BB-8, drones and VR headsets on rent as startup pitches ‘try before you buy’

Photo credit: YouTube.

Like in many developing economies, high-end electronics aren’t easy to buy in India. It isn’t availability that is the problem – global giants like Google, Apple, and Facebook are going out of their way to woo the Indian consumer.

It is the high sticker prices. The 42 mm Apple watch (sports), for example, retails for US$349 in the United States. Add in taxes and import duties, and the tag climbs up to around US$510 in India.

The story stays the same for most wow-worthy gadgets that the mavericks of the tech world introduce to mankind, much to the annoyance of geeks and tech lovers.

The Znatta team, L-R: Surendranadh Adireddi, Harsha Korasala, and Samdhathri Dontaraju. Photo credit: Znatta.

Facebook’s much celebrated VR headset, the Oculus Rift, is available for booking at US$599 in most countries. In India, the tag can shoot up to around US$1,200. The official Oculus page does not list India as a shipping country yet.

Bangalore-based Znatta is trying to bridge this gap, selling a “try before buy” model that works with the belief that customers will be open to shelling out a fragment of the cost of expensive gadgets to rent them out for a week, before making a decision on purchase.

It also wants to help OEMs and distributors overcome the problem of returns and excess inventory.

Officially launched in March, Znatta (the name is a portmanteau of “Ziegler–Natta,”
a catalyst used in the synthesis of polymers, and underlines the startup’s mission to be a catalyst for making purchase decisions) is a bootstrapped team of four tech lovers – Harsha Korasala, Samdhathri Dontaraju, Adireddi Surendranadh, and Adarsh Koyya – who got together last year to solve the Indian tech geek’s gadget dreams.

The Zuck walks down an aisle at the Mobile World Congress, while attendees check out the Gear VR headsets. Photo credit: Facebook.

“We started off with high end gadgets because we are targeting early adopters and innovators,” Harsha told Tech in Asia. “We let people try high end, new tech gadgets that are difficult to find.”

Targeting of a niche group is the reason why Znatta’s only received 350 orders in the past couple of months – low when compared to the growth numbers typically thrown around in the country’s startup industry.

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