Strategy Roadmap for Online Directory And Listing Portals

Back in 2013, Vikas from IndiaAClick met us in Pune. He had launched a business listing website couple of years prior to that and was managing its growth through his bootstrapped company. His team was building the website, developing content and using SEO to promote the website with the following objectives:

Build traffic to the portal through SEO, Social and digital promotion

• Use this traction to attract advertisers to buy ad space or become paid subscribers.
• Help advertisers generate relevant leads for their business
• Continually grow the subscriber base year on year

Sounds like a neat plan?

He was expecting to break even in 2 years and start generating profits after that period with a paid user base of around 5000.

The problem? – some key elements of his vision were either missed out or overlooked or ignored. Competition, Technology Disruption and Market Adaptation based on these changes were severely underestimated or not planned. Hence, he was leaking money on keeping the website up, promotion and worst of all – poor conversions for paid services.

We created a 3 POINT plan for him:

A. CLARITY: ZYT undertook a 360 degree review of his business model, the market dynamics (past, present and future 3 years), technology and online user behavior. e.g. one of our analysis showed that would take seven times his estimated cost and time to develop a customer base of 5000 subscribers! Forget break even, it was a back breaking.

B. STAGED GROWTH: Since, he was bootstrapping finances, scaling up real quick was out of question. We planned a 3 stage plan so that business would sustain as well as grow organically but steadily to a point when a JUMP could be taken.

C. THE JUMP: This was the inorganic growth stage when certain metrics and milestones were hit. At this point, investments would be brought in to give in the desired thrust.

Currently, in Stage B, we’re happy they are already looking to pre-pone the estimated JUMP by almost 6 month. That’s awesome!