Bombay Locale x Bigin by Zoho
A SaaS Musical Based in Texas, Done in Bombay
Bigin by Zoho - A Western Musical
Anyone Can Bigin
Our friends at Zoho approached us with an interesting problem statement - to position a CRM specifically built for small/growing businesses in the US? 
Research
The devil is in the detailFirst things first, we wore the clothes of users/customers of Bigin and tried to look at the problem from their POV. Additionally we brainstormed with the product & sales teams at Zoho - the ones who are closest to the customers. We also got on multiple calls with the existing customers - to get insights and found interesting stuff as to by Bigin ticks.



People know the pain but don’t know there exists a productOwners of growing businesses are aware of the problems while donning multiple hats. Use cases such as handling social media, making calls, sending emails, scheduling etc., seem like a Herculean task as other aspects of the business demand their attention too. Although they know of CRMs but they don’t think an existing CRM fits their needs.



CRMs are intimidating - small business owners are skepticThere are a lot of CRM offerings for Enterprise and Mid-Market businesses but for a small/growing business - CRMs have never been friendly. Implementing something like a CRM needs hundreds of dollars even for enterprise/mid-market cos.  Bigger CRM providers - don’t even consider smaller businesses their customers. Thus small businesses(not Tech Savvy) aren’t able to be benefitted by an offering like a CRM.



User Research further revealed a two-fold problem that bothers growing businesses
1. Finding new customers - creating pull
2. Generating revenue from their existing customers/clients
Though they are small now - might not raise external funding but want to grow. So we added a minor detail. We didn’t call them Small Businesses, rather we chose to call them Growing Businesses.
The Tale of Folsem Town, aimed to showcase the incredible impact that Bigin can have, with these businesses as its sole focus.
The magic of storytelling
All said and done - Explainers are booooooring.
Adding to that, we needed to make an explainer for a CRM. A CRM sounds so long that it has to be abbreviated to be told. Who wants to hear the workings of a Customer Relationship Management Software?

Our team got to work and started finding ways to tell it.

A Brainstorm transcript (Click to Read)
An unconventional explainerWe used the most basic story technique - care. We made sure that Bigin looks approachable. Bigin is a product for the friendly neighbourhood baker who knows your taste buds, the local realtor who knows you want a new house, the car wash owner who never misses the fortnightly washing, and the florist who remembers your mother’s birthday.

So why not choose a community that has it all? We took the story to Texas. A closely knit community in rural Texas, the Folsem town. The song and the sheriff were the story tools that tied all the growing business owners together seamlessly.What came out of it was a musical where we told the story and managed to make it easier for the business owners to adopt the product!

PS - Watching “The Dollars Trilogy” helped. Who isn’t a Sergio Leone fan, after all!
The best thing about Bombay Locale is that they are engineers and they understand SaaS and its intricacies like we do, and that coupled with creative storytelling creates wonders.
- Vibhav Vankayala | Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Zoho
Which of these were shot in Rural Texas/US?
None of them
The musical was written shot and produced
solely and wholly in Mumbai, India.
Hire Locally, Showcase Globally - Pool of Global talent in India.
India has a pool of international professional actors, and we are good friends with all of them. And we mean ALL of them.
So we shared the song with them, and asked them to sing for us. They did.

We shared the script with them, they shared the audition with us. Then we scrolled through the auditions for days to get the right personas for the film.

Actually, that’s what our casting team did. xD
Production with a leap of Tech
A major challenge we faced while creating “AnyoneCanBigin” was the location.

Our rockstar in-house writers wanted to set the narrative in rural Texas, but the production team felt that flying to Texas and shooting the film on location would have cost a fortune, and we didn’t want to do that to our friends at Zoho - they promised us Hot Chocolate.

As a team of engineers and storytellers, and hot chocolate lovers - we were uniquely positioned to solve this problem. SOMETIME LATER we decided to create the film entirely out of India using VFX and Frugal Production Design. Yeah, that’s how much we love hot chocolate.What really helped was our in house team for everything. We have an in house set designers, vfx artists, writers, directors, stylists, editors and everything else a film needs. That’s what makes us efficient, pocket friendly and frugal.

It’s like tackling problems of a new feature in your product with your rockstar team. The product, design, engineering , they all come together and solve it seamlessly.

After enough homework, we were able to recreate the look and feel of Texas, right down to the smallest details, even the architecture, the foliage, the crockery, the gun holder of the Sheriff.

We even built a virtual replica of a Texan street in our studio to shoot the sequences. This approach not only helped us to save tens of thousands of dollars for Zoho, but also gave us complete creative control over the film, giving extreme clarity of thought to the final product.
Click anywhere on the video to see the magic!
Hollywood Ads at Bollywood Prices
A Dollar is a Dollar is a Dollar.
But its also 80 INR.

Not that we are bragging, but it would have costed Zoho 3x if they would have gotten the film produced in LA.

At Bombay Locale we take pride in our ability to bridge the gap between technology and storytelling, and the success of "AnyoneCanBigin" is a testament to this.

By creating a fun and engaging musical that showcased the benefits of Zoho Bigin, we were able to help position the software effectively among small businesses. Thanks for being here till now, now you can go and have your hot chocolate or pizza or whatever you’re into. And not to mention you can come to us whenever