ZipDial: Turning Missed Calls into Moneymaking Connections

In a small home in Bangalore, India, a group of brilliant and passionate entrepreneurs turned a phenomenon into a huge business opportunity. This phenomenon – called missed calls – is ignored and was never thought of in the past as having a potential.

Using missed calls as a business concept seemed unusual. However, missed calls have been observed as a prevalent behavior in India because most people use prepaid cellphones. Calling and texting cost money, so people would rather use dropped calls to send a message since drop calls are free. For instance, a person who wants to tell his friend that he is home safe would rather call and hang up to send the message than complete a call and pay the charge.

While the “pager behavior” failed, the “missed call behavior” thrived. So did the company, which the founders named ZipDial. Eventually, ZipDial owned the space.

ZipDial provides advertisers with phone numbers that can be placed on newspaper ads and billboards. Any customer can make a drop call using the flashed numbers. Thereafter, ZipDial will send a message to the customer about deals, promos, or anything that the advertiser wants to get across the customer.

Aside from the advertisers, telecom service providers also love ZipDial’s business concept because it creates traffic that never existed before. Moreover, ZipDial gives advertisers real time survey results from their “followers.” According to reports, ZipDial is outperforming the advertising that occurs on Twitter or Facebook.

Recently, ZipDial announced that it has reached 400 million missed calls, a milestone that shows how ZipDial is making waves in the market. Furthermore, ZipDial expects continuing growth as the mobile phone market is also hitting the 700 million subscribers mark. Next year, there will be an estimated 20 million additional first time mobile phone users.

A number of more established companies have tried ZipDial and are satisfied with the way the company has helped increase their market shares. Among the first benefit from ZipDial’s innovation are Greenpeace, Gillette and Disney Channel.