Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	June 12, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Indian contest site is a dotcom winner
By Raju Bist

MUMBAI - "I used to make 100 calls every day to prospective clients. Two of them would come on the line. Only one would agree to a meeting," remembers Indian entrepreneur Alok Kejriwal, chief executive of contents2win (C2W), a unique Mumbai-based online contest site.

Three years later, it is clients who call up Kejriwal, asking him to devise contests around their brands. Venture-capital firms are now lining up a third round of financing. A China site, launched last year, is all set to overtake the original Indian one, which has 750,000 registered users.

Kejriwal, 31, has cashed in on a solid idea: take the pastime of contesting and turn it into an interactive platform for Internet advertisers. Beginning in August 1998, Kejriwal borrowed 200 square feet of office space from his grandfather, who ran a socks-knitting family business. Grandpa also picked up the electricity and telephone bills until the first round of external funding came in.

The young entrepreneur did the concept selling. A webmaster, hired on a half-day basis, handled the site. With no budget for advertising, Kejriwal instead asked his clients to mention his site in their ads. "Within the first two years, I got about Rs160 million [US$3.2 million] worth of advertising this way," says Kejriwal gleefully.

Even today, Kejriwal does not advertise extensively. "His site would have more recall if he advertised more frequently in traditional media like print, television or billboards," says Anjali Dhingra, a new media analyst at New Delhi-based stockbroking firm Madanlal Gupta & Sons.

C2W slowly became the talk of the town and in November 1999, ICICI Ventures, a leading Indian venture-capital firm, called. Just as the deal was being wrapped up, eVentures India, another venture outfit (jointly promoted by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and Softbank), also expressed interest. The two firms jointly pitched in with Rs22 million.

There was no looking back after that. Kejriwal moved to a bigger office, hired skilled people, expanded his operations to three other Indian cities and professionalized the setup. To date, the site has organized 1,200 contests (20 of them are on right now) and has built up brand relationships with 400 clients, including some of the biggest business names in the business - Hindustan Lever Limited, MTV, Procter & Gamble, the Tata Group, Adidas and Sony Music.

Contestants have been lured by prizes such as free trips abroad, fancy cars, jewelry, giant color televisions, audio systems and imported sunglasses. A contest now being aimed at collegians has the ultimate status symbol for the prize: a chauffeur-driven Mercedes for five days.

Kejriwal now owns 40 percent of C2W. The employees have 15 percent and ICICI Ventures and Softbank jointly hold the remaining 45 percent. Thanks to the Softbank connection, C2W expanded to China in August 2000. The operation there is a 50:50 joint venture between Softbank and Kejriwal. Why China? "It was easy to replicate the existing platform. There was no existing contest site there. Also, the proximity to China was a major attraction," says Kejriwal.

C2W employs 22 people in China compared with 35 in India. The Chinese C2W has handled work for 50 large clients, including Nokia, Coca-Cola and Starbucks coffee. It is furiously throwing up revenue and threatens to soon overtake its parent Indian site.

C2W earned revenue of Rs31 million in India in the last financial year ending March 2001, and another Rs25 million came from China. C2W’s Chinese website (www.contests2win.com.cn) is already among the top 15 sites in China, with a consumer base of 900,000 users, growing at 20 percent per month.

At a time when other dotcoms have suddenly vanished, C2W has survived for a variety of reasons. "The site is very focused towards its target audience - the youth," says Mumbai-based banker Dharmesh Maheshwari. "Everything about the site - the content, the language, the look - is geared towards attracting the young ones."

C2W tries its best to be innovative all the time - and this has clients laughing their way to their banks. For Domino's, the site asked contestants to read out a number from a coupon online and call the pizza company. For every pizza they bought, they got another one free. Domino's raked up sales of Rs2 million worth of sales in a matter of days.

Most important, Kejriwal is a shrewd businessman and has his head firmly on his shoulders. He did not go ahead with joint ventures with Rupert Murdoch in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom because he did not think the numbers would add up profitably.

And the entrepreneur is confident that the site will work in South Korea and Japan and is currently in talks with Softbank for joint ventures to be launched there next year. "We would like to completely tap the potential of Asia before exploring the rest of the world," says Kejriwal.

The youngster has time on his hands for that - as well as a seemingly unbeatable idea.

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