On a trip to meet Gov. Rick Perry last month, the Indian ambassador to the United States met with Satya Prabhakar at the Four Seasons Hotel downtown.

Ambassador Lalit Mansingh first heard of Prabhakar and his Austin-based website, Sulekha.com, in January when the site, little known outside the Indian community, crossed over in a big way. A posting on the site about alleged pro-Pakistan bias on CNN had led to an online petition of 55,000 names and a meeting with executives at CNN's Atlanta headquarters.

Mansingh was impressed. He urged Sulekha.com's staff to make the site a window on India for the rest of the world. "His main thing is, 'You guys are too insular,'" says Prabhakar, who founded Sulekha.com in late 1998 with his wife, Sangeeta Kshettry.

That should change. Sulekha, which means, "good writing" in Sanskrit, the mother language of Hindi started as a way to share the creative writings of a group of friends. But it has grown into the world's largest online community. This site now bubbles with selected essays on Indian identity in the United States, news, discussions, movie reviews and even a database of baby names.

As Sulekha starts to find its global voice, it chases a global business as well. It has 18 employees, more than 10,000 contributors and 7.5 million page views a month. In September 2000, a group of private New York investors put $3 million into the site.

Prabhakar and Kshettry would like to franchise the site's model to other ethnic groups and interest groups. But first, Sulekha.com must beat the challenge that faces dozens of content heavy sites: how to turn popularity into profit. Some, such as Salon.com, have gone public and struggled. Others, such as the "e-spirituality" community Beliefnet.com, have received tens of millions in venture investment but are far from profitability.

Sulekha.com picked the cheaper route. The site spends no money on advertising. But advertisers such as Sprint Corp., AT&T Corp., Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank unit, and Western Union Financial Services Inc., have found it anyway. The site spends no money on content, but Penguin has published a book of the site's best writing and wants to do more.

The approach seems to be working. Sulekha.com, which began with no business plan, expects to be profitable this fall. Prabhakar won't disclose the site's revenue, but he said until this year, expenses had been running twice as high as sales.

Quitting jobs to go to work
Prabhakar and Kshettry, both 38 and natives of India, have two young daughters and no history of taking business risks. They are the first in their families to go into business for themselves.

To make Sulekha.com work, they quit their jobs. In 1998, Kshettry left a $60,000 a year job with the Texas Department of Insurance, and two years later, Prabhakar quit his $115,000 a year job at SBC Communications Inc.

"You're always calculating the cost of going out on your own," Prabhakar says, "But what the hell, you know. I felt reasonably qualified."

Sulekha.com's transformation from a creative writing site came in February 1999, Prabhakar says, as he sat in a financial cryptography conference on the Caribbean island of Anguilla, staring out a window at the sea. He says he realized the huge volume of comments posted on the site in the past week had to have a larger purpose to connect Indians wherever they were in the world. "That was the huge motivating factor," he says.

Prabhakar picked up his legal pad and wrote a 15-page plan for site development, brand positioning and month-by-month content and traffic goals. "Suddenly I could see Sulekha as a global community and not just some two bit ezine on the net," he says. Soon after that, he quit his job.

Still, he was so nervous about telling his family about quitting that he didn't tell them for months.

He starts his business day at 3 a.m., trying to find ways to squeeze costs. Sulekha has 15 volunteer editors helping the one paid employee who handles new content. Most important, Prabhakar finds ways to promote Sulekha.com for free.

A year ago at a journalists' convention, Prabhakar met Hari Srinivas, the US director for the Indian entertainment network B4U, which is seen in about 80 countries.

The two came up with a "Write Angle" contest where writers would submit screenplay ideas to Sulekha.com and the network would help produce the winning movie.

"We ran promos on our network for two or three months, 15 times a day," Srinivas says. Each one mentioned Sulekha.com for free.

The "Write Angle" project was what really made people, and paying advertisers, recognize Sulekha.com. Prabhakar says, "We were no longer just a web site; we were a player."

Advertisers find a market

The growing attention could change the way US advertisers treat the Indian market. About 70 percent of Sulekha.com's users are in the United States. When the 2000 US census reported that Indians are the fastest growing Asian group, with about 2 million people, companies noticed.

"We see the doors opening now, " says Neeta Bhasin, who runs the New York based marketing company ASB Communications, which targets the South Asian community for clients such as Prudential Financial Inc. and Western Union. They are attracted by the demographic: Indians in the United States have an average household income of more than $60,000, Bhasin says, and about 90 percent of households have a computer.

The 1990s tech boom, fueled in part by Indians, helped change advertisers' outlook, Bhasin says. It used to be, "They're the taxi drivers," she says. "Now it's 'Oh, you must be a computer programmer'."

Sulekha.com is trying to convert that largely upscale spending power into a variety of businesses: online event ticketing, targeting advertising, book deals and the soon-to-be-launched e-publishing and event management projects.

But they want the commercialism to be low-key: In a twist many companies wouldn't understand, Sulekha.com doesn't want to offend its loyal users. "The biggest challenge we face today is to keep Sulekha growing while retaining the intimacy, " Prabhakar says.

That means the site's workers take particular care to help advertisers shape their message. "A Western Union ad was turned into a game of Indian trivia," says Sulakshana Gopal, Sulekha.com's manager of creative development and global marketing.

"It's been a very cautious approach," says Zafar Iqbal, a marketing professor at DePaul University and a Sulekha.com user who has watched ads slowly work their way onto the site. "Most savvy people say, 'There's got to be money made here.' We understand that, but it can't be blatant."

Says Vijay Mahajan, a University of Texas marketing professor who features Sulekha.com in a book on marketing, "It's important that the community feels like it's not being used."

Community's the ticket

One of the site's established businesses is ticketing. Sulekha.com has become the leading ticketer of Indian events in the United States, a business that provides about 65 percent of the site's revenue.

In a recent showing of the Indian blockbuster "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham" in 16 US cities, Sulekha.com sold more than 11,000 tickets at an average price of about $9, getting a commission of up to 6.95 percent, plus 50 cents of every transaction.

Sulekha.com is taking its name offline too. This year it will start investing in and organizing some of the events for which it handles ticketing, in return for a share of the profit.

The site also has entered into syndication deals with India's highest profile magazine, India Today, in addition to deals with Yahoo India and MSN India. The publications get Sulekha.com produced content, and Sulekha.com gets free promotion.

The site's splashiest offline move so far is its book, now titled "Black, White and Various Shades of Brown". Last year, after Penguin passed on publishing a selection of Sulekha.com writings, the site spent $6000 to self-publish it. The 2400-plus copies sold out, Prabhakar says.

Based on those sales, Penguin changed its mind, says V K Karthika, senior editor at Penguin India. Penguin printed 2000 copies for the Indian subcontinent. Nothing to get rich on, but enough to start a relationship that both sides expect to produce more Sulekha.com books. Two proposals are under discussion.

"I really like what Sulekha is doing finding young writers around the world," Karthika says. "It's like a bank for us as well." Penguin has approached at least one Sulekha.com contributor about other books, she says.

Extending its publishing plans, Sulekha.com in August will launch its Epress publishing business, making short books and pamphlets written by contributors available online for a fee of a few dollars apiece. The site is considering a few credit card-based payment models.

As Sulekha.com turns more of its contributors' unpaid work into revenue, there is the chance that the community could start to ask for a cut. Those featured in Sulekha.com's self-published book, for example, got exposure, not money.

"I don't know how long that will last, but it seems to be working," says Iqbal, the DePaul marketing professor.

And if it doesn't last? Prabhakar, who loves quotations, answers with wisdom from Warren Buffett and the Bhagavad Gita in a single e-mail...

From the Bhagavad Gita: "Perform your duty equipoised, abandoning all attachment to success or failure."

From Buffet: "It is not that I want money. It is the fun of making money and watching it grow."