The Biz of Coding

Q&A with the Founder of IndianPad — Part 1

by Ujwal Tickoo on April 11th, 2007

IndianPad (www.indianpad.com) is the most popular social news site in India, quite often referred to as the Digg (www.digg.com) of India. I am an avid user of IndianPad and always wanted to know how this rocking Indian Web 2.0 product came to life. The Founder of IndianPad agreed to an email Q&A with me. He also has graciously allowed me to publish the Q&A, in a 3-4 part series, for the readers of TheBizofCoding.

He prefers to not share specific details about his identity. He wants IndianPad "to remain absolutely neutral" to his individual personality and to not "affect the viewpoints expressed" by IndianPad's users. His email signature tells me how happy he is to just keep the focus on IndianPad and its users rather than drawing attention to himself, besides how attached he is to his Indian roots:

IndianPad
http://www.indianpad.com
Vote Daily, Comment Often and Live Life Kingsize :)

For the International readers of TheBizofCoding, Live Life Kingsize was a very popular catchline by Four Square Kings cigarette launched in India by Godfrey Phillips in 1973. As a kid I used to see Four Sqaure Kings commercials in cinema halls (but never became a smoker). It was India's first king Size filter cigarette. The brand positioning offered young adults the promise to 'Live Life King Size.'

  Here is the first episode of Q&A. It is focused on understanding how IndianPad came to life. If you have some questions for the IndianPad founder please leave them in the comments section of this post. In the last part of this Q&A series I will try to have some of the questions answered.

Question 1) Users are curious to know your name and a bit more about you as the founder of Indian Pad?

Answer: About Me - I work for a multi-national manufacturing company and have recently started spending more time in India. On that topic, I must mention that its amazing to see our country being transformed (in both good ways and bad) in front of our eyes.

On the identity issue - There are a couple of reasons why I have kept my identity secret from our users. I want the site to remain absolutely neutral so that my individual personality does not affect the viewpoints expressed by our users. Also, the privacy allows me to separate what I do in my free time from my day job.

Question 2) When did the idea about Indian Pad first cross your mind.  From that time on how long did it take you to starting working on building it and finally launching it?

Answer: Let me start by defining what I think of IndianPad today.  The major theme of the site is to see if crowd power can be channeled to provide insights into what a population thinks is relevant.  Our purpose on IPad is to remove any barriers that prevent users from interacting with the site while maintaining the integrity of the process.  We have had some discussions on allowing non-registered users to post stories and comments but it lacks accountability which is a major sub-theme on the site as well. 

The initial site was created about 16 months ago as a link sharing site between my brother and me.  The site at that time was a collection of bookmarks that both of us maintained (think del.icio.us on a wheelchair).  Over time other people started visiting the site and that's when we decided to expand the site.

I had been planning a collaborative site like digg even though the track record for such sites in the Indian context was quite dismal.  Most sites then, and even now, have a central group of users or admins who filter stories and channel discussions.  This was an excellent model and we had some great desi sites like desipundit, sepiamutiny, etc using that.

Anyhow, we finally agreed to give the collaborative approach a shot and initially used pligg (pligg.com) to setup a quick social bookmarking site.  However, within a month we came across limitations that forced us to code a new site.

The core site was coded in php over a period of 3-4 weeks but the enhancements and changes have never really stopped.  The site has come a long way in terms of usability and performance but I believe that we are only scratching the surface in terms of features.  The site is still a work in progress and our users keep coming up with new ideas and requests that never cease to amaze me.

We have had some challenges monetizing the site as I have shied away from adding ads all over.  Frankly, even I would stop going to IndianPad if that happened :)  We have experimented with some scenarios but are still working on options that enhance the experience rather than bombard users with contextual ads.  Currently, we allow users to place their own ads under the stories and some of them have really taken this to heart and hopefully made some money for all the hard work they put into the site - for e.g. http://www.indianpad.com/user/devilsworkshop/ads.

Q3) What is the current status of Indian Pad in terms of users, traffic, other key metrics?

Answer: Even though many question the viability of web 2.0 sites among the Indian audience we have grown quite briskly over the 12 months.  We had to move the site once last year to a cluster of dedicated servers due to the sheer number of hits we were getting.

Currently, we average about 550,000 hits a day from about 45,000 users (the site is heavy on ajax thus the traffic is usually under-represented on most reports, including this one).  55% of these users are new users while 45% are return users.  Most of our traffic comes from India followed closely by US, UK, Canada and UAE.  The surprise here is UAE which generates more traffic than Pakistan and Australia combined!

We have about 13,000 registered users (http://www.indianpad.com/users) but many of our regular visitors are not registered with us as we don't restrict any areas of the site to un-registered members.

Q4) What are the key insights and learning you gained while building and now running Indian Pad?

Answer: I think the most important lesson for us has been never to under-estimate our users.  We have argued internally over features that seemed too esoteric or complicated for most users to comprehend.  However, in every case our users have used them and taken them in directions that even we didn't envision.

It may sound corny but my faith in democracy has certainly been strengthened since I started working on IndianPad.  Personally, I have always liked order and precision so I was somewhat apprehensive to let the site behave organically.  However, the users now do a much better job than a small group of admins could ever accomplish.  We just maintain but the real success story here are our hard working users. We have tried to reward them in a small way by recognizing the top users in a month ( http://www.indianpad.com/rank) but they really do all this without anything in return.

–End of Q&A Part 1– 

The second part of Q&A will be published in 1-2 weeks time and will focus on IndianPad Founder's thoughts on the Web 2.0 space in India. How Web 2.0 product uptake and development in India compares with that in the US. We will also cover issues like the accelerating and slowing forces for Web 2.0 growth in India. Keep coming back!

Update: The Q&A series couldnt be continued further due to major changes on IndiaPad taking all the time of its founder. Inconvenience is regretted.

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POSTED IN: India