Raghu Reddy and Kailash Sankaranarayanan joined “The Thing With This One Is” podcast with Ram Deshpande. Raghu is the CEO & co-founder and Kailash is the COO & co-founder of the brand Lumio. This latest entrant into the large Indian market of smart TVs has already made its mark by climbing the bestseller charts on Amazon. Customer reviews are good too and the product is living up to its tagline ‘India’s Fastest Smart TV’.

In this podcast, the founders of Lumio have described how they formed the team, how they identified the gaps in the market, how they decided on the key features of the TV, how they are selling now, and what their future plans are. We got to see a live demo of the Lumio Vision series TV. Furthermore, a live comparison with TV of a well-known brand was done to see the effectiveness of Lumio. Watch the episode to know if Lumio is indeed India’s Fastest Smart TV.

Chapters

00:00 Intro and sneak peek

02:04 Podcast starts

04:46 Raghu Reddy’s journey in consumer electronics

08:04 Kailash’s corporate experience and involvement with XLRI band Bodhitree

11:06 Born in HSR Layout, Bengaluru – Lumio’s early days and first sale

12:16 Investors in Lumio, an Indian brand making televisions

14:25 Lumio team of AV Geeks - The thing with attracting the right talent

17:45 The thing with understanding specific consumer pain-points

19:05 Evolution of TVs in India, first TVs, no remotes, one channel to the generation of chord-cutters

23:28 How crowded is the Indian market, how big is it, and gap in the market

26:12 Slow TV epidemic – conclusion from analysis of consumer reviews

28:20 What do consumers look for when buying a TV and why don’t brands tell them the truth?

31:05 Addressing the performance requirements of the cord cutter consumers – making the fastest smart TV

35:32 Flagship display and great sound alongside fast performance

41:45 Developing new software features to improve user experience

44:05 Selling online on Amazon (and soon on Flipkart)

48:15 Price points of Vision 7 and Vision 9 models of Lumio and plans for other models

51:37 How TV product discovery is different from smartphones while purchasing online

53:15 Demo of Lumio vs other brand – booting speed, opening Netflix, scrolling speed

58:22 TLDR – coolest feature of Lumio

1:02:45 What makes Lumio faster and better? The thing with RAM and Flagship processor

1:05:15 Lumio vs other brand on YouTube search, colours, and Apple TV app – seeing is believing

1:09:10 Customer response so far and online reviews

1:14:39 Lumio on social media and creating online content

1:17:36 Experience Lumio TV at Urban Ladder in Domlur, Bengaluru

Television sets have become ubiquitous across India making it one of the largest markets in the world. What started with black and white single channel TVs has leapfrogged into a market that is overwhelmingly dominated by Smart TVs. With the cord cutter generation being the primary buying or influencing segment, smart TVs are a default demand now. While most brands have advertised and delivered exceptional visual quality, sound, connectivity, one aspect has remained a customer pain point. That aspect is performance or the speed with which a smart TV performs its functions like booting up, opening apps, switching apps, and other such functions. A customer may not think of performance as a primary criterion of selection while making a TV purchase. However, it soon becomes a big thing as the novelty of other features wears off. Lumio is solving for this gap in the market.

Raghu and Kailash talked about how they got into this business of manufacturing and selling televisions in India. Either they have to be a bit crazy, or they need to have a really kickass product to enter a market that is dominated by huge multinational organisations with established multi-billion-dollar sales in India. Listen to the podcast and watch the demo to know how they are building a kickass product.