Share Promote and Profit : Interview with Ramesh of Best Of Indya

This interview is with Ramesh, creator of Best of Indya.com, a social bookmarking site, who tells us about his experiences with starting the website.

It has been just two months since it started, but the site is now loaded with features. He says he owes the surge of traffic on the site to Best Of Indya’s philosophy of “Share Promote and Profit”. There is also a Hindi Section coming soon. Do read on to find some great insight on his ideas.

What was the idea behind starting BestOfIndya?

I have been an avid “geek news” reader since the best days of Slashdot and started using digg immediately after the website went public. I like the idea of users moderating the news articles and deciding what is worthy of being the top news article. Basically “User Moderation” of content is the basic idea behind BestOfIndya.

Can you give us some idea about yourself and how you started BestOfIndya? Are you funded?

I am in the software industry for a while, love programming and try to keep myself current with ever-changing technologies. Recently I started working on a project using open source technologies and came across ‘Pligg’ which is Content Management System suitable for Social Bookmarking Websites. It fascinated me and I decided to start BestOfIndya. What started as a fun learning project took the shape of a serious, informative and the present BestOfIndya. Initially it was a one man effort but due to ever-growing support from users and contributors, recently I have partnered with a couple of friends to increase the pace to bring more features to the user community.

Could you explain again in a few lines, about what does BestOfIndya do?

BestOfIndya is a social bookmarking site facilitates information sharing among users. BestOfIndya allows user to submit an article or link to article from the web that will be reviewed by other users and will be promoted, based on popularity. Users vote and decide which article bags the top spot. When the story is first submitted to BestOfIndya, it will immediately appear in Upcoming News where other users can find and if they like it Vote for it. As soon as the story receives enough votes it will appear in Published News.

BestOfIndya seems to getting a lot of traffic already. Considering it was started in early March. How have you managed to make your site get so much attention?

I have managed to update and add new features regularly to make BestOfIndya feature-rich and user friendly to attract both technology savvy and casual web surfers alike. Success of such Social Bookmarking sites mainly depends on contributing users. To thank contributors BestOfIndya has recently introduced ‘Share, Promote and Profit’ theme that rewards users for participating in BestOfIndya.

What are your plans and expectations from BestOfIndya?

Objective of the site is to be feature rich while remaining family friendly and provide useful information to users of all age groups. I expect BestOfIndya to be one stop site on the web for all India related information.

What cool features can we expect in BestOfIndya by June 2008? Do you think it would last till 2012?

Since the launch of the site I have already added “News Dashboard” and partnered with BlogOSphere to bring “RSS aggregator” to BestOfIndya users. To support Hindi readers and take advantage of fast growing Hindi content on the web, new category for Hindi Stories is also added recently on BestOfIndya. Soon I am planning to release new software for the site that will allow users to contribute articles, videos and reviews in various categories and sub-categories. This is just the beginning and BestOfIndya is working on adding more useful features on the site in the days ahead.

With support of my elite users and contributors I don’t see why not!

Who are the major competitors of BestOfIndya, and how do you think you are working towards being better than them?

BestOfIndya is just a 2 month old baby and there are quite a few similar well established sites around. BestOfIndya knows very well that the only way to get ahead of competition is by being the best and attracting the best contributors to the site. We plan to continuously enhance user experience on BestOfIndya by providing more and more features through in house development and through partnerships. BestOfIndya will always be feature rich while remaining family friendly and provide useful information to users of all age groups.

What are the major issues that you have faced since you started work on BestOfIndya? Has it been worth it?

Fortunately so far it has been a smooth ride. Without a doubt it has been fun filled learning experience.

Could you give us some time lines, about when you got the idea, and how long did it take you to implement this site.

I thought about setting up my site in early March. Site went public on March 31st. Since I had some experience working on PHP, HTML and AJAX it didn’t take too much time to get going.

What do you think about the entrepreneurs in India and about the innovation happening in the country?

I think this is the best time ever for entrepreneurs in India. I think currently India is at a fascinating juncture. India missed earlier 90′s internet boom. But this time India has same chance as any other country if not better.

Could you tell us about one incident when it seemed that everything was going down. And how did you get back?

Luckily so far it has been fun filled ride.

When and how would you decide to let go of BestOfIndya? As in how should one decide that their work is over, and one needs to move to something new?

I really haven’t thought about that far ahead and all I can think for near future is to better up my site.

Which are the best Indian Internet Companies that you have used or heard about?

I used to spend lot of my spare time web surfing before I got into developing BestOfIndya. I have used and seen Rediff, IndianPad, ibibo and many other companies grow from incubation to full fledged thriving web companies that they are today

Finally, what do you think about Gyaan Sutra and Ploterati? And I would love to hear suggestions on how to improve it.

I appreciate the great work you are doing at Gyaan Sutra and Ploterati. Ploterati is really a nice concept and I am looking forward to its July release.