Extramarks.com goes live! We get covered too!

If some one was to ask me for Career advise, especially concerning Internet, I would definitely advise one thing - Work for a startup..atleast once in your professional life!

My prior experience in Established companies has also been good enough..but when youwork for a start up where virtually every job lands at your desk..the learning is awesome!

We started working on Extramarks.com 6 months back. With SN moving out to Reuters, I was also quite open to looking out of HT. Met a guy - Rohit Jain who was looking for some one to head an online startup on education..Rohit came across to me as a super intelligent guy! Somehow our chemistry clicked and I ended up joining Extramarks. It was not named like that. A (rare ;-) ) brainwave led me to this name which got universal approval including that of our chairman - Mr. Atul Kulshrestha. Rohit is now the CEO.

We hired a company called Image websolutions which despite many weaknesses, did deliver to us a project with multiple functionalities. Praveen lohani & I created lots of Project Requirement diagrams (PRDs) that made the lives of the tech team quite miserable ( due to quantum of work) and easy ( defining a thing clearly helps a techie a lot).

About 3 weeks post making the site live and getting a good number of users ( essentially word of mouth) , I feel happy for 2 reasons..
a. Starting something from not even the scratch
b. Ability to create a team that delivers

We got covered in alootechie (http://www.alootechie.com/) .. my favourite internet newsletter .. Rajesh Barnwal, his editor gave our subject line in the newsletter he sends everyday! We got 21 comments - allmost all of them positive.. It made me happier. I think we would have broken the maximum number of comments record on alootechie!

Deepti Kaul helped us get some footage in http://www.htnext.in/. Feels good to see the site name across prestigious publications.

See the coverage if you have not seen it already :
http://www.alootechie.net/news/extramarkscom-launched-to-help-students-score-extra-marks-in-exams

http://www.htnext.in/news/7087_2040360,008700000011.htm

http://www.agencyfaqs.com/perl/news/company_briefs/index.html?id=19291

I just hope the site does well! Our promoter's faith and his willingness to back us with any kind of support has to be justified!!