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

Hello LetMeKnow users,

We are happy to announce that the Alerts have been reconfigured and are working fine now. I would like to tell u the advantage of Alerts-
>> You get what u are interested in i.e U get only those opportunities posted on the website for which you have subscribed. This is different from the Email Subscription which is powered by Feedburner. The email subscription is the daily newsletter that gives u the latest content on the website.

To try it out all u have to do is to login using any of your Google/Yahoo/Open IDs. The login button is on the Top left corner of the website under the Search bar. Once u login you can select the Alerts tab and then tick those categories you want to hear about.

- Technical Support @LetMeKnow

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.

We had added “Google Friend Connect” gadget on the sidebar and got a really good response in terms of members. We currently have 400+ members connected through Google Friend Connect. We wanted to create a community around LetMeKnow and help visitors participate and connect with others. Developing a Social Networking component for LetMeKnow would lead to a fragmented effort for “connecting” people. What best was to make use of existing Social Networking components provided by Facebook, Google, Disqus among others. Keeping this in mind at first place we integrated Friend Connect and created a community around LetMeKnow. Recently we have integrated full fledged Google Friend Connect with following components-

• Commenting on Each page
• Recommending content to other readers
• Rating and Reviews
• A Social bar at the bottom

The Social bar mainly shows the Members list as well as the recent activity on the site by other members. Also the Feedback page has got a small makeover.

Goutam Kumar says,
“this is very informative site.. it provides me informations of any events taking place across d globe.”

Mini Says,
“Absolutely love this website!Inever realized there are such great opportunities available across the world,cos’ I never came to know through any other source.Now I feel I have so much more to do!Thankyou!”

Dinesh Kapur says,
Sifting through the information will be become exceedingly easy if we could somehow mark events we have viewed. 1) It helps identify new events added 2) One will not spend time recollecting if one has been through the details of some events

Reply from LetMeKnow- “Dinesh, thanks for the suggestion. We will implement this in the next version of LetMeKnow portal”

Narendra Majhi says,
“It is a very important site which give us knowledge on environment and nature”

Akash mittal says,
“fantastic site!”

Indrakshi Mishra says,
“Wonderful website, Very useful and elegant too! Congratulations!”

Just a reminder to our visitors- We would like more ppl to write about LetMeKnow in their blogs so that we can feature them on official LetMeKnow Blog. Thanks a lot for the feedbacks and suggestions. We will make sure that the feature requests are added in the next release of LetMeKnow portal.

We have been getting a lot of feedback from our readers and in order to encourage our readers to give us their valuable feedback we have thought of featuring some of the testimonials from our readers. We would select a few of them and highlight it here. So readers don’t forget to drop in your valuable feedback here and also don’t miss out a chance to be featured on the blog. We are also thinking of having the user to provide a link to his photograph so that we can feature the feedback along with the user photograph. If anyone has written about LetMeKnow on their blogs, do send in the link to sanaulla@letmeknow.in and we will feature the blog post immediately. To summarize-

• Drop in your valuable feedback using the form here.
• Write about LetMeKnow in your blog and send in the link to the blog to- sanaulla@letmeknow.in -Good blog posts will be featured on the LetMeKnow blog and will be linked from the LetMeKnow blog. (A chance to increase the traffic to your blog!!!!)

What the readers say about LetMeKnow-1

Narendra Majhi Says,
It is a very important site which give us knowledge on environment and nature

Subhashish Sahoo says,
please start alerts on mobile. if possible use google sms channel

Reply from LetMeKnow- Thanks Subhashish for the feedback. We will surely try using Google SMS Channel to start with and will have our Mobile updates in place soon.

Nakul Gupta Says,
Hi! I’ve been following this website, from quite some time and believe me guys its a really nice idea. I mean being an engineering student I know locating those far fetched opportunities from here and there to have an extra edge is really a hustle. So just wanted to express my gratitude. Thanks guys. N hey…all the best.

Tuhina V Says,
hey, since you keep updating pretty fast, all might not want to subscribe for all categories (implies they might not wat to know all of ‘em). heres a suggestion. you could add list with check box for subscription after the email thingie. that way you can mange you audience better

Reply from LetMeKnow- For all our readers, we have a personalized system in place. One can visit the personalized page here (http://www.letmeknow.in/my). One can sign in using any of- AOL, Google, Yahoo, OpenID IDs and can subscribe to the personalized alerts. Apart from this the logged in users can-

• Mark certain events as favorite and get an quick access to it from the user dashboard.
• Comment on various events and share information about the event.

Ankita Pujar says,
well, this was the first time i visited ur site after reading DH Education… i thank u all for letting us know so much… i’ll keep visiting this site regularly… thanks again

These are few of the feedbacks we have received in the past few weeks. We will be putting up newer feedbacks, blog posts and any other mention of LetMeKnow on the LetMeKnow official blog.