Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud (Part 1)

Rajesh Jain has built a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India. This is an important case study for all the bootstrapped entrepreneurs out there looking for inspiration and methodology to scale.

Sramana Mitra: Alright, Rajesh, let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from, where were you born, raised, what kind of background?

Rajesh Jain: I was born and raised in Mumbai and did my schooling there. Then I did Electrical Engineering (EE) from IIT Bombay from 1984 to 1988. Then I went to Columbia for my masters in EE. I worked for two years in the US, and then I came back.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you go back?

Rajesh Jain: That was May of 1992.

Sramana Mitra: It was right before the internet.

Rajesh Jain: Yes, and I came back because my father had told me, “Finish your master’s in nine months, work in the US for two years and come back.” So there was no staying in the US.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do when you went back to Bombay?

Rajesh Jain: So I came back to be an entrepreneur. The first two and a half years were very difficult. I failed at pretty much everything I tried.

Sramana Mitra: What did you try?

Rajesh Jain: I tried to build a database multimedia database company at that time that didn’t work, followed by an image processing company where we did some cool algorithms at that time. That didn’t work either.

I tried a couple of random things. Nothing was working and then I realized that whatever we were doing had to die, and I had to do something else. So that’s sort of the life of most entrepreneurs, I guess.

Sramana Mitra: So, then what happens?

Rajesh Jain: In late 1994, I went back to the US for a couple months, I’d just got married about a year ago. It wasn’t a pleasant year, because I realized business was not working out; I was failing. It’s always very hard for an entrepreneur to accept that his ideas are not working, because you always feel that your ideas are the greatest.

Then when I went back to the US in late 1994, I had a few ideas in my mind about what I wanted to do. One of them was to make content from India available for people in the US.

I was thinking about the internet, but the internet was unavailable in India at that time. In the US, I experienced the dial-up connection and being able to browse content and what a website really meant.

I realized that that could be a very interesting problem to solve, because I’d faced that problem myself.

A couple of years before that, I could not find out quickly information about what’s happening in India and other content from India. It was pre-internet days. I realized that the internet could be a great bridge for my two ideas, the fact that the problem statement was news and information about India, as a possible solution.

I went back after two months in the US, met a lot of people, and talked to people about these ideas. It was very early days, of course, for the internet at that time. When I came back, I had to let go of some of the people that I had in the company at that time. I got my wife Bhavna to start working with me. I said, “Look, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have to pay you. So let’s start working in this together, Bhavna.”

Then I wrote letters to pretty much all the media owners in India saying, “I’m doing this. I’d love to get your content for free to put up on the internet.”

The good news was people didn’t really know much about it. They didn’t understand the internet.

Sramana Mitra: They didn’t understand it at all.

Rajesh Jain: A few people thought, “Hey, are you creating a new TV channel or something?” A few people did respond. In March of 1995, I launched India World, the first portal from India. We had a pretty good diverse mix of content, from daily updates on stock quotes, news twice a day, cricket scores, stock quotes, Indian poems, stories, a few recipes – sort of a potpourri of many things.

I put up one ad in India Today International. But otherwise, I had to figure out how to get people to know about us. It was a priced service. This is March 1995. So to put that in context, it was just around the time Yahoo and eBay launched.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, of course.

Rajesh Jain: I tried to charge for some of the content. It took a year for me to realize that Indians are not going to pay much money. Some of the large corporates, I realized, just had one login because someone would log in and then share the login and password with everyone.

Sramana Mitra: So it was not an open, free service. It was something you were trying to monetize.

Rajesh Jain: Part of it was free and open, but some sections were behind a paywall.

Sramana Mitra: So then how did you navigate out of this situation?

Rajesh Jain: So for the first one and a half years, we had a $20 a year plan, but then I realized that’s not going to work. I also realized that if I had to get revenues coming in, I had to start doing website development, I had to have a services business, because I didn’t have much money.

So, while some of the cash coming in from subscriptions helped, I started a services revenue stream by building websites for corporates in India. That actually started doing pretty well, because we were very early on. I would go and tell people that this is the next big thing in the world to reach out to people globally.

That’s one thing that helped a lot. It kept the cash coming in because we didn’t have any external funding.

Then the second thing we did was, a couple of years later, I created this vertical sort of anti-Yahoo strategy. Yahoo was everything under one domain. Everything else was a sort of yahoo.com slash something – finance, sports, and news.

A lot of people started writing to me saying they only want the news or the recipes. You don’t want those one or two extra clicks to navigate to those sites. So then Bhavna and I came up with this idea of having specialized domain names. We picked memorable Indian words. So samachar, which basically in Hindi meant news, Khel meant sport for cricket updates, khoj meant search. We literally copied the idea from Yahoo’s directory plus search. Then we had Bavarchi, which basically meant a cook for Indian recipes.

We had about 13-14 such sites, four of which I mentioned did very well. Samachar became pretty much the de facto homepage for Indians in the US. From 1997-98, the ad revenue started coming in.

So there were a lot of banks and telecom companies wanting to target Indians and that helped the revenue go up.

Sramana Mitra: How did people know about it?

Rajesh Jain: Word of mouth.

Sramana Mitra: So it was organic. You didn’t really do any kind of traffic acquisition strategy or anything. And at the time, there was no real Google search or anything, right? So

Rajesh Jain: There was pretty much nothing I did. If I remember correctly, it’s now almost thirty years, I put up only two ads. One was when I launched and another was when we launched the cricket site because cricket was very popular in India and with Indians globally. But that’s it.

My big learning was, if you just focus on the product and listen to what people want, that word of mouth really helped us grow.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a Bootstrapped Unicorn from India: Rajesh Jain, Founder of Netcore Cloud
1 2 3 4 5 6 7