Call him the shaadi man, the matchmaker. Now unmarried, he's seriously thinking of settling down. "I am so involved in my businesses that my life revolves around them. Besides, I travel a lot. But now, I'm thinking about marriage and it'll happen soon," he says. Anupam Mittal, founder and chief executive officer, People Interactive, started what is arguably India's most well advertised matrimonial services website, Shaadi.com, after a chance meeting with a matchmaker.
Mittal, 32, heads the Rs 100 crore People Interactive group that owns the matchmaking website, Mauj, a wireless content and services company, Fropper.com, a friendship and networking website, and People Pictures, a film production company.
Mittal recently set up Shaadi Point, a brick and mortar version of the marriage portal, aimed at those who are not internet savvy and to corner a market that is largely dominated by competitors like Bennett,Coleman & Co.
Mittal is currently building a countrywide network of 250 Shaadi Point franchise centres. He also inked a marketing alliance with web portal Yahoo India in September for wider distribution.
Mittal seems to be on a roll but all this didn't happen overnight. It took a number of trials and errors before Mittal found his feet. While in college, he started supplying interior designing accessories to designers.
When that didn't work, he tried working in his father's textile manufacturing business for a couple of years. But finding that it didn't excite him enough, Mittal once again started a new export venture "� exporting shopping bags, cushion covers. The business failed and he lost a lot of money in 1992.
What followed were four years of soul searching when Mittal travelled a lot trying to figure out what to do. Most of this was spent in the US doing small odd jobs. But he soon realised that to get anywhere at all, he needed to expand his horizon.
Mittal enrolled for an MBA in operations and strategic management at Boston College, USA in 1994. Again after completing the course, he spent a good part of the year sending out several hundred copies of his resumes and hunting for a job, without success.
The turning point came when Microstrategy, the US-based information technology (IT) firm, hired him. Drawing on what he learned there, Mittal started his own company, Satyanet Solutions, to capitalise on the IT and internet boom.
His first office was opposite a cow shed in a by-lane of Mumbai's Chira Bazaar and his first deal was a web development project for Tajonline.com for a grand Rs 10,000. Today, People Interactive holds over 25 per cent of the dot com company's equity.
Later, a meeting with a matchmaker "� the kind who walk around with biodatas "� set him thinking. Mittal decided to put biodatas on the internet and called it Sagaai.com.
In 2000, he redesigned the portal and bought a new domain, Shaadi.com. The portal has over two million registered users, around 70 per cent of them from India and the remaining 30 per cent from across the globe.
While the company clocked over 100 per cent growth last year, Mittal is worried about finding the right people. "While we talk about India being the IT super power, it is mighty hard to get the skills and talent needed to compete globally with say companies like the US-based $ 300 billion Match.com, the dating site owned by Interactive Corp. Simply doing a course at NIIT doesn't help. A lot of time we are running six months behind schedule."
He denies that he's divesting his stake in a public issue, saying that the promoters have enough capital to fund current requirements. "We are raising Rs 10-20 crores for People Pictures but there's no public issue in the pipeline," he says. What's in the pipeline is, of course, a shaadi.
