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Anjali Prayag

With over Rs 20-crore annual turnover, twenty million hits every month and online groups of all sorts debating motley issues, Sulekha.com has come a long way from being just a writer's notepad.

It started as a Web site for wordsmiths. For NRIs who wrote more for the love of words and India, than for the greenback, which anyway was not on offer. No wonder then, Sulekha.com has the largest collection of reviews for a single movie: nearly 550 opinions on the Bollywood blockbuster Lagaan.

What began as a platform for the creative expressions of Indophiles is now a booming business venture. Confesses the founder President and CEO of Sulekha.com, Satya Prabhakar, "We never thought it would reach such proportions."

Despite the growing pains, the company's focus remains the same: anything Indian chalega. And so, today, Indians across the world buy a PC, sell house, find a new job, a housekeeper, a bridegroom, a holiday idea and a million other things on Sulekha.com's classifieds. "We're also the largest online ticket-sellers for Indian events and movies in the US," adds the soft-spoken Austin-based entrepreneur from Machilipatnam, Andhra Pradesh.

With over Rs 20 crore annual turnover, twenty million hits every month and several kinds of online groups debating motley issues — BayArea New Moms, Indian BPO professionals, Chennai Film Writers and so on — Sulekha has come a long way from being just a writer's notepad.

The story of Sulekha unfolded in November 1998, around the same time the heady dotcom days hit a rough patch. Prabhakar, a software engineer with a passion for writing, created Sulekha (su meaning good and lekha meaning writing).

"There are plenty of people in the world, including myself, who love creative expression through writing and the Net has given us the technology to freely express that urge," he says.

Inspired by DakGhar (Post Office), an online community of ex-IIM students, Prabhakar and his wife Sangeeta launched Sulekha.com. Today, it has 60 city portals in five continents. "But we have not lost sight of our initial goal to provide an online platform for Indian writers," he says.

Penguin has published select articles from Sulekha.com over the years. Sulekha Select and Black, White and Various Shades of Brown feature a pot-pourri of the most popular essays on the site. The former was on Amazon.com's South Asian bestseller list.

"Among our writers is an IT professional from Singapore, a doctor from Mumbai and a filmmaker from Hyderabad," says Prabhakar, adding, "Our writers can write just about anything; but they have to be either Indian or write on a subject that has an India-focus."

The portal has over five million pages of content and a huge collection of visuals; the travelogue segment has over 20,000 pictures posted by members from all over the world.

At the turn of the century, Prabhakar and his team-mates felt that Sulekha should be more than just a site for opinions. "Some members felt we could give useful information on products and services."

That gave birth to the classifieds services. Following the global NRI's search for business opportunities back home, Prabhakar launched the offline version of the classifieds magazine in Chennai and Bangalore recently. "We needed to crack the Indian market in the long run. We have two million people of Indian origin in the US and about four million of them elsewhere. But there are 250 million Net-users in India. It's a huge market for us. Statistics show that over two million new users are being added every month."

Though Sulekha was born at the tail end of the dotcom bust, market forces did not spare even this small Austin-based company. How did this Internet company survive the bust that hit most e-businesses in the late-1990s?

"With a lot of difficulty, believe me," he says. But this Net champion never lost faith in his business model. And, unlike other e-biz ventures, they were spending very little on content cost. "We had already invested in infrastructure and so we kept it going by slashing our salaries." And that was when Prabhakar actually let his creative urge take a backseat and sharpened his business skills.

With so many India-related events being organised all over the world, he realised that online ticketing was a vibrant business. Today, the company generates close to Rs 1 crore every month from this line of business.

Basically, Sulekha is looking at three streams of businesses: corporate advertising, classifieds and event ticketing, with each contributing about one-third to the revenues, which touched Rs 20 crore this year. Prabhakar expects this to grow 200 per cent every year. Sulekha now has 130 employees with 124 of them in India. "There are only six people in the US in the marketing team, and everything else is done here in India," he adds.

Picture by Bijoy Ghosh

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