• Opportunities

In their final year of school, while most of their classmates were debating on further education possibilities, Divyank Turakhia and his brother Bhavin were already charting plans to found an IT company. The year was 1998, a time when the internet was still very much a nascent phenomenon in India.

But the Turakhia brothers, who had already freelanced as internet consultants, were confident of the industry and co-founded Directi, a web products company. They had a three-pronged strategy to build a global internet business, sell web-related products, and to maximize the potential of any time spent developing it. “With a products-based company our processes don’t change and the product is 100 percent renewable,” says Divyank, President and Co-Founder, Directi.

Today, the company sells to 230 countries worldwide across two primary lines of business: web infrastructure services (under sub-brands LogicBoxes.com, ResellerClub.com, PublicDomainRegistry.com, .pw, Accreditation.com, and WebHosting.Info) and internet media: primary brand Media.net (sub-brands include Skenzo.com, BigJumbo.com, DomainAdvertising.com, MediaInvestments.com).

So with personal funding of Rs.25,000 from their parents, the brothers ventured onto an entrepreneurial path with Directi during an era when BSNL monopolized the internet in India. They spotted domain name registry, web and e-mail hosting, the first three basic requirements for any SME, as a primary opportunity soon after ICAAN broke the monopoly of Network Solutions in this space.

“We realized that everyone was ultimately going to get online, it was just a matter of time,” says Divyank. And indeed it was. Back then domain name registration was priced at $70. However, another company OpenSRS charged $10 a year. Finding an opportunity to break in, Directi became resellers for them. Good sales numbers soon gave it the accreditation required to become independent sellers.

Soon its business Logicboxes was born, in 2001, as a software solution provider to domain registrars, ISPs, datacenters and even to web hosts. The goal was that anyone who becomes a registrar can use the software, the client here being a reseller who gives the company access to a network. Till date Directi has registered four million domain names, and has over 200 customers and has been the only consultant to register 950 registrars worldwide. Since inception it has always followed a reseller-based model wherein it partners with companies who in turn sell to other companies.

The brothers did not go the ‘customized’ route, so web designing was not an option. Instead, they developed a do-it-yourself kit to build a website. Around the same time, domain advertising was booming with an established market value of $500 million. Directi found another golden opportunity and made a foray here with its first venture in the internet media industry via the domain advertising vertical.

Skenzo was born in late 2005 as an exclusive traffic monetization program. According to Divyank, the domain advertising vertical in the internet industry represents $1.2 billion of the $50 billion spent on internet advertising each year globally. At that juncture the company maximized on its sole competency, technology, and utilized the segment with three solutions in the same space—domain, domain advertising and BigJumbo.com.

Over the last 12 months it has monetized 19 million names, predicting directing navigation more accurately each time. Skenzo has become one of its fastest growing businesses and has become one of the top five largest domain advertising companies worldwide. Today Skenzo is the largest company (under parent firm Media.net) in the space worldwide in terms of headcount (250+), managing an inventory of 20 billion ads.

“We started late but have managed to grow faster than everyone else,” claims Divyank. The brothers are betting big on this business vertical which they hope will be a full-fledged media company like MSN and Google one day, giving people a chain of products to be online.

Divyank’s dateline
At 18: Net worth of over $1 million
At 21:   More than 1,00,000 customers
At 23: Net worth of over $100 million
Now at 28:  Net worth of over $300 million (valued by private equity funds)

©Entrepreneur May 2010

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brothers, Directi, Turakhia