The key lies in persevering through your model despite lack of demonstrable data points. They will come eventually
Most of the Internet users you come across may be from urban India, who is comfortable with English. Reports say a mere 12 per cent of the Indian population is comfortable with English, meaning a whopping majority of India are non-English consuming users. This essentially translated to ‘OPPORTUNITY’.
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| BG Mahesh |
We started Oneindia.in in January 2006 with a clear mission in our minds – to make language content available to Indians. You read often about the lack of availability of language content on the internet, we want to be part of the solution, not the problem.
Oneindia.in today has 5 Indian languages – Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu. Our traffic has grown impressively over the last four years. We also have another vertical, click.in, – which is a leading horizontal classified site. Both these properties are owned by Greynium Information Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
The first few years we concentrated on increasing the reach of Oneindia.in (unique users), there was a casualty because of this approach–revenue growth. Our revenues were not growing at the same pace as our page views. We knew the reason for this problem – we did not have a dedicated sales team. My partner Sriram Hebbar (COO) was able to devote only part of his time to sales, the rest had to be devoted to operations. Believe it or not we never travelled out of Bangalore for any client meeting. Very few know we never had a sales team. One of the reasons being – lack of funds to hire good sales professionals. Sales team in the online world can be expensive. People with few years of experience were demanding over Rs 10-12 lacs per annum, but I wanted guarantees on performance. For sales team it is a must to have the compensation linked to performance. But we were not in a position to hire good people because we were not funded.
To execute many of our plans we had to look around for raising funds from VCs.
While most VCs agreed what we had was good, none of them were willing to bite the bullet. For them languages was still an unknown thing. If you closely watch, most of the companies that receive funding have a model that is proven in the West. We were in a space which was unique to India alone. In China, English is rarely used, so automatically people had to consume content in Chinese. In India, as I said before, we are bi-lingual. I wasn’t able to show an example were a business based on bi-lingual model had succeeded. My argument was–I am setting the standard, I am setting the example, I am taking the lead in this space. But finally it boiled down to “show us where else this has worked.”
| Snapshot |
| Name: BG Mahesh, CEO Age: 43 Education: BE (Computer Science), MS (Computer Science) Experience in business: 18 years Leadership style: Give others the credit for success, take blame for failures. Big learning: Patience & focus are very essential for long term success. |
| Factsheet |
| Name: oneindia.in Domain: internet portal Turnover: Private Set up in: 2006 Employees: 85 Headquarters: Bangalore Website: www.oneindia.in |
| Business Model |
| Advertising is the main source of revenues for the portal. Ecommerce is a new introduction on Oneindia.in |
Convincing VCs was just not easy. Very few agreed (then) that languages were being consumed online in India. The other thing which went against us was the lack of internet penetration. Tier-2 and Tier-3 never had good access to Internet. In fact many parts of Bangalore still don’t have access to wired broadband. Everyone is aware of the internet, but access was difficult. Needless to say many of the prospective Internet users would have been accessing Oneindia.in if they could. We were losing out on user base but then you need to understand–there is nothing you can do about it. So instead of whining try to innovate, concentrate on improving the product you already have, try to increase the number of revenue models you have. VCs wanted us to have ‘transactional revenues’. We had to demonstrate language speaking internet surfers are willing to ‘buy’ on the internet, however small, we had to show language users are open to spending on the internet. We did sell few books, bus tickets on our language sites but we needed to have dedicated teams to scale that model.
I had a good resource who could translate my ideas to a presentation. My colleague Sriram Hebbar was doing a great job on the financial plan. We had all the supporting materials a VC was looking for but that was not enough. Rejection can be tough but I made sure I took it as a challenge; rejection only increased my commitment towards the company, shareholders and employees.
It is important to learn to say ‘I don’t know the answer’ to many questions. It is better to be frank and acknowledge any good ideas you hear from VCs.
Over time I too started seeing some valid points in what the VCs had to say. If they said “no”, I asked “why?”. Then I use to analyze the reasons they gave. There is no need to accept or reject everything they say, but you must be honest to yourself while analyzing the feedback. Because if you are not having an open mind while analyzing what they have to say you will be the ultimate loser.
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