Ishan Sodhi, Head - Corporate Relations, HelloIntern.com

With more than 20,000 registered students, this Mumbai-based website has successfully managed to meet the requirements of around 320 SMEs and 50 odd corporate giants like Kimberly Clarke and Deutsche Bank, among others. Surprisingly, unlike other profit-making enterprises, Sodhi’s focuses on generating traffic.

The website sidelined its emphasis on revenue to ensure that viewer ship does not suffer. However, now that the portal has generated a sufficient amount of traffic (around 4,000 page views a day), it’s time focus on the moolah factor; Sodhi plans to launch paid services on the website soon. This would require him to revamp the website entirely and add a host of other features and services and offer discounts.    

“We also plan to scale-up our business operation by going pan India. This would require building a strong network of college partners. So, we are working on that too,” said Sodhi    

It’s rare that a person is fascinated and lured by risks, so when YourStory chanced upon Sodhi, it indeed was a rare encounter. For this young magnate, risk is the means to reap great rewards. He, however, admitted that with new entrepreneurs mushrooming across the country, the risk quotient has shrunk considerably. Most budding entrepreneurs usher in an array of services like publicity, VC, Mentors and Prizes, which make entrepreneurship seem as good as a regular 9-5 job.      

When asked about how trying his journey to success was, Sodhi said, “Challenges were umpteen, but the most threatening was to deal with the lack of skilled personnel. Unlike in the US, the fad for working for a startup is lukewarm in India. The HR crunch is by far the biggest obstacle we faced; we are yet to overcome the hurdle,” Sodhi lamented. 

Funding the initiative was not really a problem since whatever expense was involved was met with the prize money HelloIntern.com won through competitions across India. This in, fact also served as the initial revenue of the enterprise. For Sodhi, the biggest achievement so far is the incorporation of Blue Gen Knowledge Solutions Private Limited, the corporate arm of HelloInter.com. The enterprise has also been recognized for its endeavour and has received coverage from leading newspapers like HT Café and HT Mint and CNBC Young Turks. Sodhi now plans to take his venture to greater heights and aims to make the website the biggest of its kind in India by 2010.

It’s the desire to succeed, attain freedom and fill the gap between employees and interns that drives Sodhi to stay buckled on to his roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship. Even his advice to budding entrepreneurs reflects his passionate for the venture, “Stay hungry. Stay Foolish.”