V. S. S. Mani had already tried building a telephone directory business when he discovered a particularly awkward problem. People remembered its name, Ask Me. They could not reliably remember its number. For a company whose front door was a telephone, this was rather like commissioning a handsome shop sign and forgetting to provide a staircase.
The idea continued to interest him after he left the venture. When he tried again, the number received close attention. A string of eights would make the route to the service easier to recall. The company that followed was called Justdial. Even its name was an instruction short enough to survive a busy afternoon.
His story stretches from printed yellow pages to mobile screens, with a wedding publishing detour, a public listing and a Reliance partnership along the way. In July 2026, his term as managing director and CEO ended. It is a good moment to look back at the smaller decisions that made the larger business possible.
A salesman’s education
Born in Jamshedpur in 1966 and raised in Kolkata, Mani considered a future in commerce and chartered accountancy. Family responsibilities pushed him toward earning. He found work selling advertising for United Database India, a business directory company. The job gave him a close view of information that customers needed and businesses were willing to pay to place in front of them.
A directory was useful, but consulting one required effort. A caller could describe a request to another person and let that person retrieve the answer. Mani saw an opportunity in that exchange. In 1989, he and partners launched Ask Me in Delhi, putting business information at the other end of a telephone line.
They had arrived early. Telephone access was limited, and the business expanded quickly into other cities. Mani left in 1992. The experience supplied a lesson about pace as well as demand: a useful service could still become a difficult company to finance and manage.
“Spreading too fast was our undoing at Askme.”
V. S. S. Mani, 2008
Wedding publishing followed. Guides brought together the services a couple might need, supported by advertising from the businesses supplying them. This work kept him close to the same underlying exchange: people looking for help and merchants hoping to be chosen. The subject matter had acquired flowers and a band; the commercial question remained familiar.
In 1996, he launched Justdial in Mumbai with ₹50,000. The office was small, the computers rented, the furniture borrowed. His earlier attempt gave him reasons to be careful. He had returned to a business he understood well enough to know where it could go wrong.
A small office, a workable exchange
Justdial’s offer was straightforward. A person needed a local business; the service supplied information. Underneath that short description sat the work of collecting listings, making them searchable and training operators to deliver a relevant answer. Accuracy mattered. A beautifully remembered number was of limited assistance if the information at the other end sent somebody to the wrong place.
The business needed advertisers as well as callers. Search was free to users. Merchants could pay for greater visibility. In the early operation, client businesses were encouraged to have their employees use the service, helping generate the initial audience without a large advertising budget.
Payments collected in advance helped fund the next round of selling and expansion. That arrangement mattered to a founder working with limited resources. Revenue could support another employee, another set of listings, another opportunity to make the service useful. The company had to persuade both sides of the exchange to keep returning.
Local information, free to the user.
A maintained database connects need with supply.
Sponsored visibility helps finance the service.
There is something revealing about this part of Mani’s career. The product depended on ordinary businesses being findable. Each listing represented somebody hoping the next enquiry would turn into work. Growth required attention to details that would never make an especially glamorous launch announcement: categories, addresses, operator training and whether the answer arrived promptly.
A search box takes a few attempts
The internet offered another way to deliver the information. It also introduced costs and uncertainty. Justdial registered its domain in 1997, experimented with the web, withdrew after the dotcom downturn, and tried again. The sustained website launch came in May 2007. Owning an internet address had proved considerably easier than building an internet business.
Advertisers who understood telephone enquiries needed persuading about online visibility. In 2009, Mani bundled voice, web and mobile rather than selling each separately. The package let the customer buy access to Justdial’s audience while the company continued changing how that audience arrived.
The service itself needed to change, too. A spoken answer could become a message containing the details. A website could add pictures, directions and reviews. These changes followed the practical business of helping somebody choose a supplier. The database could travel across different interfaces, provided its information remained useful.
Moving customers toward digital tools also meant accepting that fewer of them might need to telephone. For a company named Justdial, that required some flexibility. The familiar name could remain while the habit behind it changed. A caller’s original request had room to become a search query.
The public market gets a number
By the time Justdial approached its 2013 IPO, the modest opening budget belonged to a very different scale of operation. The business had handled 254.3 million search requests in the financial year ended March 2012. Its database contained roughly 9.1 million business listings when the offering came around.
Revenue had risen from ₹71.6 crore in the year ended March 2008 to ₹277 crore in the year ended March 2012. Profit rose from ₹1.7 crore to ₹52.8 crore over that interval. There was a working business beneath the search service’s familiarity.
The IPO attracted investor interest of more than ₹11,000 crore against an offer of approximately ₹950 crore. For Mani, the public market arrived 17 years after the service launch. A short account can make those dates appear almost adjacent. The years between them contained repeated attempts to get the timing, distribution and economics to work together.
The founder who wanted the bill paid
Recognition followed, including the services category of the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2013 awards, announced in 2014. Mani had built a company around a need that was easy to explain. Explaining the company’s next move would become a more demanding part of the job.
He maintained an interest in the economics beneath expansion. In public interviews, he argued for earning before spending and resisted the idea that money alone could make a business work. That position had a practical history: rented equipment and advertiser payments had been part of Justdial’s opening arrangements.
His ambitions also extended beyond returning a phone number. In 2015, he described Search Plus as a way for users to compare offers from online sellers and nearby shops and complete purchases. Discovery could lead further into the transaction. A business that helped people decide whom to call was exploring what happened after the call.
The proposed app also brought together activities such as booking cinema tickets and cabs. A user could begin with several different needs and stay within the same service. For the nearby shopkeeper, appearing beside an online seller carried another implication: a local business needed a place in the comparison, even when the customer’s shopping trip began on a screen.
That was a larger undertaking than reading out a listing. Prices, choices and the ability to buy would sit closer together. Mani’s description showed how far his ambitions had moved from the original directory. The merchant was still there, hoping to meet a customer; Justdial wanted a role in more of what followed their introduction.
There were personal influences beyond directories and balance sheets. He named Shah Rukh Khan as an inspiration, observing their shared move from Delhi to Mumbai. Earlier, as a youngster, he had organized a paid video screening. An audience, a reason to attend, a little commercial initiative: the episode fits comfortably beside his later work, without requiring that every childhood afternoon be promoted into a business prophecy.
A bigger partner, then a handover
In July 2021, Reliance Retail Ventures announced a ₹3,497 crore transaction for an initial 40.95% stake in Justdial, with an open offer for up to another 26%. The agreement included both newly issued shares and shares purchased from Mani. He continued as managing director and CEO.
His stated ambition was to extend search and discovery into commerce, including the company’s B2B platform. The partnership placed the local information business alongside a much larger retail operation. The founder remained involved in pursuing a broader version of the exchange he had first encountered in directory advertising.
Five years later, the succession became explicit. Mani’s term ended on July 31, 2026. Dinkar Ayilavarapu, formerly of Flipkart, was appointed to take over as CEO from August 1. The change closed a long period in which the founder had also been the operating leader.
of quarterly unique visitor traffic came from mobile platforms in Q1 FY2027, the quarter ended June 30, 2026.
The last reported quarter before the handover illustrates how far the service had travelled. Justdial recorded approximately 192.9 million quarterly unique visitors, with mobile accounting for 86.5% of that traffic. Voice represented 2.9%. The telephone had given the company its opening; customers had since learned other ways to ask.
Mani’s earliest observation still gives the story its shape. Information about businesses existed, but reaching it could be troublesome. He spent years reducing that trouble, first through a memorable number, then through interfaces that no longer required dialling it. Somewhere nearby, somebody still needed to find the right person for a job. That was enough of a question to keep him occupied for three decades.