How did I grow 200 times with almost zero marketing budget

It was Jan 2013 when I took the first goal for my team. Below is a team picture of 2013.It was a one-man team back then — me.

The goal was to get 1,500 internships over next 10 weeks. I had made graph on a chart paper and put it in front of my sitting spot (though I don’t have an actual picture, the graph looked something like the picture below). And I was so keen that every week I would mark the actual number on the chart paper — only to be disappointed.

The result at the end of 10 weeks was very disappointing. I knew this all along from the progress, so it wasn’t a big surprise. But it was very disappointing, nonetheless. I had managed to get 253 internships only! That is 25 internships per week.Today this number is about 5500 internships per week — more than 200 times than the number I had achieved back in 2013.

Today this number is about 5500 internships in a week — over 200 times higher than the number I achieved back in 2013.

Let’s look at the growth picture below.

What happened — what made us grow more than 200 times in less than 6 years? And what’s more interesting that I hardly spent any money to make it happen.We primarily did three things — provided an awesome customer service, we hustled (a lot), and we innovated.

We ensured that we provide a great customer service — This is one thing that has helped us greatly. Majority of our initial users came because someone or other had referred Internshala to them. What makes users to talk about our service?

1. Fast service— Every internship that is posted on Internshala is subjected to a manual check; to ensure the credibility of new employers & to ensure that no important information is missing in the internship post.

Earlier employers had to wait for 48 hrs to get their internship approved. We brought this time down to 4 hours. We have even taken the next leap — 35% of the internships are approved instantly, without any waiting time. We’re working to improve this number to 50% by the end of this year.

1. Resolving email queries within 4 hours — Earlier we took 24 hours to respond to queries. We decided that let’s do it as soon as possible. Give the volume of queries, 4 hours came out to be a viable time. What next — we’re building a chatbot to resolve the queries instantly. We’re already in experiment phase & have made quite some progress.
2. Taking care of smallest things — We send template offer-letter, template certificate with employers so that they won’t have create one from scratch; they can just edit and use.

We (gradually) made our product awesome — When we first launched our website, it was (obviously) not a great product— in retrospect I think the page design & flow were very bad. We realised that there was huge headroom for improvement –

1. Visitors to registration ratio was poor
2. There were drops at every transition (registration to verification, verification to profile completion, and so on & so forth)
3. The page speed was not up-to the mark
4. It was not very smooth on mobile (this is very important when you’re receiving a significant traffic through mobile devices)
5. Messages & content were very technical

We picked one problem at a time & fixed. This helped a lot in converting the people who were coming the platform & improved the numbers (and experience) significantly.

We were always hustling — We majorly focused on two channels— SEO (search engine optimisation) & email campaigns. And a little bit of paid marketing channels— Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Adwords & banner ads on relevant platforms.

Through email campaigns, we reach out to start-up founders, HR professionals, professors, politicians, government officials, ministers & MPs & MLAs, freelancers, and almost everyone who could hire intern.

1. We did a LOT of email campaigns — And this a major contributor in creating an awareness about the platform. Where did we get the data from? Here are some hacks we used – we hired freelancers to crawl data(there are multiple avenues; you just to look harder); we build automated crawler to crawl data; we partnered with other star-ups on a pro-bono basis. We also did many split tests to identify the best content, and this worked for us ??
2. Let me talk about SEO — there were a set of keywords which we had zeroed in (you can use Google Webmasters for this & you can also get some sense from Google Trends — the trends shown are relative & hence not very much helpful; but better than nothing). All the keywords we wanted to rank for, we started ranking at the top (in India; and we were doing well globally also!).

We wanted to discover more keywords for which we could optimise the page. That’s where the Google Adwords idea kicked in — we intuitively made a list of keyword & ran campaign to understand their search volume. Guess what? we did spend some money without much of a success. We paused this activity.

3. Paid campaigns — Since I had some money (in fact a good deal of money) at my disposal, I tried many paid avenues. But I was always very prudent & analytical in my approach to spend money on acquisition. I tried Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, & Google Adwords. I had best ROI with Google Adwords and everything else was really very bad.

Since we had established that email campaigns worked best for us, we found vendors (HR forums, start-up e-magazines, etc) for paid email campaigns. And it did work well for us. We continued this for some time (until vendors raised their prices & ROI stopped making much sense).

Even though I got some registrations from these adverts, a very small percentage of those registrations converted into internship opportunities. I am glad that I realized this fast & decided not to throw away good money after bad acquisitions!

We kept innovating — Below are some innovating brand campaigns we did (and received ovation for that) –

Innovative brand campaigns have helped us take the credibility of the brand to a next level.

1. Internship for Supermoms — We launched this in 2016 on Mother’s Day to help mothers who had taken a career break restart their careers. Guess what? Not only many big brands (FedEx, Godrej, Directi, etc) participated & agreed to take mothers as interns, many media houses covered this story.
2. Online Summer Internship Fair — Another campaign that we launched in 2016. This campaign brings summer internship opportunities with respected brands for students. This has become flagship event where over 2 lacs students participate every year.
3. Intern with Icon — Where we bring internship opportunities with iconic people such as PT Usha, Abhinav Bindra, Amitabh Kant and so on. This also gets us huge media coverage. This was also launched in 2016.
4. India’s Best startup Internships — Another very innovative campaign that we came up with in 2018. We partner (now without much of a hassle) with startup ecosystem partners (such as AWS, AICTE, Kerala Startup Mission, etc) to identify the startups with best internships & recognize them.

This is my team in 2019 :)

Allama Iqbal says —” Junbish se hai zindagi jahan ki, yeh hai rashme qadeem yaha ki; chalne waale nikal gaye, jo thahre jara kuchal gaye”.

This means, “In movement, dwells the life & progress, and this has been the tradition of the universe since eternity. Those who kept moving progressed; those who didn’t, demised!” :)