investors will view this as a sign of maturity, humility, and most importantly, its potential for growth.

Water

Several events converged in the past two weeks that have given me a new perspective on access to clean water. In chronological order:

1. The water purifier in my apartment broke.
2. A day of manufacturing visits left me pretty dehydrated in semi-arid Ahmedabad. I turned even whiter than usual and laid on the floor for an evening, groaning while Cynthia (Wello's founder) forced water on me like a nanny bearing cod liver oil.
3. I finally succumbed to digestive distress and required constant rehydration for several days.
4. A construction project began in my building, and the beloved tap water has become intermittent at best, sporadic and unpredictable and often nonexistent at worst.  

I became a water hoarder. I started boiling water by the potful and decanting into various containers, stowing them around the house. I learned to keep the lids on lest an errant pigeon feather float through the window and sully my hard work. I experimented with iodine, iodine + flavor enhancers, and finally took my SteriPen out of its original packaging. I found that unadulterated Bombay tap water tastes like Lake Huron. 

I've learned to yell paani nahim (no water!) in frustration. Laundry piles up, as does the fine layer of filth on my skin. I've started leaving buckets underneath open taps, to immediately, urgently gather water whenever it becomes suddenly available. I'm working on engineering a rainwater collection method from a 4th-floor window, but haven't yet perfected it...

For me, this annoyance is temporary. I'm leaving India in 10 days. I'll head back West, drink directly from a reliable tap. But compared with the people Wello aims to serve, my situation in Bombay is luxurious. I'm not walking several kilometers several times a day to fill several 20-liter steel mattkas from a pond shared by dogs and goats. I'm not carrying that weight home on my head. I'm not filtering the mattka contents through a cloth and serving the results to my family. I'm not waiting anxiously for the rains so the pond will refill. The fear of the late monsoon does not hover, desperate and constant, in the back of my mind.

These are the realities of life all over rural India. During field visits in Rajasthan, we spoke with hundreds of people whose daily routines revolve around when and where water will come. If Wello can help make those answers a little more predictable, they can devote some of that time and energy elsewhere.