While PG looks for a hypnotist in Philly, let me make use of my Sunday morning and add some PG History bits from memory
also for posterity's sake. I'll focus more on the journey of Pagalguy.com from a kitchen website to becoming a full-fledged commercial venture. Continuing from
Lord Q's post (History of PaGaLGuY.com) ...
The 'alleged' CAT result leak made Pagalguy.com quite famous overnight
and added to the word-of-mouth. In 2004, Shameek (arboreal_tarantula) suggested that since we're an enthusiastic
bunch here with decent jobs and education and loads of time after the mock-CATs on weekends, so why not use it to give back to society through Community Service. the
Touching Lives section thus took birth and puys in half a dozen cities tied up with a local NGO to teach slum/disabled children every week. Even now, many of the cities are actively pursuing it, primarily Mumbai and off and on in other places.
December 2005: Allwin gets his Wharton admit and considers turning PG into a money-making venture. The site's already the largest for MBA prep in India, so marketing's done. Several revenue models are considered and after various meetings at McDonald's Baristas and CCDs Rohit (estranged_gnrs) is brainwashed into leaving his IT job with Patni.
January 2006: Rohit becomes the first 'employee' at PG (After the big boss, of course
) and kickstarts a revenue stream by selling advertisements on Pagalguy. The initial office comprised of a 4x4 sq feet cabin, an old P3 desktop and an exhaust fan
.
The response from the market is great from the beginning itself and Allwin and Rohit decide upon a few policies to ensure that PG's commercialization doesn't affect the forum and community. It includes rules like No Pop-up ads, no dedicated advertisement mailers to users, no selling of database, no censoring forum threads because a client's product is presented in a bad light there, etc etc. Kunal (theginsoakedboy) joined Business Development and worked for a couple of months before joining VGSoM IIT KGP for MBA (Now back in the PG Team). Yours truly joins in May 2006 to work on content. We go all out to campuses to hire for marketing, content, etc and find a few brilliant youngsters to work for us like Sonam, Zeeshan, Bijay and others. Sonam (ultra_lord) joins as a newbie journalist and within an year manages to interview biggies such as Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Avnish Bajaj, Anupam Mittal and more. More people come and go and the insane ship continues sailing as a proper company
(Inzane Labs Private Limited). The company has worked without a boss most of the time as Allwin is doing his MBA in Wharton. But he stays in regular touch over the Net until May 2008 when he completes MBA and returns
. We also experimented with a few things like pagalgirl.com, a community only for women which invited quite a few brickbats from the guys on the forum for obvious reasons
Turning commercial helped in many ways - from something as simple as being able to afford production of the PG Tees to bringing in services like Quant Question a Day, DI set a day, sponsoring puys to a holiday in Alibaugh for the All India PG Meet, etc etc. Mods who came in during this time were Govi, Mahip, Neo2000, nikhilkulk and rmbt. All of them were able to adapt to the new avatar of PG as a business pretty quickly.
The company's staying cash flow positive, and we have very exciting lives meeting everyone from the Directors and Admission Deans of top-schools in India and across the world to CEOs, management thinkers like Philip Kotler and Bala V Balachandran.
As of today, we have doubled the number of posts in one year (4 lakh in August 2006 to 8 lakh in August 2007) and nearly tripled the user base (about 50k registered users in July 2006 to 1.36 lakh in August 2007). We've seen the potential in mobiles and erected an
SMS plaform for CAT aspirants. We have sued an Ahmedabad based coaching institute because they use our name illegally to attract customers. User activity is increasing year on year so it's all okay, everything's good. Next things in line are a few more crazy products for CAT aspirants (like last year's PG connect), a revamp of the entire website look and theme to appeal also to non-geeks :P
Puys are free to drop in at the PG office (PGHQ) in South Mumbai anytime they want. I fact, we'll celebrate the 5th anniversary of Pagalguy.com in the first weekend of September at the PG office... exact dates will be posted somewhere, and all puys are welcome
Cheers,
)
Hypnotist? Allwin, what art thou up to???
IIFT - BATCH OF 2008-10 
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