Sheo Narayan, Founder, DotNet Funda.com

The fundamentals of .NET

It was a dream turned into reality for Sheo Narayan to start the organization called DotNetFunda.com. Sheo himself is a techie in the field of IT since 2001. YourStory had a conversation with this techie where he told us about his entrepreneurial aspirations and his dream company DotNetFunda.comWhat is IT Funda?

DotNetFunda.Com is a popular website for online tutorials and guide for latest Microsoft® technologies aimed for beginners and intermediate level professionals. DotNetFunda.com offers articles on diverse areas of SDLC. This typically includes, software development, tutorials (including video tutorials), Career Advice, interview questions, code snippets and discussion forum. This site is completely dedicated to project articles and other artifacts on the Microsoft’s cutting edge technologies. Our Career Advice section has 4 honorary panel members and they are Microsoft MVP, PMP, ITIL certified professionals with their overall experience of more than 50 years in IT industry.What is your target market?

Our scope of the organization is limited to e-learning. On an average we have 13, 000 people across the globe consuming its services on daily basis. Students, Software professionals, new comers to the IT industry across the globe are our target audience. We help beginners to become intermediate level professionals and help intermediate level professionals to become an expert. By following our different sections regularly, we hope a person will soon become one of the 'Most Valuable' professional and start shining in his/her career.What makes you different from others?

We maintain high quality standards on all currently supported aspects. We have an approval mechanism for articles and Interview sections where our highly qualified editors scrutinize the content to ensure that only standard contents are being published on the website.

Behind the scenes, we care and feel all the hard work put forth by our valueable memebers in submitting content on the website and we sincerely respect and thank for all the efforts. We discourage duplicate contents that are published on multiple websites. Upon request, we publish articles already available on a different website provided the articles are qualitative. We often get such requests and acknowledge with a positive note. We believe in learning, helping and earning. That’s why we always encourage our visitors, members to learn, help and earn in the form of monthly winners program. Time to time, we also organize competitions among the members to author articles and win attractive gifts. Typical gifts at the moment include Laptops, iPods, Mobile phones etc.

Why entrepreneurship?

Actually I still do 9-5 and even more and this is my part time job as a passion that I do in weekends and before and after working hours. I am not the legal owner of this but my wife (Dr. Sunita Narayan) is, I assist her in maintaining it. I admit that there are pros and cons travelling on two boats at the same time.

Taking of pros and cons, what was the major hurdle you came across?

Retaining good people is the biggest challenge and I think this is not only for me but for every software company now. There could be many ways to overcome these challenges and I am figuring out slowly how to do it and hopefully, would be able to overcome it very soon as I do not want to cheat people by alluring and getting only my work done. I want to have a mutually beneficial, transparent and long term relationship and I understand that it’s difficult to find like minded people.

Any mistakes so far?

Trusting everyone just after few hours or minutes of talk and disclosing my plans, business ideas is the biggest mistake I made.

What has been the growth trajectory for DotNetFunda.Com so far?

In terms of visitors we have grown in many folds in the past 3 years.In a typical month (May 2010) we have around 2, 87, 277 visits from across 188 different countries and territories across the globe. ; however, in terms of branches and employees we did not had an opportunity to increase the count just because we have been comfortable enough to get the jobs done with whatever we have at hand today.

What are your future plans?

Our motto is to help the community by hosting qualitative, informative and interesting articles. Having averred that, we also strive to publish articles on real time problem solving techniques which we hope to be a value addition. We are also targeting 15,000 visits per day in the near future and increase the credibility of the website among all levels of development engineers. We are soon going to launch our website www.itfunda.com that will be an online education marketplace where people can buy and sell their educational materials.

Please tell us about your achievements and recognitions.

Developing, Hosting and maintaing the site single handedly. After much hard work, achieving a throttled hit rate of 13,000 visitors within a short span of time. I will also would like to emphasize that it was achieved with a part time effort. Many a times our articles have been selected as “Articles of the Day” in Microsoft official website www.asp.net and www.windowsclient.net websites.

Do you have any advices fr the coming entrepreneurs?

Never trust anybody that does a sweat/emotional/sentimental talks. Dont fall fare people who try to entertain something at ease which is impossible without hard work. They might be someone that would steal your ideas, plans and other confidentialities. Sometimes listen to your heart instead of mind, that would caution that something bad is going to happen.

YourStory wishes Sheo Narayan and DotNetFunda.com all the very best for their future.