Lessons from PagalGuy

I first learned about pagalguy.com from my friend Amit. Who told me that he finds it very helpful and gets lots of information easily, obtaining which otherwise can be tedious. Amit later went to a prestigious school. So, I can infer pagalguy did played some role in his life. And that says a lot about a website's utility.

I got opportunity to meet PagalGuy's founder Alwyn at Startup Saturday (will blog about it in a separate post). Following are some key points I noted from his speech.

• Started as a hobby
  
• Started cause he couldn't find any MBA dedicated message board
• Hired first employee in 2006
• Founded in 2002
• Primary revenue source is online advertisements
• Looking for investments for creating more services for current user base
• Have people from prestigious institutes working for them
• ~15 people team, mostly(read all) engineers or have engineering background
  

Growth

• 2002 -> nothing
• 2003 -> 1000 hits
• 2004 -> 10000
• 2005 -> 30000
• Gone small e :) (exponential)
• ...
• 2008 -> 400000 unique visitors per month

And most interesting part.

Why named PagalGuy.com?
Apparently, he just owned it as he uses this name for various online accounts. In a nutshell it is not about how cool your name is. It is about how superior your product is and how well you can sell it.

Later, I had a chat with him. I primarily wanted to know his views on offering stock options to employees. I find it odd that Indian startups have yet to accept offering stocks as norm. I was happy to learn his views on this matter.