RapidoRead Story – Another Failure Story

I, Bikash Kampo, and Subra’manyam Mantry started a viral content website called RapidoRead in 2017.

At the time, we all had very limited knowledge about content marketing, WordPress, and SEO; but we started!

We bought a domain name (rapidoread.com) at a discounted rate from GoDaddy and a cheap cPanel hosting from NameCheap (I guess) – installed a simple magazine-like WordPress theme and the website was ready.

We were super excited. 😍

And now, we just had to publish quality articles.

But to be honest, we didn’t have a concrete plan of what and how are we going to proceed further. Initially, I and Bikash wrote a few articles but it was becoming difficult as I was still in college.

Then… I, Bikash, and Mantry made a plan: we would invite our friends who were passionate about writing. We had nothing to give them in return but we tried.

I didn’t have any friends who were willing to write but Bikash and Mantry had. They both were able to convince 5-6 people to write; in return, writers would only get rights to brag and show off about themselves that they write.

Some of the contributors were Sanat Biswal, Kallola Mishra, Namrata Bhattacharjee, Hari Chandan Patnaik, Asutosh Patra, Subham Padhi, etc.

And, they were really good at writing.

This went on for 3-4 months, Mantry and Bikash would send me the originally written articles and I’d publish them. We started seeing some traction too. The site was receiving a few thousand monthly organic visitors and they were engaging with the content too.

I was kind of an editor, Mantry handled social media and Bikash would gather topic ideas. But… our plan was not future-proof. No one can write tens of articles without getting anything in return at all. Also, it was the final year of college and almost all were busy with our college work and the site didn’t receive enough focus as it should have.

After approx. 6 months, we stopped publishing new content and after a year, the domain expired and we didn’t renew because we still didn’t have any concrete plans.

But it did teach a few things:

• do not jump into something just because it looks shiny
• make proper plans at least for the near future
• teamwork and management, and
• a bit idea about content marketing

At least, we got to know what doesn’t work. 😎