Everyone looks up to the owner of IndiaMART as the Ideal Businessman from India owning the biggest B2B Marketplace having a revenue of $2 billion (Rs. 225 Crore). Do you know that Dinesh Agarwal whose company Indiamart wrapped Delhi Metro with its banners once worked with Indian Railways to oversee the computerized reservations system of the New Delhi Railway Station.
There has been ups and down, dot-com bust, market crash, but with a clear Goal in his mind, hard work and dedication, he succeeded in executing things in the right manner.
Never Give Up
IndiaMART was founded in 1996, a time when internet did not have many users. Many in India didn’t even have an internet connection at that time, and Dinesh Agarwal made a B2B Market place, even before the world’s largest b2b Market place, Alibaba got registered. He has been risk taker and visionary, a must trait for any entrepreneur.
During his early days he himself used to write the names and addresses of small businesses from his apartment in East Delhi. He himself went to the Post Office to deposit huge bundles of envelopes in order to get the contact details of business firms across India to list them on IndiaMART. He sent letters to at least half a million businesses.
His website did not have much traffic initially since having a computer and internet connection was a luxury. He made efforts to convince businessmen to get registered on his portal during those days when internet used to be pretty slow, mostly dial up with 56 Kbps. He used to stand up in front of Pragati Maidan in New Delhi for getting forms filled by everyone who came there and created their web pages on IndiaMart.
He believed that internet was going to be the primary source of communication in the future and would connect the whole world and make life easy. He was in US when he first used the internet and was fascinated, as finding anything got easy with Internet. It is then he planned about doing something related to software and internet in India.
He came from a traditional business family and knew that small and medium enterprises have a significant market share in all terms from generating employment to manufacturing goods. Hence he thought of connecting them in an online business directory. IndiaMart started as a listing site and then evolved into a business supply store. During 1997-1998, he succeeded in getting 100 paying clients on board.
Surviving Market Downturn
His company was among one of the few survivors that survived market downturns. After the 9/11 attacks, the global market was going through a bad phase but Dinesh did not fire any employee, he instead took steps like cost cutting and delaying salary hikes till things back to normal.
Tolexo and ABCPaymemts
Dinesh Agarwal did not stop at IndiaMart; he started an online Payment Gateway named ABCPayments.com in 2004 and Tolexo.com, an eCommerce website for industry equipment in 2014.
His company IndiaMART is targeting a revenue of 20 billion by 2020. Today the company has more than 100,000 paying customers and 2.2 million suppliers on its platform with 55 offices and more than 2400 employees scattered across 100 cities.
All this would not have been possible if he hadn’t taken the first step, he implemented his ideas and never lost focus, believing that it will happen without worrying how it’s going to, since then he never looked back.
Ikrant Kumar Bhatia is a Digital Marketing Enthusiast and is passionate about becoming an Entrepreneur. He is currently working as an Internet Marketer and planning to come up with his own Startup.