Sulekha: Could have been an Indian FB-Reddit-Twitter but ended up as a pale Indian Craigslist

I was watching one of Rajiv Malhotra's video recently and he happened to mention posting on Sulekha! Believe it or not, once upon a time, people like Rajiv Malhotra and Prof S N Balagangadhara actually posted and argued on Sulekha.com, of all the places in the world!

Long before Facebook, Twitter and Reddit became giant multi-billion websites with millions of users, Sulekha was a magnet for Indians with Internet access (mostly NRIs and techies). It neatly spanned the 3 important functionality people look for on the Internet:

1. Engaging content - this was the original intent with which the website was started. As the name implies, Sulekha = good writing. I think they were trying to be like rediff.com. Somehow, it managed to become a platform where Indian users produced content on their own volition and inspiration. The so-called "web 2.0" was all about user-generated content. Incredibly, Sulekha was one of the pioneers / leaders in this. It had 3 types of content produced by users - original articles and blogs, they posted links to news articles on other sites with a discussion underneath (similar to Reddit) and they had a separate forum / messaging board. All of these were very engaging and hundreds, if not thousands, of people spent hours on the website every day.

2. Engaging people - both positively and negatively. A lot of people get online and get active because of other people that they like, dislike, love or hate. Sulekha had enough of such people for everyone who came visiting. Incredibly, Sulekha is one of the very few, OPEN websites (as opposed to closed networks like FB) which managed to get Indian women to post freely and openly. Except for Twitter, there is no other platform where Indian women engage freely online. I am not counting FB here because it is a closed network where people can choose to not reveal themselves to strangers, or can block strangers who try to engage with them.

3. Portal features - classifieds, paid / unpaid ads, local news, etc.

By mid-2000s, all of the above features were at peak utilization on Sulekha. On the basis of this great foundation, Sulekha could have easily become the predominant platform for Indians, an Indian Facebook or Baidu, a multi-billion dollar company with a billion users. Instead, they squandered it all away. Why did they do so? Two important reasons:

1. They did not fully see the monetary value of their users. They saw this partially, but did not understand it fully. Those were the days before social media really exploded. Sulekha was lucky enough to stumble over the seed of Indian social media. But they did not fully recognize its value.

2. Since the original intent of becoming a forum for good content (I believe they were trying to be another rediff.com) did not work out very well monetarily, they pivoted towards portal features - classifieds, ads, etc. purely for the sake of making some money.

As a result, they ended up as a pale Indian Craigslist, barely competing with many websites and portals that cater to local states / cities in US and other places.

Good summary! Do you think there is an opportunity for V2.0 of Sulekha?

Agree! Sulekha squandered it, despite having a bigger following back then, than any Indian website. FB, Twitter did not exist then.

I don't think Sulekha ever had the vision to grow or simply did not have the people to see the big picture and how to use their membership.

Sulekha kept pushing towards providing local services for members and that's what they have become.

Surprisingly, the brand is still recognized. These days the recognition is more among classifieds, especially for those looking for roommates or tenants. That seems to be the number 1 utility. There is always an opportunity for a revised, relaunch to make it more "social". But the opportunity to make it the no. 1 social network for Indians similar to China's Baidu might be lost forever.

Migration of quality posters to other sites and frequent bitter, profanity laced war of words on the forums might have something to do with it. I first heard of Sulekha in early 2000. I started following forum discussions since 2002. Since 2003-2004, the "wars" started. By about early 2005, the owners started focusing on the revenue generating Classifieds and left the garbage filled forums to rot. The (brief) rise of Orkut probably nudged out more users, and MySpace was a star for a little while as well. Through all these years, a few faithful continued to visit CH. After the thread killing spree in 2010 due to a bug which Sulekha didn't bother to fix, the forumotion CH was created where a few(and becoming fewer) faithful still lurk, like a bunch of quarantined zombies.