New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Recently, Rajesh Jain took a trip down the memory lane and recounted his IndiaWorld days on his blog (Rajesh sold IndiaWorld to Satyam for over $100 million). The dot com era was a thrilling time and I had my own little adventures then. I was in 2nd year at IIT when my buddy Himanshu and myself decided to start our first dotcom. A couple of hours of discussion was enough for us to zero down on creating a classifieds website. Mind you - this was 1998 and there were no India specific classifieds website online (I would say classifieds are still not done right even today here - there is no equivalent of craigslist in India). So we set out to create BharatClassifieds. A couple of days of hacking perl scripts later, we had our website ready for release. Yes - we took an idea to its implementation in less than a week. Of course it wasn't earth shattering but we were very proud of it. Once BharatClassifieds (codenamed BhaCla by us) was ready, we needed content so that the site wouldn't look empty. So, we decided to manually type in a few dozen ads in each category from the newspapers. We also made up some ads. It was kind of fun to put in a matrimonial for a class mate or put somebody's car for sale without telling them. The next step was more challenging. To make the site work, we had to get people to put in their ads themselves. We needed to do some marketing! It turned out that in those days, VSNL (local monopolistic ISP of that time) left its subscriber list lying around on its server for anybody to use. Thus started our mass email marketing campaign. And while today it will be labelled as spam - back then people used to email us back to thank us for starting a free website which was so useful! Sounds unbelievable huh?

The site was ready, emails had been sent, and fake content had been typed in. Now we had to wait for first real ad to show up. It didn't take long. An erotic massage parlor in Thailand decided that BhaCla was a great place for them to advertise their services. So they had the honor of posting the first real add on BhaCla! Soon it became an addiction for me to check the statistics for the website. Within a few weeks, we had started getting several dozen ads per day. Sometimes I would ask my friends and family to just respond to an ad and mention that they had come across it on BhaCla. You know, to give an impression to the users that the system actually worked.

A few months onwards we were getting a steady stream of traffic. Not a whole lot but I think it was in the range of some tens of thousands of hits per month. In 1999, for a website that never spent a money on advertising or development, it wasn't bad at all. Soon we created GreetingsIndia, an India specific website for greeting cards and IndianJobShop, a website for jobs. It was at the same time when Naukri.com was brand new and just starting to gain popularity. So without realizing it, we had covered quite few bases of what can be called a "portal". But a few months later we lost focus. We got busy with college. We heard of millions of dollars pouring in as VC money in other websites and got disheartened.

In the final year of IIT, Himanshu and I made a comeback. We participated with full gusto in a business plan competition organized by IIT Bombay. We had some ideas around Bluetooth applications for the consumer market. We worked real hard on it and made it to the last 10 amongst over 150 entries. However the final round was a real anti-climax for us when the VC judges shot down our idea after looking at just the first slide of our presentation. What a disappointment it had been! Incidentally Rajesh Jain was on the panel that day.

When I look back, I think we had a real good thing going with BhaCla and we never realized it. We had noticed early on that matrimonials were the single most popular section and even discussed starting a dedicated site for matrimonials. But we never did. With the job site, I used to get calls from recruiters across the country who wanted to get a 'homepage' on my site (I had this concept where any HR firm could get a free homepage on the website if they posted enough ads there). But I never took it to the next level. The bluetooth idea was not worth anything and I am thankful to those VCs for shooting it down mercilessly. But in the process of making this business plan, I came in contact with Dr. Jhunjhunwala who has since been like a mentor for me. So I gained a lot even though it had seemed like a total failure at that point of time.

So that was my little dot com era story. Not quite as successful or enlightening as Rajesh's, but nonetheless very memorable for me.

PS: I googled and turns out BhaCla is still listed in many online directories. And if you want to see what the site used to look like check out the archived version on the Wayback machine