The first session of RTBI’s Monthly Entrepreneurs’ Meet went very well. The Research Park Conference Hall was packed with interested attendees who had come from all over Chennai.
The founder and CEO of BharatMatrimony.com, Murugavel Janakiraman, kicked off the series with an insightful talk peppered with anecdotes, advice and challenges he had faced in building the company from scratch.
The Vision
Online portals were the buzzword in the late 90s, and sites such as Sify, ChennaiOnline and Rediff were dominating the Indian landscape. Murugavel’s initial vision was small – build a simple portal in his spare hours targeted at the Tamil community that would include various features such as a forum and relevant news. Murugavel also added a small – and very rudimentary – matrimonial section that encouraged users to put up bride and groom profiles.
With no business model in mind, he tried to spread the word about the site through emails to friends, and by handing out flyers outside cinema halls. His portal initially started gaining ground only incrementally – in fact, it took a full 30 months of dedication and hard work before traction started to kick in.
The focus of the site shifted from a generic community portal to matrimonials, since that was the section that was gaining the most eyeballs and interest. More importantly, it was a niche that Murugavel could compete effectively in – and be a leader in – since there were no major competitors in the online matrimonial space at that time.
The Challenges
Resources: Murugavel had a full-time job, and could only work on his portal on the side. A one-man show, he was involved in the design, development and promotion of the site, and would have to work several hours late into the night. Another huge challenge came up when, after 9/11, he lost his job as a consultant, and had to weigh the risks of running a startup full-time, with a family and a house being built simultaneously.
Clarity: There was no clear business model for the site to be sustainable. An engineer, Murugavel focused on building a feature-rich, usable product, and had set aside little thought for anything related to balance sheets and income statements.
Investments: He also self-financed the site, for which the upkeep costs were rapidly rising, from US$50/month to over several hundred a month. This was during the dot-com bubble era, when investors were throwing their cash at any product with a domain name – but Murugavel didn’t see the need for external investments at that stage.
Social life: His friends often questioned his motive – why spend so many hours and so much money in building a site that realistically has a microscopic chance of success?
Relevant Advice
Selling a vision. Find a solution to a problem that affects you, and give it all you’ve got. As the site was growing too fast for just one person to handle, Murugavel was able to sell the vision of his site to, and rope in a M.C.A gold-medallist to join him (she is now BharatMatrimony’s head of technology).
Unintended consequences. There will be stumbling blocks and obstacles along the way but these are there for a reason, and a savvy entrepreneur should either use them as stepping stones or find ways around them – the “jugaad” mentality is critical here.
Self-belief. The ultimate trait any entrepreneur should have. Belief in oneself automatically leads to self-motivation and the energy needed to drive things forward. Even though he was faced with numerous challenges, Murugavel stuck to his guns, grit his teeth and plowed ahead – all because he believed in his idea.
How It All Panned Out
With a clarity in vision – and consequently, a clarity in the business model – BharatMatrimony.com surged ahead in popularity, and growth exploded. Murugavel had the insight to employ a PR agency to help catalyze the growth. He took the decision to start charging users for placing profiles, a move that brought about several benefits: (a) BharatMatrimony became profitable and (b) the company was able to ensure quality in profile submissions, which was a result of users having to pay to set up their profiles. This, in turn, attracted more users to the site and led to the growth of the site.
He then sliced his userbase into various tranches (elite members, pro members etc) to maximize revenues and provide quality service. BharatMatrimony eventually expanded to cater to other segments of the Indian population, by driving community-targeted matrimonial sites such as TeleguMatrimony and MarathiMatrimony.
An interesting story Murugavel brought up was that he himself got hitched through his own site. His future parents-in-law (in Gujarat) had chanced upon an ad his parents had placed on BharatMatrimony.com in the Tamil magazine Mangayar Malar, and sent his parents a note indicating interest.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The Journey that Started it All.
In a nation where rapid urbanization is taking place to the detriment of rural areas, opportunities for social entrepreneurship are not without their own unique, set of constraints. In such a scenario, uncertainties usually associated with regular start ups, tend to get multiplied, significantly reducing the chances for the venture’s survival. Yet RTBI’s founders – the TeNeT Group of IIT Madras, known for pioneering incubation in the Indian academic setting for the past twenty-five years – have taken up this difficult task. Through RTBI they continue to foster their distinctive vision of development that harnesses the potential of affordable technologies to facilitate sustainable growth in India.
IITM’s RTBI has the unique distinction of having been funded both by the World Bank’s InfoDev Project and the Government of India’s Dept of Science and Technology’s as the only incubator focusing on rural technologies and businesses in India today. In the past two years of its inception, RTBI has established itself as an innovation system offering an influential paradigm for creating ICT based service applications and business models. The Incubator is currently involved in supporting entrepreneurs in building ventures to promote livelihoods, education, healthcare, agriculture, connectivity and financial inclusion in India’s rural areas. Needless to say, ICT’s play a crucial role in scaling RTBI’s aims across geographies and in empowering large sections of the underprivileged in India including women.
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