Namaste (hello) India!

In the past two days, BillMonk has been featured in dozens of newspapers and magazines all over India. This flurry of press is thanks to a widely circulated story by the Press Trust of India (similar to the Associated Press).

Amongst the most prominent publications are the Times of India, the largest English daily newspaper in India with ~8 million readers; and the Dainik Jagran, a Hindi language daily with the highest readership amongst all newspapers in India, with ~20 million readers.

We’re excited because we’ve always considered India to be an ideal location for BillMonk, given the recent explosion of cell phones and households with Internet access. It’s very common to share the costs of food, housing, and utilities, especially among the rapidly growing young and urban middle-class. What’s more, BillMonk’s largest userbase outside of the US today is in India.

The image below is from a clipping from the Dainik Jagran that Gaurav’s uncle Rajesh sent him this morning. Seeing ‘BillMonk’ printed in Hindi was so cool that we just had to share it with you all.

10 Things Everybody Ought to Know about Bottom-Up Marketing

Since we launched BillMonk in January, we’ve enjoyed a steady flow of positive PR which includes a story in Business 2.0, an interview on BBC World Service Radio, an invitation to speak at Google, several positive blogger reviews including ones from TechCrunch, CNET, eHub, Springwise, and lots of other press.

How did two guys on a shoe-string budget without the help of a PR firm get all this coverage? Many of you have asked, and we wanted to share. Click here to learn about 10 simple but effective strategies we followed to market BillMonk.

BillMonk on BBC World Service Radio

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about BillMonk with the producers of Culture Shock, a BBC World Service Radio show about “the latest global trends in arts, entertainment and culture”. Today’s radio program featured BillMonk as one of the key segments, with more than eight minutes of air time.

The hosts of the show introduced us as “the next MySpace online,” and continued to describe the general problem of borrowing, the BillMonk solution, and the social implications of using a service like ours:

“Most of us have probably forgotten to return stuff on occasion, and this of course, can lead to all kinds of tension… with a student or community setting, [BillMonk is] actually going to make life easier, you are going to do away with the post-it notes, the IOUs, there isn’t going to be one person made to feel like they’re the bill nazi… The community library is a brilliant idea… guerilla [and] ad-hoc… it adds an element of fairness… I think we’re looking at human activities being turned into transactions, because it’s a way of creating social ease.”

Wow! We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.