Generating Business from Heart

How many times in our school days have we been rebuked by parents for watching too many movies? Most of us would actually loose count trying to find the exact number. But would you believe the passion of Agarwal brothers who went all the way to let 'passion and business' actually collude! Feeling shortchanged by the way movie DVDs were disseminated across India, physical and virtual stores alike, the duo decided to step in thus was launched Induna.com in October 2007. Considering that it took 8 to 9 months to develop the website, you can well estimate their eye for detail. The website was developed from scratch by the Salt Lake, Kolkata-based Company 'Indus Net Technologies' and is powered by all Open Source software (MySQL and PHP). One admirable feature of the site is that it is neatly categorized into some 20-odd genre for Hindi and Bangla titles with a fair bit of sprinkling of bestsellers from other popular languages. 'We are very particular and fussy about how we want the website to be, and the team at Indus-Net always delivers on all counts,' pat comes the reply when complimented on the website design. Abhishek Rungta, CEO of Indus Net, adds, 'We focused on keeping things simple and user-friendly, therefore you don't see Flash or JavaScript being used for the site. Google Zeitgeist List 2008 ranked induna.com as the 3rd most searched query from the city of Kolkata.'

The website helped the brother-duo start making profits after 4 months of launch. It features close to 6000 titles. And they keep adding around 400 to 500 titles every month. There are 7500+ artists (actors, actress, directors, singers etc) credited in the website. It boasts of movie listings from all distributors and relies on publicity majorly through word of mouth, forums and blogs.

An innovative offering is the Sailing-Flix program were movies are shipped to people randomly on the premise that the movie shall not stay put with the recipient but keep changing hands. The brothers have partnered with BlueDart for shipping within India and use DHL-Express for shipping outside. They promise a 24 hour delivery which they claim is possible because they actually stock up all DVDs and VCDs before listing them on the site.  The website receives a lot requests from small towns in India. Probably this has to do with the fact that they stock a lot of movies which are not main-stream and also physical stores don't carry titles beyond a limit. The website now gets requests for movies from people of more than 80 countries. They keep going. The sole intention being, to provide a single source of movies for all the movie buffs out there!