Aglasem.com: A ‘One-Stop Student Help’ Web Portal
Aglasem aims to be the friend, philosopher and guide for your student life and even beyond. What started with the simple motive of helping the student community has grown much bigger than that. Aglasem provides information, updates, guidance, interaction, exposure; in short everything a student needs to have success delivered at his/her doorstep.Anand Meena, a second year Computer Science student was waiting in the college photocopy shop one day with his seniors. It took them over an hour to get ten-page notes for each one of them. Though most others were pretty used to this waiting by then, a little something struck in these students' minds. A student's plight is best understood by a student himself. So this team of students- Anand Meena, Anwesha Bose and Sanjay Meena, from Delhi College of Engineering decided to find a good solution; and they did. They used the mightiest tool in today's world, the internet. The idea of Aglasem germinated in their grey cells in January 2009, and they started working on the layout, content and everything else. Within twelve days, they launched "Aglasem.com".
Based in Delhi, Aglasem gives information about Engineering, Medical, Law, and Arts entrance examinations and universities; updates about college events, placements and achievements; has a forum called 'The Indian Fusion' where 100+ authors write on various topics; gives information about career opportunities and higher studies; gives study resources for CBSE students of class 9-12 among other things. Their 'Shop And Downloads' section is where a large number of books and gadgets are made available online on discount with a CoD option; their 'Money' section advices on finance and investment. They are also going to introduce online test series and exclusive study material soon.
Revenue model:
They work completely on the Advertisement model for now. The visitors are not charged anything for viewing or registering. Also, they intend to keep the site user friendly. Everything is done keeping in mind the visitors’ convenience and revenue generation at balance.
“We have so far not approached any venture capitalist and thus initially most of the earning is pumped in as investment. With increase in traffic, we have to upgrade the servers and promotions, plus there is marketing to be taken care of and also the technical team of website developers and content writers who have to be paid. In numbers, we really don’t know how to put it, but for now, we are glad to say that things are going well. Each month, we just keep pushing our goals!” says Co-founder Anwesha Bose.
Until this year, they had kept everything open, i.e each section had its own followers and subscribers. Some sections like 'Admissions' have thousands, some newer sections like 'Money' have in few hundreds of subscriptions. Since Jan 2012, however, they have started registrations on the main website for which they already have 37,000+ users and are upgrading their backend to manage things centrally. “For now, we can state the Google Analytics figure that says Aglasem has over one million visitors monthly. Pretty impressive!” Anwesha chirps.
Currently, they have tie ups with colleges to provide authentic data to students and prospective students. They have also started partnerships with a few companies in the education sector to provide some useful stuff for students at very low rates.
Team and Future Prospects
Aglasem is currently a team of core members, section managers, editors, marketing and student volunteers. The core team is formed by Anand Meena, Anwesha Bose, Sanjay Meena and also dedicated student teams from colleges all over the country, including IITs, NITs and more. The key to success, they believe, lies in the student teams who nurture their technical and management skills in the course of professional work in the company.
The seed was planted with Rs. 3000 only. Being self funded, the revenue earned by the website was pumped into its growth. Also, the team used to design websites and provide online solutions to earn more money for investing in Aglasem.
“The concept is growing and catching up. Now-a-days students trust online information. For example, if the information brochure for IIT JEE exam has been released, instead of reading the big brochure, students prefer to search for information online. With social media gaining such a strong hold, everyone is always online. Also, most of the major exams are going online now so students have one more reason to start studying online too. We see the future to be very bright for Aglasem!” concludes Anwesha.