On March 10th, 2000, the NASDAQ peaked at 5,132.52 before closing at 5,048.62; afterwards it fell as much as 78 percent (the dot-com crash). Many organizations were forced to file for bankruptcy. Caught in the storm was Hari K. Ravichandran, former CEO and Founder of BizLand and now CEO and Founder of Endurance International Group (NASDAQ:EIGI), trying to stabilize his sinking vessel. "The dot-com crash made advertisers back off, and our revenue fell dramatically," explains Ravichandran.

At that point, Endurance was subsidized by advertising. And to enable its growth, the firm had been spending a lot of money that flowed in from their ad-based model on payroll. Ravichandran adds, "When things go bad, the venture-guys start running for the hills."

The dot-com crash was all set to engulf Ravichandran's conception. He had two options; one was to hit the reset button, and the second to exit. Reluctant to take the latter, he decided to steer on and made some obligatory amends. "We had learned a hard lesson: If you don't focus on profitability, things can go bad. We stripped down to a staff of 14, and told customers to pay a subscription charge for their services. We ended up converting about two percent of our customers to the subscription model," elaborates Ravichandran. Many organizations crumbled under the pressure, but Ravichandran, the never-say-never captain kept his ship pointing forward.

By 2003, Ravichandran had persevered through the dot-com bust with a renewed and renamed Endurance International Group. However, a predicament still lingered.

Ravichandran explains, "Our technology platform could support millions of customers but post reset, there were only a few thousand left." There was an urgent need of capacity utilization. The operations of Endurance spanned across three main offerings, a web hosting service, a plug-in ecommerce tool, and a well-developed shopping cart.