A list of failed ideas (& closed campaigns)

If we created a museum of failure, exhibiting every failed idea, I feel it would be immensely big. I feel so because I believe a lot of failures lead to only a few successes, if we have courage to keep going on.

Data also suggests that; as per a Fast Company article, 75% of the venture-backed start-ups fail. If you look back, we had many promising start-ups coming up that are no where to be found now — Dazo, PapperTap, Purple Squirrel, and the list goes on. Well, the objective here is not to dissect the problem, analyse and find out the reason of failure — let’s leave that to start-up ‘media’ and ‘pundits’.

I just want to share the stories behined ideas and campaigns that we tried and failed; they greatly outnumber the successful ones! And every failed idea led to good deal of learning or a new idea.

InternConnect — This was a social media for interns — how cute! It was there in the very beginning of Internshala. As difficult as it may be to build a social media platform for a niche audience, the idea was impressive — and perhaps way ahead of its time. The objective of the platform was to connect with a fellow intern (previous interns) in a company/city so that you could find out the relevant details & you are well informed before you join the company or move in to a new city for your internship.

Well, with no revenue source & only person running the company (only Sarvesh was there & a few work from home interns) there are only a few things that you could do. Here is a video made for InternConnect.

EDGE (later Internshala Career Services) — EDGE was a resume review service & our primary source of revenue. We used to charge Rs 499/- per resume review. Initially the entire set up was on blog & Google Spreadsheet — a blog page, a Google form, automated emails (sent using spreadsheet scripts). A full jugaad set up.

We got Vikram (CTO) on team to build this segment & scale it up. He was more inclined to building an online learning platform. So, he started building VTC (Virtual Training Centre; now Internshala Trainings).

Well, we had to find somebody new who would help build EDGE. We hired a new person on team. He came to office; worked on EDGE & changed the name to Internshala Career Services. Next day, his email came that he was joining an MBA program.

Then we got Deepak to lead Internshala Career Services. Deepak worked on this for about 6 months. By then VTC was growing well & we needed somebody to focus on it as Vikram was to lead the tech team. We decided to shut the Internshala Career Services. In retrospect, we think it was a wise decision to make as it was important to focus on one thing & also resume review involved a lot of manual effort & hence was difficult to scale.

InternSaturday- It has been Internshala’s mantra since the day one that everything has to be around interns. This was Internshala’s annual event that we would organize in July (around the time when summer internships get over) in Delhi, inviting students interning in Delhi NCR region to participate. This one-day event was a counselling & talk session where we would invite people from different segments (technology, start-up, unconventional careers, etc.) to interact with students & address their questions.

Though this was hugely popular among students & students loved it — we had students from applying from different states — we have not done it again since 2012. Below is InternSaturday promo video.

We have, however, come up with different offline events:

Internship Day — We do this in partnership with AICTE to recognise colleges with best internship track record.

City Internship Fair — We’re starting this with Jaipur. The idea is to promote the concept of internship among students pursuing non-technical degrees in tier 2 cities.

Internships for Women — This seemed fantastic idea when we first discussed, especially when we looked at the data that how majority of women who take a career break fail to return to work and how Indian workplaces have alarmingly high (higher than the world’s average & highest among the BRICS countries) gender disparity.

We worked on this campaign for about 18 months. Initially, we saw a promising response — the number of women finding an internship in a month on Internshala rose 40 to 250. But then it got stagnant there; didn’t go any higher. We tried many things — community engagement, women ambassadors, contests, celebrity engagement, & different other marketing campaigns.

I have come to believe this problem exists not because of the lack of opportunities; it’s there because of the of the sentiments & beliefs deeply rooted in our society. And government should come up with policies to address this.

We have put the campaign on an autopilot — women can still apply for internships.

Indian (Un)Employed — Unemployment being one of the issues the country is grappling with, it made a lot of sense to 'do something*’.

We launched this campaign in 2017 with a goal to help 50,000 students find a pre-placement offer with a company. A big goal. We created a dedicated page & reach out to companies to create internships with pre-placement offers. We partnered with Facebook to help us create an awareness about this campaign. We collected success stories & promoted them among through relevant people through our channels, Facebook India page, and media.

After running this campaign for close to 6 months, we realised that numbers are not encouraging (even though we had tried many new things). And we decided to close the campaign.

Students can still find internships with PPO & apply for them on Internshala.

Some other honourable mentions:

First free ride: Idea was to partner with Uber/Ola & get students their first day to office ride free, to make their internship special. Uber/Ola didn’t find the proposal exciting & declined. And this led to building Intern with Icon.

Intern with Ministers/Chief Ministers: The idea to partner with ministries (and CMOs) & create an internship program at each ministry. We put a lot of effort, but it didn’t happen. However, this led us to build a good relationship with some ministries & CMO, resulting into Government of Maharashtra signing an MoU with Internshala & Government of Andhra Pradesh collaborating with Internshala for several projects ??

Partnership with institutions for their SIPs: We wanted partner with all colleges/institutions running an internship so that we bring all prestigious internships programs at one place. We failed. But we created an awareness about Internshala among professors & scientists who now hire interns/research assistants on Internshala.

International internships:The idea was to create some international internships on the platform. We worked on this for about a year. We did get some success — we started at zero and over time we were able to get 200 internships from international employers. The only issue was that majority of these internships were work from home internships. And the ones that we in-office, there was too much hassle to make the hiring happen because of visa & other legal issues.

Internshala Product Re-imagination: It’s just a bunch of changes that we made in our product to make hiring experience smooth. The whole thing was like a time-travel, but only in a backward direction; it sent us about a year back :D

This setback, though, taught us how go about making an awesome product.

I must stop here as the list is very long & it would take more than one article to cover everything.

*I personally believe in the idea of ‘do something’. I feel it’s always a great place to start :)