The irony? While mutualfundsindia quickly racked up a high brand profile - only four Indian sites were included in the Forbes survey, and the site currently claims 1.5 million hits, and about 6,50,000 page views per month - for Online IndiaCapital the runaway success has also meant that their original business plan could be in danger of running amuck. Quite simply: mutualfundsindia.com has a narrow focus. For scalability - a key criterion that venture capitalists look at - Online IndiaCapital, therefore, needed to wrest back the control to the original business plan by launching a ``mother site focussed on all personal finance issues''. Pertinently, in the last few months, the promoters have also launched two other specific content aggregating sites: IndianIPOS.com and Finance Samachar.com.

Insisting that the launch of the mother site has nothing to do with attracting venture capital, Mr Anurag Garg, director, Online IndiaCapital.com, says: ``In terms of scalability, we felt there is a need for a general finance portal, indiacapital.com. Strategically, we started first with the mutual funds site as at that time mutual funds were beginning to do well again. There was investor interest and the mutual funds were spending a lot on advertising. So to get the traffic and the earn the revenues, we decided to focus first on a domain site and then later launch the mother site.''

The current agenda: indiacapital.com will now act as an umbrella, offering investors detail information on all personal finance products from the debt as well as income side. The three domain sites will thus retain their individual identity but will now dovetail into the mother site. While that will bring the strategy in order, the key challenge for Online IndiaCapital will now be to ramp up performance of the portal brand in such a way that it earns the spurs of a ``mother site''. Says Mr Aditya Agarwal, director, Online IndiaCapital: ``Compared to mutualfundsindia.com, we hope that in the next six months indiacapital.com goes up to 8-10 lakh page views and 1.5 to 2 million hits a month.'' For this, the company is rolling out a franchise network across the country for direct customer interface. The company plans to appoint 25 franchisees in the next two months, across major towns in North India.

Claiming a revenue stream of Rs 4-5 lakh a month currently, Online IndiaCapital hopes to achieve breakeven in the next six months - around only then, claim the promoters, will it look for a second round of funding.

Online IndiaCapital was incorporated in 1999, and till May 2000 survived on the personal investments of the promoters, as well as revenue generated by selling content and advertising from the domain sites. The company also has a software division which offers Website development services to brokers.

In its first round, it raised Rs 1.5 crore from the Sidbi Venture Capital fund for software and IT industry, under the aegis of the Ministry of Information & Technology. By year-end, the company plans to launch another domain site, depositoryindia.com - it has tied-up with the Depository Participants' Association of India to develop the country's first depository-based portal, for the purpose. The company claims that its total investments so far have been around Rs 1 crore.