Wikipedia transformed the idea of encyclopedia we had before the age of dot.com bubble. You could search for any topic and it had the answers. But when we thought this was the best we could get, the new age India’s entrepreneurs come with another innovative idea to break the pre-set rules. Alchetron is one such kind of platform that combines the basic idea of encyclopedia with social networking. The website gives answers to your queries in all available formats such as PDF, Doc, image, video, PPT etc. to help you get a comprehensive search result, without fumbling through multiple sources and lets you share these information with contacts and users on Alchetron through messaging and social profiles.
“Users can search & share thousands of organized topics which can be anything and everything like biographies, free courses for students, news, cooking recipes etc. there are endless possibilities”, says Dibu Paul, the founder of Alchetron. The idea of coming up with a platform of social encyclopedia appealed to him after receiving feedback from a large number of internet users who couldn’t find relevant high quality images and videos for their search and on top of it, they found the idea of online encyclopedia a tad boring. Online users wanted to find a way to get relevant information online and share it with others when needed. The web market is growing and tapping it on the right time is the first key to success.
As a result, Dibu Paul left his job as Senior Software Engineer in Accenture and Dinny Paul too, the co-founder of Alchetron, quit his job to work full time in their start-up.
Their journey, however, was not a bed of roses. Before the official launch of Alchetron in 2014, the founders had to go through numerous obstacles to materialize the idea. They worked in crowded railway platforms in Thane, Mumbai and when the stations got overly noisy, they would move to a nearby temple to work. Money, electricity, space, lack of resources – they had to face every possible roadblock in the initial period. They borrowed laptops and hard drives from family and friends for coding. And when the time came to launch the product officially, they quit their full time jobs, invested all of their savings and borrowed money from others to form a proper team. “Finally the founders rented out a small space, electricity and internet still is a problem today but somehow we manage that in our own way. It has come a long way since then to now to serve more than forty five thousand visitors from 130 countries and 2500 cities”, says Paul.
But the product is still in its nascent stage. How do the founders see its future? “Our short term goal is to increase the user traction, Improvise the product innovation on all smartphone platforms. Recently we have also launched our Android App. Our mid- term goal is to bring in more technology innovations within our product, capture market share. And our long term mission is to become next generation encyclopedia for world by organizing the world’s information and making it easily accessible for global internet users”, smiles Dinny.