This is a very recent development among media housed in India; they have suddenly started realizing that people here are actually earning money by doing a "valid" business on Internet. You can also find lot of bloggers being covered by national newspapers very frequently. I say, this is a very good move because more than anything else it will help in reducing the tabooness of leaving a secure job for doing a startup.
Thanks! I can't thank HN community enough for the guidance and support. I remember doing Ask HN about 1.5 years ago and got great feedback (especially from patio11, webwright and others). Now even though we're still bootstrapped; team has grown to 6 (earlier it was me alone). At the time of Ask HN there were 0 users, now we have paying customers including Microsoft, Groupon, Mitsubishi and other big brands. It's been an awesome ride! (Hint: May is also 1 year anniversary of our paid plans and we are planning something very special)
The best thing about our business is that we earn in USD but the expenses here (in India) are less by a factor or so. Hence even without raising VC funding we can afford to hire top talent, let them tackle challenging problems (servers doing 1.6 billion pageviews per month) and pay them really well (at par with Google, Yahoo, etc). Can't wait to see what's in store ahead...
Could you share what was the process like? TOI people contacted you or you contacted them? phone interview? email? Really interested in knowing this. Thanks.
[Edit] I myself was contacted by a national hindi newspaper, but it didn't work out.
Sure, a fellow entrepreneur (Pallav from FusionCharts -- awesome guy, has an interview on Mixergy) connected me to the journalist who had covered them. The journalist called and we then exchanged lot of mails and phone calls. Then he went radio silent and now out of nowhere, we got a story!
Thanks, 1 billion+ impressions are impressive. Would love to hear more about some of the technical challenges you face. Perhaps a blog post sometime on that? :)
Yeah, I think a blog post would be interesting. We scaled from having 1 server to now application spread across 19 servers (most are Apache 2G RAM; 2 varnish caches 4G each; 1 load balancer 4G. We are going to add one more load balancer soon.)
I'm not the parent, but I do find it interesting that the title is about being covered, and not what was covered. Updating the HN title to match as "Optimizing Web Biz" would probably get fewer upvotes however.
The most valuable parts of this discussion are Paras' comments about how he was helped out by the HN community... that would make for a great story on its own.
