Marketing analysis of internet portal Sulekha.com

Sulekha.com is a groundbreaking site for multiple reasons, one of them being that, it is a completely member-contributed website; almost all of its 500,000+ pages of content are contributed by tens of thousands of Indians from over 50 countries.

It is best place to blog, to interact and to make friends. Sulekha has blogs, social networking, classifieds, events, yellow pages, among other services and has definitely come a long way in a short span of time. It is the leading provider of integrated online event promotion and management, membership and fundraising services to offline organizations.

It has served more than 500 advertisers in more than 10 business domains and helped meet their marketing and sales objectives. Sulekha has become a highly sought-after online advertising medium because of its unparalleled reach, unprecedented targeting (by age, gender, city, sub-ethnicity and income) and integrated offline/online promotions.

Today, Sulekha serves an exponentially growing online and mobile member base of 6.2 million in over 50 cities in India, US and elsewhere as the:

(a)Most popular online/mobile provider of YP business search results to users and business leads to small to medium business advertisers and merchants

(b)Most popular online/mobile provider of classifieds in the broadest range of categories

(c)Most popular social media site offering largest events/opinions/reviews in targeted domains.

More Indians use Sulekha.com than any other source – online or offline – to find local businesses and interact and transact with each other for the broadest range of needs all across India, US and elsewhere.

Sulekha.com’s assets include:

The largest listing of general Classifieds.

The most comprehensive and accurate Yellow Pages business listings in India.

The largest number of Small to Medium Business advertisers in the online/mobile space.

The largest base of member-generated content amongst Indian sites that spurs local commerce.

A sophisticated and scalable mobile/online platform that serves millions of users on a daily basis.

Sulekha.com continues to rapidly expand its user and customer base both through its own sales force and through a growing network of prominent alliances with major mobile and online partners such as Reliance, Vodafone, Airtel, Spice, Sify and others….making the use of Classifieds and Local Search easy and ubiquitous.

Every business that is listed on Sulekha yellow Pages has its own profile page, where in people can add information about that business, pictures, work hours, map coordinates and contact details. From the profile page visitors are given an option to either call the business or send a free text message to the business. Visitors can at anytime save the information about the business on their phone from the website.

Since its inception Sulekha has developed many applications for mobile platforms and for social networking platforms such as Facebook. The Facebook applications include a restaurant finder and an application to browse through Classifieds. They have also developed an application for the Nokia N97 which allows the user to browse through all the services offered by the company.

It is a fully funded company, headquartered in Austin (Texas, US) and with operations in US and India. The website has not advertised on TV in India to date as we always felt there would be a lot of wastage in reaching an audience that is not yet on online.Sulekha.com has been recognized as one of the Top Six Largest Internet Media Portals in India and a pioneer in marrying community and commerce in a distinctive manner.

BUSINESS MODEL

Launching a Web-based start-up had to be either an act of sheer bravado or the result of a carefully conceived business plan. Satya Prabhakar was banking on the latter, but in effect, he fit into the former category. For, the dotcom bubble had burst and portals were not considered the promised route to success. Yet, Prabhakar persisted..

He quit his well-paying job with AT&T in the US, put in his savings and investments worth $25,000, and set up sulekha.com at 37. Sulekha was a dream of setting up an online community for Indians worldwide that took shape when he was employed, and the conviction of its success saw him actually write the code for the site. He turned his vocation to occupation despite the risks involved and the misgivings of the people around him. “When I’m 55, I don’t want to regret not having done something,” he justifies his move.

It’s also his business philosophy. He attributes it to the concept of ‘regret minimisation framework’ coined by Jeff Bezos, the founder of amazon.com. Another influence for Prabhakar has been Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a tale about following one’s dream and finding out what one is capable of. “What’s the worst that could have happened?” he asks. “If this venture had failed, I knew I could have gone back to a job.” As for the family’s responsibility, Prabhakar was unfazed because he had kept aside sufficient funds to last them at least a year.

True to his conviction, Sulekha soon took on a life of its own. The next logical step was to set up a space where buyers and sellers could meet. So the classifieds version of Sulekha was born and it took about two-and-a-half years for the site to break even. About an year or so after this, Prabhakar began thinking of taking the business to India. By 2005, he had moved back home and set up headquarters in Chennai.

Though the business model for the e-venture was in place, India threw up several unique challenges for Sulekha. The sheer size of the population was daunting. The other, more critical, aspect involved convincing small businesses that the Internet was not necessarily a parallel universe, but that it could be a powerful tool if it was exploited in the right manner. So, Prabhakar tweaked his model to suit the country-instead of a regular classifieds site, he sold Sulekha purely as a mechanism for gathering business leads. This means that a small business can advertise on Sulekha with the assurance of a certain number of leads being generated. A user (buyer) who goes to Sulekha is given the option of asking for a specific product or service and his contacts are then sent to the advertiser as a lead. This implies that the user is assured a veritable flood of targeted responses.

What makes Sulekha’s Indian business model unique is that the advertisers largely small businesses have literally nothing to do online. They pay for the leads-Sulekha could be a skywriting site for all that it matters to them. There’s absolutely no commerce conducted online, so there are no security issues. As Prabhakar says, all he really needed to have in place was a crack sales team. “They (people) are my real assets. Everything else that sulekha.com owns can fit into a hard disk,” he says. So while recruiting, he looks for people with the right attitude: those who regard problems as challenges and enjoy their work.

However, reactions took time to convert into revenue. It was three years before Sulekha broke even, but there has been no looking back since then. From Rs 50,000 worth of business that was transacted in a month initially, the site has moved on to making at least twice this amount in a day. The company has offices in five cities across the country-Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi-and plans to open more. Today, Sulekha is what Prabhakar always wanted it to be: “Not just a site that people love to visit, but a site that people have to visit.”

Authoritarianism obviously pays. Users are happy with Sulekha, which gets a large number of repeat visitors, according to Prabhakar. But the portal’s success has given rise to innumerable rumours. “When you attain a certain size, there’s nothing people can do except talk,” he says. While they are talking, he is moving into different media, including mobile phones. The bottom line is clear: Prabhakar wants Sulekha to be everyone’s default option.

Sulekha.com is succeeding today by identifying and firmly establishing first-mover leadership role in multiple areas, and by managing its resources smartly and is preparing to launch the first Indian electronic bookstore aimed at selling downloadable content to end-users. It has won unanimous praise from numerous Indian and foreign media for its unique approach and commercial success.

REVENUE MODEL:

Sulekha derives its revenues in India through a performance guaranteed response model through which they have served a customer base of nearly 20,000 SMB customers and hundreds of major brands.

Sulekha.com continues to rapidly expand its user and customer base both through its own sales force and through a growing network of prominent alliances with major mobile and online partners such as Vodafone, Reliance, Sify and others, making the use of Classifieds and Local Search easy and ubiquitous.

Sulekha, which drives its revenues primarily from businesses, instead of the end consumers, is working out plans to rope in more channel partners who will drive online traffic to the websites.

The company which recently launched its assured advertising solution for small business, aims to attract about 50,000 businesses to advertise in the portal by the end of the year.

The company is giving advertisers the guarantee to succeed, and if an advertiser feel that his target of getting a certain number of responses has not been met, Sulekha.com is assuring to run the same advertisement till they met the business demand.

CUSTOMER VALUE PROPOSITION

“User-generated content, focus on the social media targeted at specifically Indians and on generating a revenue with local commerce within the community has been the unique value proposition (UVP) for Sulekha.com” according to Sulekha.com co-founder and CEO Satya Prabhakar.

Sulekha.com has now migrated and replicated there success in the online space to the mobile platform by providing services classifieds as well as mobile blogging in the current months. They want to expand by offerings, by creating more alliances with print media and mobile service providers.

Sulekha realizes this goal in a profitable manner by creating a flexible and powerful interactive platform that connects Indians worldwide through a variety of popular and powerful services.

Here are some concrete examples of how they do it:

Social Capital: Sulekha provides the most popular platform for expression and discussions (articles/columns, Coffeehouse, Weblogs) that allows exchange of thoughts and opinions. Sulekha has helped raised over $1 million / Rs. 5 crores for hundreds of cultural and charitable organizations in promoting and selling tickets for their funds and events.

Economic Capital: Sulekha runs the most popular online classifieds service in North America (and soon worldwide) that allows for the exchange of products and services among Indians. Also, Sulekha has also started a fund, collected.

Political Capital: Sulekha provides a powerful platform for Indian organizations worldwide to promote and find support for petitions advocating their causes.

The Smart Techie magazine has released a list of “Top 25 most promising internet companies in India”. The list includes BigAdda(social networking), Yatra.com(travel), Zapak(gaming), and Sulekha.com(local commerce).

CONCLUSION:

Some of the trends for the coming year as predicted by Sulekha.com show that:

The ability to target online users by geography has improved, and it’s a lot cheaper now. Local advertisers can now be sure that only local eyeballs will see their ad. One can develop a reputation very quickly online, adding to his credibility and opening more doors for themselves – all without setting foot outside the house.

Witnessing tremendous response from tier-II cities for local business search online, we feel that these cities in a very short span of time will engulf the online space.

The online space will also see frenzied activity with Marketers tightening their purse strings with a lot of stress on creative experimentation. Corporate houses, big and small will look at diversification in a big way – ways to synergize or differentiate their value offering to the end consumer. Small business will continue to grow and are expected to embrace technology more in the future due to the sheer economic viability attached to this medium.

Innovation will become a benchmark to leverage and sustain customer interest and loyalty. Apart from the online space, innovation in the mobile space will be tremendous with mobile commerce becoming a key platform for business convergence after the opening up of 3G networks.

AWARD WON BY SULEKHA:

PC World(June 2008) rated Sulekha.com the Best Local Search Site in India.

MSN (July 2008) rated Sulekha.com the Best WAP Site in India for Local Commerce.

CNBC (Oct 2008): Sulekha.com…the largest online Classifieds and Yellow Pages in India.

Venture Beat(May 2008): “A merger between Facebook and Craigslist may seem like a pipe dream – but in India it’s already happening. The web community Sulekha has quickly grown to become India’s largest user-generated content site…with 6 million members”

Financial Times(UK): “Sulekha.com…the world’s largest online Indian community…is extraordinarily sticky – some visitors call it addictive…”