PaGaLGuY.com is an Indian educational website and social network for management students and B-school aspirants in India.
As an MBA aspirant in 2002, Allwin Agnel found that the only online discussion forums available for MBA aspirants like him were Sify forum and Yahoo groups. Allwin did not find the Sify forum user-friendly with its limited utilities and the Yahoo group, Allwin observed, loaded its users with massive amounts of content as the number of participants grew. Faced with these short-comings, Allwin decided to build a more usable online forum on pagalguy.com, a site he owned. “Pagal-Guy” is a Hindi-English phrase meaning crazy-guy – the name stems from a popular Hindi phrase “Pagal hai kya?” (Are you crazy?) – used on anyone who attempts to achieve the impossible. Attempting to secure admission to the limited seats in the premier business schools in India through multiple attempts in the face of high odds is seen by many as a crazy endeavor. Allwin found this the perfect name for a site that gets the attention of motivated aspirants. Users of PaGaLGuY are called puys.
The first post on PaGaLGuY forum was made on September 2, 2002 by Allwin himself. The forum had topical threads that allowed MBA aspirants to read only what was relevant for them. The initial users were Allwin’s friends, but as the word spread about this useful forum, the registrations grew. Allwin and his friends provided initial publicity through word of mouth and on the Sify forums – a form of ‘viral marketing’. Within twenty-two days the forum had exceeded thousand posts and by February 2003 it had over fifteen hundred registered users and had outgrown the capacity on the web-server. Allwin invested his personal funds to buy higher capacity servers and cover maintenance costs to keep the forum going. To avoid quality degradation by spammers, the forum was initially not made public and new users had to know the exact address of the site to access it. Traffic grew rapidly from 1.8 GB data per month during April 2003 to 1 GB data per day in February 2004.
Till 2006, the forum and the website was funded entirely by Allwin and relied on chosen volunteers to moderate the discussions. There were no employees and minor investments were made by Allwin to improve the design and functionality, with features like file uploads and chat systems for users. Initially he made no attempt to commercialize the site. In 2006, as the market leader with the highest traffic in a fastgrowing segment, the site had turned monetizable. Allwin struck online partnership deals with college festivals, giving them banner space on the portal in return for publicity on campus. From 2006 to 2008,banner advertisements were the primary source of revenue for PaGaLGuY. Most advertisements were from B-Schools, coaching institutes or youth brands that wanted to reach the youth audience on.The site soon became the most preferred medium for publicizing major business schools events. The popularity of the site ensured enough banner views and click-through to cover the cost of the servers and their maintenance. While the rate per page view remained relatively flat over the years, total revenues escalated as more users saw more pages and spent more time on the site.
When Allwin secured admission to Wharton in 2006, he had to find a team to take charge of the forum in India. This led to the formal registration of the firm and the first two employees to join in 2006 were Rohit Awasthi and Apurv Pandit – both active users of PaGaLGuY– who had personal aspirations to create a unique organization culture that they would enjoy working in. They also had the challenge to lead it the two year long absence of the founder Allwin from Mumbai. Rohit and Apurv soon recruited more employees from college campuses in Mumbai and Pune. The PaGaLGuY office space grew from a part of an office in south Mumbai that is owned by Allwin’s father, to the entire office area that is now known as PaGaLGuY Headquarters. On his graduation from Wharton, Allwin returned in July 2008 to take a full-time role at Mumbai. In 2008, PaGaLGuY rejuvenated its marketing efforts by targeting the mock test centers of various coaching institutes. Volunteers among users were sent PaGaLGuY banners to display at a prominent place at their test centre every Sunday. The volunteers were not paid, but received the ‘Volunteer’ flag on their usernames on the forum. This publicity to the right user segment along with word-of-mouth led to increased registrations, with phenomenal growth seen during 2007-2008. In 2011 PaGaLGuY has created the world’s first crowd-ranked business school ranking.
