<span class="htext1"> The Making of afaqs!:</span> A personal story by Sreekant Khandekar

Ten years into this business, my friends still marvel at my being an entrepreneur. In the years before, I was largely indifferent to money. I was considered cautious. And as for my running an IT-based enterprise, it still amuses them. Tech isn't my strong point. That's why I have often been asked, what is the real secret to being an entrepreneur? (The underlying sentiment being: 'If Sreekant could do it, anybody can.')

But it's not that easy. There is a secret, actually, and I am going to let you in on it. As a fulltime journalist before launching agencyfaqs! (the original name of afaqs!), I'd recognised an essential quality in entrepreneurs: unbridled optimism. The I-want-to-be-an-entrepreneur type unwaveringly believes that tomorrow will be a better day, that he will somehow – even if he doesn't quite know how – get past that mile-high heap of dung standing between him and brilliant success.

The other thing about entrepreneurs is that the desire to be on their own comes first; what they will do with the freedom comes next. And so it was with me.

After a decade with India Today as a journalist I had been involved in starting A&M (Advertising & Marketing) in 1989 as its founding editor together with a childhood friend, Anil Metre. It came at a time when none of the business dailies covered this space (there were no supplements either). By 1997 the magazine was doing very well but I was restless and unhappy. I had told Anil that I wanted to move on and do something on my own. I just didn't know what.

In the summer of 1998, I was in Chennai on a holiday. I had time on my hands. The city already had some excellent cyber cafés unlike Delhi where I lived. I surfed lazily and being a print journalist, was fascinated that the written word could be transmitted thousands of kilometres without the cost of paper. It was a revolutionary idea to grasp at the time. I suddenly knew what I wanted to do.

Being familiar with advertising and marketing, and the messy retail scenario, I wanted to set up a product comparison site for large ticket items. A friend, Ashok Mehta, who knew better, questioned the wisdom of starting a business-to-consumer (B2C) site when India had only 1.1 lakh internet connections. Why didn't I set up an advertising and marketing site instead? By then I was raring to go with the product comparison site and was upset with Ashok for pointing out the obvious: that with few Indians online, a B2C site was doomed.

We were desperately short of money. It was so bad that when two of my ex-colleagues from A&M, Swati Roy and N Shatrujeet, joined me, we had nowhere to sit. For the first six weeks, I continued working out of Ashok's office, Swati from her home – as for Shatrujeet, we hired a desk for him at a local cyber café!

In August 1999 we finally moved into our own 'office' – a 250-sq ft garage in New Delhi, with a bright blue metal door (that's the picture you see here). agencyfaqs! went live on September 28 that year. Those were frantic times. I, a careful, middle class type, was borrowing money from anyone who would lend. We never had money for more than a couple of weeks and hence the urgency to cram in as much as we could into every day before the cash ran out. Anurag (Dixit), S Srinivasan, Prasanna (Singh), Alokananda (Chakraborty) joined in quick succession until there was no space to move in the garage. Even today, 10 years later, I am dazzled by my reckless self-confidence – and ignorance. I was in the midst of a serious personal crisis. I had no idea where the money was going to come from. I had never heard of a creature called the venture capitalist (there were none in India then). On a visit to Bangalore a couple of months later, a friend, Sriram Srinivasan (a former president of Madura Garments who later set up Indus League Clothing) got me in touch with some online types. For the first time, I had a sense of our worth.

I persuaded a couple of angel investors to come on board and we moved into a larger office and hired more people. Sandeep came on fulltime in the middle of 2000 and soon after, we managed – in spite of the dotcom crash – to raise money from a venture fund by August 2000.

It was an uncharted land. The spectacular American dotcom crash had taken place and there was nowhere to learn from. Large Indian online ventures were sinking all around us too. It was a scary time and we worked in a state of feverish excitement. We knew we were creating something special.

We took a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, we tried to create a B2B website focussed on advertising. Unsure of whether media advertising would flow – media publishers were an impoverished bunch – we also tried to set up online-based services and research products.

Some of the stuff was clever but ahead of its time – for example, an attempt to create a database of hoardings wouldn't work because the media owners, many of whom didn't use email, refused to go online. We also created a terrific online service, Cirrus, which monitored the media coverage of corporates – we finally sold it because we decided to focus on the media part of our business.

Advertising began to pick pace but it was still a close race to safety. In January 2003, when we broke even for the first time, we had money left for only about six weeks. With the business under control, Sandeep quit working fulltime with us to return to Mudra (though he continues to be a shareholder and a director).

It was a slow climb until 2005 when investment began to flow into all forms of media. Publishers had the money and the ambition to move out of their traditional areas and this helped our website. A remarkable aspect often overlooked is that afaqs! creates content that is paid for by online advertising – unlike most other news-based websites worldwide which are subsidised by their print or TV versions.

Until last year, when we were hit like just everybody else, the company has consistently grown rapidly, at about 50 per cent year on year. afaqs! got a print stablemate in The Brand Reporter in May 2004. We went on to the ground (2007) with events and then on to the phone with a mobile site (2009).

In 2008, we finally admitted that agencyfaqs! had been overtaken by changes in marketing communications. When it was launched in 1999, the site focussed on advertising because the media scene was placid. Over time, however, our coverage of media inadvertently increased. And since we wanted to cover the whole of marketing communications – the message as well as the medium – we changed the name to afaqs!

I must step back to mention September 2006 because it says something about the team we have. A major fire broke out in office – at night, thankfully. That coupled with the sealing drive by the local authorities in Delhi, rendered us officeless. For two months we ran the business from across five locations in Delhi. But guess what? The site was updated every single day, the magazine came out in time – and we even booked more revenue than we ever had! Because we had – still have – a cheerful young team, they took everything in their stride and treated the whole thing as an extended joke.

We'd been getting an ABC Electronic audit done from the UK for the last couple of years since there is no local agency to do it. Last year, we became the largest site in our space anywhere in the world. It was a good feeling.

Business apart, what has afaqs! achieved? The answer came to me clearly about two years ago when Kersy Katrak, an icon of advertising from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, died. Stung that few today seemed to have heard of him, Anand Halve (of Chlorophyll) wrote a superb, emotional piece about the man’s greatness. We were flooded with mail.

Kersy was forgotten because media in those days did not cover marketing communications. There was no record of him, except in the minds of those who knew him.

Journalism has been described as quick history. By recording the daily triumphs and failures in the business in front of more than two lakh unique visitors each month, afaqs! has created a community – and ensured that today’s heroes won’t be easily forgotten.

We now have a 6,000 sq ft head office in Noida with a large branch office in Mumbai and a smaller one in Bengaluru. By concentrating on just one space over 10 years, we have learnt a lot about creating content and selling ad space online, about publishing a magazine, organising events and a lot else besides, including ethical conduct in business. Beginning October 2009, we are using our experience to push into new B2B verticals – first off is a telecom site, Telecom Yatra. And we are doing something unusual: we are going to use afaqs! as an umbrella brand even as each of the new portals develops its own identity. If all goes well, you will see two more B2B verticals under the afaqs! name in 2010. I hope we will do it with the same degree of fairness that we have tried to exercise so far.

As you can see, I continue to be optimistic about the future. So, maybe the last thing I should tell you about entrepreneurs is that they never change: they may get older but not much wiser. They continue to believe that tomorrow will be a better day than today. I certainly do.