Dare,
Dinesh Agarwal, Founder and CEO of IndiaMART shared his success story at the TES 2011.
Dinesh Aggarwal hails from a small town at the Nepal border. An engineer from HBTI, Kanpur, found his way to glory through entrepreneurship. Having worked with, CMC Limited and HCL America Inc. He realized that internet has more information to offer in an informative and communicative way than the libraries in America.
Well, it was then Mr. Dinesh conceived the idea of starting a dotcom company. The idea could obviously not bring him the results. That was when Mr. Dinesh Started IndiaMART and made a few hard choices, though he was still making his way in, he played safe and soft.
His team of four in 1996 is now nearly 70 offices with over three thousand employees across his offices, is where the man stands tall and strong.
According to him the strategy to go big and global was to start marking his territories, and they were small towns. His target was to make sure that the small market which is dependent on external support gets more fuel to grow. IndiaMart would porvide that support and he could ride on the goodwill generated thus and increase his own mileage. At the same time Dinesh did want to lose the larger market, thus he gradually forayed into cities and the metros.
There were problems as usual and obviously demanded extra attention. The nightmare was not only how to make people use the website and make profits, it was also the number of Internet connections in India at the time he started wich was too sparse.
In 1999 the Indian dotcom industry was trying to make its mark most and most dotcom companies were shutting shop. IndiaMART, however, was making profits.
IndiaMart was growing at the rate Mr. Dinesh deemed right. Dinesh was happy making 50 per cent annually and not 200 per cent. His principle was it is better to grow at the pace which you can sustain and instead of makign 200 per cent one year and then slowing down. Well, he is still growing and is today one of the largest online marketplaces in the world for global buyers. Definitely remarkable.