Stats and the City

Apologies for the not-so-clever title for this blog post. As a startup based and operative in Bombay — the megapolis you can love or you can hate, but you cannot ignore — we have all come to live with the ordeals of traffic jams, transport strikes, fuel strike, truckers strike, rains and bad roads. And then you have events like Raj Thackerey’s arrest and 26/11 attacks.

We were reviewing our data from 2008, and it was interesting to see a correlation between “events” in the city to our business (measured by incoming phone calls in the graphs below). In case of Thackerey’s arrest in October 2008, we saw a huge dip in calls on 19th, 20th and 21st (almost a 50% decrease). That was bad for business, and I am sure a lot of other local businesses felt the same.

In case of the unfortunate attacks on the city in November 2008, we saw a huge surge in calls on 28th November (a 150% increase) and a steady decline in the days that followed. Almost all calls on 28th came in from citizens willing to donate blood to the victims of attacks. We were moved by the show of solidarity and experienced the “spirit” first hand.

One of these days, it would be interesting to see how we do against the stock market, the Satyam fiasco, Obama’s swearing in ceremony and other events - local and global. Our guess is, we are more affected by the small local events than by any big global events.