Brijj Over Troubled Waters
A recent post on Alootechie shows that Sanjiv Bikhchandani, CEO of Brijj (Info Edge/Naukri guys) has claimed that they have 8 Lakh registered users. Of these 800 are CEOs and 3000 are Directors of companies in India. For those unfamiliar, Brijj is trying hard to be the Linkedin of India.They also claim to get around 5000 new registrants per day.
I’d like to openly challenge both these claims made by Info Edge. I agree they could probably be promoting Brijj to Naukri subscribers, and hence do a fair amount of cross-selling … but being an active person who hires regularly from Naukri - I have yet to receive any sales pitch by email or phone.
I took a quick look at their Alexa data and my estimate shows that they probably get around 10,000 to 15,000 page views per day. Nothing more than that. Assuming that each visitor sees around 3 pages - thats around 3000 to 5000 unique visits per day.
Note: these are unique visits only. A good Social Networking model gets highly sticky users who come back very often and spend time on the site, and as a result the Social Networking site traffic GROWS exponentially. That is the key. The whole success of Social Networking model (and most businesses) is in the returning visitor / repeat sale. If you cant get that - then you need to move on to something else. The pot of gold is in the repeat visitors and new people who get hooked. This leads to the highly exponential viral growth in traffic. Now, go take a look at their Alexa traffic growth (marked by nothing but short spurts and low traffic curve) - and you will see the truth for yourself.
Anyway, I dont see how Sanjiv has claimed these stats. If Info Edge has an independant project unit that manages this project and is sending Sanjiv these numbers - then he definitely needs to go in and do some serious checks in server logs etc., so that he can back these figures. If they turn out to be false (which I am 99.99% sure), then he needs to hand in the pink slips to the people who have misinformed him. Plus, the next time around his company goes out in the open and does press releases like this, someone needs to be doubly sure. Else, things like this will end up up giving them a lot of negative publicity… which I’m sure will happen in the coming days - as the bigger media players pick this story and the blogosphere starts to post their 2 cents.
Lesson #1: Don’t rely on stats given to you by Mr X, Y or Z - unless you see it yourself, specially for making a release.
Lesson #2: Don’t make far fetched claims, even though you are publicly listed… you may get a short blip, but in the long run it will hurt your credibility in the market.
— Vishal Lamba Filed under: Uncategorized
Vishal
Thanks for the very useful feedback.
The numbers we have quoted in our press release are absolutely true.
As a public company we do not have the luxury of being less than truthful.
Brijj does have over 800,000 registrations and they are growing at over 5000 a day.
And so far we have not spent even a rupee on promotion.
The fact is that with the huge amount of traffic on naukri, jeevansathi and 99acres it is easy for us to get one time registrations.
The challenge lies in getting repeat visits from registered users, getting people to build their networks and improving the quality of the registered user base. This is a much harder thing to do.
And we have said as much in our press release.
Our next agenda is two fold.
First to market the site to our registered users so as improve engagement.
Second a continuous product improvement agenda so as to differentiate the Brijj offering from other sites.
So hopefully Brijj users will see some activity in these two areas in the coming weeks and months.
And as and when we succeed in doing that - the next stage will be monetisation.
Meanwhile do keep the feedback coming.
Sanjeev
Hi Sanjeev,
Thanks for stopping by and clarifying and supporting your claim. I have a request though - could you install a public stat counter like the one offered by sitemeter.com sitewide on brijj for a 24 hour period. Then kindly share the link and stats with all. This will clear any doubts and lack of support that countless people are giving your claims on brijj traffic and stats. thx.
Thanks for the suggestion.
WIll look at it.
However we have not got a public stats counter on any of our other sites - naukri, jeevansathi, 99acres.
Hence it did not even occur to us to put one here.
Sanjeev
By looking at Alexa stats, I can’t agree more with Vishal. The site did have an upward traffic growth recently though. However, to generate 5,000 registrations a day a lot of traffic is needed, no matter how good your conversion rate is.
I hope 5,000 is not the number of relationships added each day is. Example A adds B as a contact, even though A and B joined the site a month ago.
Totally unrelated - while reading this post, I started browsing Brijj and after a couple of minutes found an XSS vulnerability on Brijj.com - http://www.gsharma.com/brijjcom-bug/