College dropouts hit big with SMS

Inspired by passion and creativity, Deepak Ravindran and his friends dropped out of college and went on to become successful entrepreneurs. Deepak and three of his friends, Ashwin Nath, Mohammed Hisamuddin and Abhinav Sree proved  that you can climb the ladder of success, sans bookish knowledge.

Deepak, a CEO now and the brain behind the service, SMSGyan (55444) said: “I was studying at Lal Bahadur Shastry College of Engineering in Kasaragod. One day, few of us were hanging around and we saw a pretty girl pass by, so I turned to them and asked: “How do you impress a girl?” They laughed and replied: “Google it!” Back then I did not have a smart phone and that was when I wondered how to retrieve information from the web with a text message.”

Today their company, is an offline search engine that allows users to search the web by sending an SMS and getting an answer of 480 characters within seconds of sending the query. The four-year-old company has clocked a revenue of Rs 6 crore in 2011 and is aiming for Rs 25 crore this financial year.

Deepak says convincing the Telecom service providers to crack a deal was no easy task; “Being young and calling myself the CEO seemed to amuse them. Many a times I have had doors slammed on my face, but we never gave up as we believed in the company and our product. One fine day at the campus of a telecom major in Gurgaon, call it luck or chance or fate but I met and convinced the head of new products inside a coffee shop and that was the start of our successful journey," he said.

Their company, has been nominated by 10 million users for the Limca Book of Records 2012 for the largest offline search engine.