Messenger of Sentiments

Bal Krishna Joshi, the most famous goat-seller of Nepal, has come a long way since he started his struggles about 16 years ago but thinks he has a longer way to go yet. Best known for co-founding Thamel.com, a Web site and business that enables expatriate Nepali to purchase gifts and arrange for their delivery within Nepal, this versatile personality has 10 years of experience in working with both private and public sectors in the areas of Information Communications Technology, remittances and business development. He is a recipient of the Tony Zeitoun Award (The Cyber Oscars) for his innovative approach in utilizing information technologies towards business ventures in developing countries.

United States of America, where he completed his higher studies, became a place to help him learn about his goal in life i.e. don’t just create wealth but explore all the opportunities and deliver what you are supposed to deliver. However, the second day he set his feet in USA, he realized it was not the place for him to stay which made him return to his motherland after his studies and start his business ventures.

What made him an entrepreneur? His dislike for a career oriented job and his reluctance to work for a corporate.  Mr. Joshi has clear messages for the aspiring entrepreneurs: Know what you don’t want to do, acknowledge the fact that people’s opinions vary and so find out what really fulfills your life and finally, make sure you don’t die with a list of things you had always wanted to do. And these are the very reasons that made Mr. Joshi leave his family business of autos, real estate where he didn’t find enough accommodation for his innovative ideas and work as a beer salesperson for Chaudhary Group. Though everybody thought him crazy, Mr. Joshi found the job very fulfilling and treated it as an opportunity to get intermingled with the real Nepalese.

Always filed with willingness to experiment, Mr. Joshi jubilantly accepted the offer from an investor to start a lottery program in Nepal which distributed prizes of worth 2 million every week through a TV program every Saturday. Once again he got branded crazy and once again he was highly successful in his venture. But the success was short lived as the government intervention began. Mr. Joshi made an offer to pay 80% of the revenue as taxes but when another political party came into the government intervention resumed.  Mr. Joshi thought better of it and abandoned his venture.  

“Everybody in the government wanted a piece of it and I couldn’t satisfy everyone without hampering my venture”, he remembers. “I wanted to do something better. So I started looking around for opportunities.”

His search for new opportunities got his attention towards the IT industry. IT industry was at its nascent stage at the time when today’s giant companies like Yahoo!, Google were just born. Nepal had yomari.com and explorenepal.com as it share on the web world.  With a friend of his, Mr. Joshi thought of building an information portal. His friend registered the thamel.com. Their initial step to catering to the needs of the site visitors was to create a chat platform which they had even intended the vendors to use to connect to their prospective customers and sell their products. But to their surprise found most of the users which consisted of Nepalese students studying abroad, used the platform to connect to their relatives and friends here in Nepal. Mr. Joshi remembered a website called 1800flowers.com which used to sell stuffs online and had made millions while going public.  They thought of having a shot and so started selling stuffs on web. A tough time ensued as people were reluctant to put their photos or sell stuffs. Nevertheless, the venture made them around 2000 dollars.

It was the Dashain festival of 2001 that gave Mr. Joshi the lucky break he deserved. Driven to the brink of final showdown, he and his partners had made their decisions to either see their business pick up at the Dashian-Tihar period or they would return to their old jobs. While discussing about the business during the festive season at a bar, a drunken guy suggested them to send Khasi (Goat) to Nepal. Another crazy idea it seemed. But crazy ideas are what get him most excited. No wonder the idea got implemented, thought with much doubt at first and today has made him the most famous goat seller of the country, perhaps of the world. 

When thamel.com started taking orders from Nepalese abroad to deliver khasis to their families in Nepal, their primary concern was what if the khasi died? How will the customers know if we delivered the type of Khasi they wanted? Plagued by uncertainty Mr. Joshi went to observe and study the Khasi selling process as used by the local Khasi traders. Now he could be sure he got the right Khasis and conveyed the message to his customers by arranging to take the pictures of the recipient families with the Khasi and send it to the customer. First two weeks after the launch of the scheme saw no transaction at all but on the third week things not only began to look up, thamel.com sold Khasis worth 50,000 dollars. Not only did he made dime out of the crazy idea but it got him famous all over the world when he got featured on TV channels like BBC world service and CNN and later the entire television network. Now this goat seller in the limelight travels round the world sharing his success story.

The idea of clicking pictures with the Dashian Khasi excited the people so much that the guys at thamel.com had a hard time managing time to deliver Khasis and clicking pictures. “Bhai Tika” saw the most number of pictures as it carried sentiment of all the sisters for their brothers.

Talking about sentiments, thamel.com once had to deliver a present on the deathbed, a gift of teddy bear to someone on their final moments on life in a hospital. Moved by the sentimental value of their work, he changed the slogan of thamel.com to “messenger of sentiments”.

In the background of his working area, Kathmandu, a highly congested and mismanaged city, Mr. Joshi thinks the guys at amazon.com have a much easier job which is why he has been busy developing new systems to facilitate the gift delivery system in the city. He has been trying to make use of Google Maps and Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies.

Besides, thamel.com Mr. Joshi has also worked on introducing the automatic clearing house technology in Nepal which enables people to transfer money to Nepal without any ay additional charges or any requirement for middlemen. He is also planning to introduce mobile remittance, a technology that allows transfer of remittance to Nepal through mobile phones. Among other things, Mr. Joshi was the first person to introduce the concept of loan to Non Residential Nepalese.

Having done his best in every sector he has put his hands on, the guiding principle for Mr. Joshi has been “don’t just create wealth and find every opportunities and do the best you can do”.