I was morning, I remember, when Vijay Shekhar Sharma, the founder of Paytm, called.
He had just landed in Hong Kong, looked at Twitter and read my tweet. I can’t still find the tweet, but I remember being exasperated with Facebook’s Free Basics campaign, and feeling hopeless about the status of our campaign. We had some 6000-7000 submissions to TRAI in what was the final leg of the campaign on Zero Rating, and Facebook’s Free Basics push was bringing in multiples of that.
They had set up a missed call service with a 1800 toll free number which they promoted via newspaper ads in multiple Indian languages, where people were asked to give a missed call in order to support Free Basics. There were SMS campaigns, spamming millions asking people to do the same thing. They had hoardings up across major cities. We were going to lose Net Neutrality. AIB still hadn’t made a video. I was home in Delhi after 20 exhausting days in Bangalore, despite the support of friends. So I tweeted, frustrated with everything. Vijay read that tweet. I explained the situation to him. He said he’d do something (literally, “Main dekhta houn.”)
Within a day or so, on the 23rd of December, Vijay had his team change the Paytm post-payment page to one that embedded the savetheinternet.in website.
source: https://twitter.com/jishnu7/status/679637272136790016/photo/1
To understand how big this was, you need to get a sense of scale. Paytm had a couple of hundred million users, and many multiple of millions of users were recharging their phone balances every day. There was no bigger marketing outreach landing page in India than Paytm’s post-payment page. Vijay replaced one of his most significant sources of online revenue with savetheinternet.in . The numbers started coming in. Bit by bit others got involved, activity increased, and submissions increased to the TRAI. It all began, and the tide turned, with that phone call from Vijay.
Over the next couple of weeks, Vijay put actual money behind promoting savetheinternet.in website, though he’s never told me how much, and I’ve never asked.
We had banner collateral ready for anyone to use. Vijay used these to run savetheinternet.in ads on DTH (streaming services weren’t there in India then), and I only found out when someone told me they saw an ad on TV. I was in Jaipur for a TiE annual off-site on December 29th (I think…more on this later), where I was speaking, when someone from his team called me to run some audio scripts related to SaveTheInternet by me. Next thing I know, there were SavetheInterent radio ads (radio was big in India then) running across radio, being run by Paytm.
It would be unfair to everyone else to say that Vijay saved the day and saved the savetheinternet.in campaign with this, but what he did helped us immensely. I was giving up and he gave us hope. Above all, he brought momentum back to the campaign.
For the next few weeks, that word “momentum” became a key one for me. I would wake up in the morning with the word momentum on my mind. It kept me going, and I kept pushing everyone to do more.