KEY POINTS:
Anupam Mittal is one of the pioneers of India's Web 2.0. His matrimonial website Shaadi.com has had eight million users in the last decade and captured more than 50 per cent of India's online marriage mart.
He reckons Shaadi.com - shaadi means marriage in Hindi - has been
the online force behind around 800,000 nuptials.
That's quite a feat in a country where arranged marriages are still the norm and parents check out prospective brides and grooms before the actual parties get a look in.
The matchmakers of yesteryear were elderly aunts and uncles with an encyclopaedic knowledge of family and caste links and a wealth of information about which family had a good-looking daughter or a highly qualified son.
But old aunts and uncles can't do the trick for everyone in a rapidly urbanising society.
The hunt for brides and grooms in recent decades has spilled over into the pages of the country's top newspapers, which earn big revenues from their classified matrimonial ads.
Now, however, the newspaper ads are getting tough competition from sites like Shaadi.com.
Mittal, who's a handsome 34-year-old, was an early mover in the wedding stakes.
He started Shaadi back in 1997 when most Indians were only just starting to go online.
But the site was an instant hit for obvious geographical reasons - millions of Indians who live abroad still want traditional weddings for their children but lack the local knowledge.
Today, Shaadi.com has survived the internet bust and has annual revenues of US$40 million ($50.3 million) that are rising rapidly.
But one small catch is that marriage websites don't get enough repeat customers, even when divorce is commonplace. There's also the bigger problem that only a minuscule percentage of Indians go on the web.
If you're an incurable optimist who always sees a cup half-full, you could say that leaves heaps of room for growth.
But Mittal's eager to push up revenues quickly and reach out to people who aren't constantly going surfing in cyberspace.
He has opened 125 Shaadipoint offices around the country and plans to double that in the next 18 months.
The Shaadipoints are, as the name suggests, bricks and mortar offices where the whole family can troop in and meet Shaadi.com match-making executives.
"We want to reach parents who make the decisions and who don't necessarily go on the net," says Mittal.
Mittal himself is a child of the internet era, who spent a decade studying and working in the United States. He still spends several months there annually because a large chunk of Shaadi's revenues comes from North America. But Mittal and several other web entrepreneurs have discovered that the Indian internet market is different from other parts of the world. Because broadband usage is very low and internet penetration tiny, there hasn't been the explosive growth that has taken place elsewhere.
Says Mittal: "If you go by global benchmarks the trick is to offer one site. But internet growth here has been fairly gradual so how do we grow faster?"
So, the group is spreading out in different directions in the quest for multi-bagger growth. Mittal's People Interactive Group has venture capital backing of about US$18 million from Intel Capital, Sequoia India and Westbridge Capital Partners for different projects.
The most promising new venture is Mauj, which sells value-added services like ring-tones and wallpaper for mobile users.
With eight million new phone-users each month, this is a hot market that's pulling in good revenues already.
Then, the group is broad-basing its internet muscle. For a start, there's a Facebook lookalike called Fropper.com and a real estate portal called Makaan.com (it means house in Hindi) that's offering house-spotting services in 12 Indian cities.
There's also an astrological site called Astrolife - it is a good fit with the marriage website because many Indians routinely consult astrologers before going ahead with a match.
Fropper hopes to convince users that an Indian social networking site will be more relevant for Indians than international ones like Facebook. And Makaan.com is opening offices in these cities and using the online-offline model that Mittal has perfected at Shaadi.com.
"Real estate advertising is a US$500 million business. If 10 per cent of that goes online it will be big business," says Mittal.
If the internet doesn't deliver fast enough, Mittal's also dipping his toes in the booming Hindi film industry. His new company People Pictures will make two films this year. One, due to start shooting soon, is about "Bikini Killer" Charles Sobhraj, who after stints in Indian and Thai jails is now locked away in Nepal.
The way forward won't be all that easy because competition is heating up in all these sectors. Take a look at another dotcom company, Info Edge, which runs a jobs portal Naukri.com (yes, you guessed it, Naukri means job in Hindi).
Info Edge picked up about US$40 million from its IPO and used some of the cash to buy a matrimonial site called Jeevansathi (life together).
Mittal's desperate for fast growth because he's convinced that only a handful of companies make it big in cyberspace. The internet is actually very consolidated, he says. About 80 per cent of all revenues go to Google, Yahoo and eBay. On the internet, it is winner takes all.
The Shaadi.com founder's goals are clear. He hopes to go public in 2009 if the market's in a receptive mood and he wants to build annual revenues of about US$100 million, not necessarily in that order.
Meanwhile, he's trying new tricks in the online matrimonial game, like video-conferencing for would-be couples. At a more far-fetched level, he's experimenting with some serious maths to achieve an alchemist-like dream of using complex algorithms to figure out if couples will be compatible.
But there should be one warning on the pack - despite knowing all the tricks of the online marriage business Mittal himself is still single.
