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Sulekha to follow Indians worldwide

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CIOL Bureau
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Could you brief us about why, when and where Sulekha.com was started?

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Sulekha.com is today India's biggest and most popular online community and social/professional networking hub for Indians worldwide.

It was in 1998 that my wife and me started Sulekha.com, in Austin (Texas), as a simple website with the objective - 'a place where Indians worldwide can share their ideas and opinions' has now evolved to be the biggest, most popular and intensely networked interactive community for millions of Indians from over 100 countries.

The site features discussions, photographs, articles, art, events, news, reviews etc. Sulekha has transformed itself into a popular web destination for Indians worldwide and is a bustling marketplace of thought, opinion, discussion and creative expression.

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Following the tremendous response and success of the portal, we left our jobs and then nurtured the site in a self-funded mode for about two years, before we securing investment capital from an equity fund. Now we have operations in Chennai, Seattle, Bangalore and San Francisco, offering numerous valuable services that help Indians worldwide connect and transact with each other.



Over the years, Sulekha's team (in Austin, Chennai, Seattle and Bangalore) has developed sulekha.com into a global Internet franchise serving Indians with multiple dominant competitive positions as being the world's biggest and most popular online community and networking site; most popular network of city portals in 23 cities worldwide; most popular blogging site in the world; most popular online classifieds service in 23 cities around the world; most trusted and popular online ticketer for events and movies in North America; world's only digital marketplace for premium content, and finally as the most popular online advertising medium to reach NRIs.

Interestingly, Sulekha.com holds the privilege of being the only website whose creative expression (of its members) was published a book by Penguin

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What do you exactly mean by offerings and what do you focus on?

The Indian community is large across the world. As for the city offerings in US, and well as in India, we are the pioneers in online classifieds and online yellow pages. Recently, to cater to the unconquered real estate market which both Indians living within the country and abroad are interested, we launched Per Square Yard, and we intend to increase the traffic by at least 10 times with over 250 million paid views. Though, we are looking at other verticals where there is growth, especially the travels segment, however, there are no announced plans as yet.

What are your other plans for expansion of Sulekha.com?

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We have been expanding based on the responses and hits we get to our portals. With the Internet traffic growing phenomenally with the advent of the broadband at affordable prices, we see great scope for growth within the country. We are concentring on being in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and north of India, and then in tier-2 cities, where the real internet traffic and business is beginning with Ahmedabad by early next year.

As well we are also planning to have a foothold in other countries where there is a significant Indian Diaspora – namely in international cities such as Toronto, Singapore, London and Dubai, where we would be offering the and marketing by this year-end or early next year, our unique services such as classifieds, blogs and property services.

What in your view would be Sulekha.com success and growth?

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The primary success of Sulekha.com is that it serves as the largest online portal for the Indian community, with a unique combination of social media with local commerce. This has given us the strength to increase our presence across the globe, which we aim to be at 30 cities by year-end and 60 cities by next year.

The other reason for popularity is the convergence of technology. Though the core business is online, we have also integrated mobile services such as SMS.

Our growth can be measured by both cities and in sectors. We are the pioneers and are still the leaders in classifieds blogs. Our latest offering of Yellow pages both online and on WAP, is witnessing a 60 percent growth month-on-month.

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As I mentioned earlier, to increase the pace of growth we plan to expand aggressively in India with our bouquet of services.

What are your future plans and strategies to maintain consistency in the growth, which you are witnessing?

Shortly we would re-launch and bring in a new version of classifieds. Though it is part of evolution every six months, the new Version 6.0, would be user-friendlier which will be faster and easier to post advertisements, with mobile integration and responses in SMS mode

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A few months back, we launched yellow pages on WAP and shortly we would also be launching mobile-interactive services such as viewing and posting classified online through the mobile device.

Again on the News segment, we want to be known for being most comprehensive with inputs from the international media. The new section of News and Current Affairs again will have a combination of contributed news and compiled news, along with comments, blogs about current news and affairs, thus making it a one global repository, which would also be indexed

We want to be known as the most comprehensive and useful content portal, by our visitors as users drive 95 percent of content. We have also worked out offline promotion model, such as publishing of best blogs on various topics in leading newspapers, which we have tied-up with. Initially, we are already doing a content syndication for the Travelogue in the Sunday Express of The New Indian Express. In turn, the author, whose article is taken for content syndication is given special prize money or valuable gifts to encourage them to write better.

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