womenZweb.com - that is where it all started

The Story

It is almost two years now, four of us were sitting in a room and just as anyone else from our generation, we were thinking how we could make our million.

After brainstorming for days, rejecting several ideas, we came to conclusion that a lot of women in India were now going online these days and there was no real site that addressed this segment's needs. We were looking at the age group of 18 - 50. The idea was simple - "Give women in India a chance to express themselves online". Thus was born www.womenzweb.com in concept. I like to call wZw for short.

Around the same time  my friend and classmate visited us in Hyderabad (a city in South India). He introduced me to Joomla. Before, I knew I was hooked on to it. It made creating web-sites so easy that the first version of wZw was born in 7 days. It changed multiple times till it reached its current form. Most of these changes were around look and feel.

The Idea

The idea was simple and  great. Provide a platform of tools and infrastructure to allow women to express online. They could contribute their articles, recipes, travelogues, short stories and any "grand ma" solutions to common problems other women face. A part of it was also to let small businesses run by women be able to advertise / sell online. The site was built to target women of Indian origin but could be leveraged by any one really. The idea was easily very powerful, just a few months after wZw went online, one of the biggest channels in Indian television launched a similar site www.indiwo.com.

The next step in the idea was to tie up with big companies in India to sponsor contests, campaigns on the site. We had started early dialogues and loads of companies showed a lot of interest as they were beginning to realize the potential of Internet and the increasing role of women online.

Did the idea succeed?

As I said the idea was powerful, over the last year, a few more sites have come up in the same space. Even yahoo recently launched a site for women shine.yahoo.com. However, wZw could have been way more successful. I did not invest enough to seed the site with articles from professional women. The clear value add that wZw has over any other site in the same space is the ability for women to contribute. Mostly, only forums allow women to contribute on other sites but wZw had more avenues.

However, the right balance could be to have a mix of both. This is the reason why some more investments in wZw could have let it down the path of success. I was the only one working on the site.

What did I learn from my first experience?

The site is still a success in many other ways. This was my first attempt at building a site and I enjoyed the learning involved. The pearls of wisdom I gathered from this are invaluable. I now have all the technology / infrastructure to start any new site in a jiffy. I made www.vamindustries.com (my dad's business), www.vishalsood.com using the same infrastructure.