Let Me Know!
Just as their by-line goes, they have succeeded in “breaking the information barrier” to a considerable extent. Let Me Know, also an investee venture of Unltd India, is a platform where one has access to several opportunities in the fields of Technology, Business, Art and Culture, Social Innovation, and Entrepreneurship. So you may ask, why Let Me Know? The answer lies in the previous sentence – the very diverse range of fields in which you can find opportunities through this portal. The idea of browsing through scores of them in one place, as opposed to the arbitrary Google searches and surfing – which could be a shot in the dark – is certainly a big plus.
Let Me Know was founded in November 2007 by Nitin Rao a young Indian, aspiring to be a successful entrepreneur. The idea for the portal itself was born from a paper presented by Rao at the London School of Business in 2007. The need to help the Indian youth find appropriate avenues, combined with a passion for social entrepreneurship has resulted in Let Me Know, and it has been a boon for thousands of young Indians ever since.
How do they work?
The team at Let Me Know gathers information from Event Organizers, and also has a dedicated student team that works conscientiously to scout for opportunities in colleges. Through this vast network, they have been able to post thousands of opportunities for young Indians to grab.
By using tools like Google Friend Connect and SMS alerts, they have succeeded in connecting more and more youngsters in the three years of their operation.
What they have done so far?
One of the initiatives in 2009 was the Internship Madness Fiesta, during which there were a lot of internship opportunities posted on this site. Many students benefited from this rewarding initiative, and what’s more, they helped by sharing these opportunities with more students.
When you navigate through their website you are immediately struck by the simplicity and effectiveness that you see. Neatly categorized, you can view opportunities in the field of your choice, or you can view them all. They have a “Deadlines” tab as well, which is extremely useful when you want to quickly remind yourself of when something is due.
The popularity of this young team is very evident in the number of students vouching for them on the site’s blog, and the number of fans they have on social networking sites.
Nandini Muralidharan is a networking engineer and a free lance writer based in Mumbai. She writes for www.bookshopblog.com and www.chillibreeze.in
One of the most challenging decisions we’ve had to make was with regard to the Google Adsense ads which were located on the website. There were a few significant draw backs with using these ads; to put it in simple and remarkably few terms, they didn’t look very pretty. However, considering the ever increasing traffic too the website, they did serve as revenue generators. So the big trade off was: user experience Vs money. We chose to “trade off” money for user experience. Our logic was and remains simple, If we give the best possible service to the users, they will love it enough to talk about it. To get customers to talk is perhaps the single biggest achievement for any business. Its big because it means a lot more than just satisfied customers, it means publicity, loyalty and a host of other pretty terms. Most importantly, it shows that we care. So, as we bid goodbye to Google Adsense for now, we request you to keep the comments and the feedback coming, because we’re listening and we care. 
When I speak to the users of Let Me Know, I find that they all have something in common… they’re all hooked. Once they come across the website they find it difficult to not check for new opportunities whether they intend to use them or not. Let Me Know, is indeed quite fortunate to have a loyal user base. Their loyalty and our consistency have ensured that we can only grow from here. Ok… so we have a group of really cool people who are addicted to Let Me Know, thats great, so whats the next step? What can we do to ensure that we can offer them better services and how do we make them part of the process? We believe the answer lies in building a community around the website. We need to give the users something more, so that they have in common something more than just an unquenchable thirst for opportunities. We need to give the users a platform where they can not only interact with us but also among themselves. Google Connect and the newly deployed Discuss Community have contributed to a significant extent in this regard. However, we’ve made it a conscious policy to actively develop a strong community around the website, which means that we’re not going to solely depend on Google or Discuss to do it for us. We believe in providing a more personalized experience to the users based on their suggestions and preferences, so users can watch out for exciting new opportunities to get their opinions noted. So when do we know that our job is complete ? How do we gauge the success of our community building strategies? Well… the one of the pillars around which the community is built is the facilitation of our users to help themselves get a better service from us. Better service can mean a lot things, whether it is to have more number of opportunities or having a more intuitive console on the website. The number of entries we get from customers and their activeness on our forums have proven to be valid indicators.Making the website self sufficient with respect to the content has always been a dream, a dream in which users actively share opportunities which they hear about. Out role, until we achieve such a state is to facilitate their sharing activities, perhaps through better design or through augmentation with other services. Measuring customer satisfaction is a completely different ball game though, how do we check whether our customers are satisfied without dissatisfying them? Now thats something worth pondering about. 
Recent Comments