Before LinkedIn and telemedicine, a Kochi dentist was quietly building both

A seemingly ordinary conversation prompted Dr Benosh Haris to revisit a chapter of his own life that he had long forgotten. “Recently, my eldest child asked me what I was doing 25 years ago. I told her I had built a website for dentists with something like a social networking platform. She wasn’t very impressed,” Dr Haris said.

Curious to see whether the project had left any trace, the Kochi-based dental surgeon dug up old web archives and rediscovered a venture he had quietly shut down over two decades ago. When we think about the story of the early internet, we often picture a garage in California, a venture capitalist’s cheque and a world-changing startup. Haris does not fit that archetype.

Back in 2000, from a small clinic in Edapally, Kochi, he was building a web platform that would eventually include features resembling a professional networking community and browser-based consultations. He recalls doing much of it on a 512 kbps internet connection that could reliably handle uploads only after midnight.

He called his platform Netodontist.com, and almost nobody remembers it. He didn’t, either, until recently. “If you had come to me a year ago, I wouldn’t have thought any of this was newsworthy. I needed an AI to validate it and tell me it was interesting work. I had just quietly shut everything down, moved to Bombay, got on with my career, and more or less forgotten about it,” he said.

What Haris forgot is one of the unusual chapters in India’s early internet history, one documented in part by archived snapshots preserved on the Wayback Machine.

The inspiration

Haris revealed that the idea germinated not from a business plan, but from an encounter with a patient. Someone found Haris through a basic personal website he had set up on Tripod, a free web hosting platform from the 2000s. It triggered in him an instant realisation that the internet could connect a dentist in Kerala with a stranger anywhere in the world.

For Haris, this was a eureka moment. “Most people knew about email and would visit a few websites, but they didn’t understand its business value or its potential for connectivity.”

Story continues below this ad

A scanned image of the Netodontist web page from old marketing brochure.

In the Kochi of 2001, that was especially true. Haris found his early adopters not in Kerala but in Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Dubai, cities where digital awareness was taking shape.

What he built over the next three years, on a bootstrap budget with a programmer and a designer he couldn’t always pay in full, was a multi-layered digital ecosystem designed specifically for dental professionals. The public-facing side connected patients with practitioners, while the professional side, named the Dentist Club, was something else entirely.

The people who built it

Jothish Narayanan, director at Kochi-based IT company Sorice Solutions, said his career “actually started with Dr Haris”.

“After completing my computer studies, I sought experience and received a reference from him. He was running a dental clinic in Kochi and invited me over to discuss some ideas,” said Narayanan.

Story continues below this ad

According to Narayanan, Haris wanted to create a portal where dentists could connect with each other, schedule appointments, communicate with patients, and share knowledge. He recalled that there were multiple modules – a CRM, a web portal, and an online consultant or chat system. “At that time, we didn’t have WhatsApp or similar applications, so the concept itself felt quite new.”

Narayanan said his meetings for the portal took place sometime around 2001. “Haris used to do his practice in the mornings, so I would go there in the evenings, around 6 pm, when he was done with patients. That’s when he would hand over his computers to us; there were no laptops yet. Another person, Jaykrishnan, and I used to work on it together, coding in HTML and ASP.NET, using MS SQL for the database.”

The archived ‘Online Consultant’ page describes a browser-based interface designed to let dentists interact with patients remotely, years before telemedicine became widely adopted. (Screenshot via Wayback Machine).

When it came to the design brief, designer Ameen Mohammad recollected that the idea was to build a community platform for dentists.

“It was created for the dentist community and included several applications designed around their needs. Considering we were working on a dial-up connection that offered slower speeds then, we had to take those limitations into account while designing the platform,” Mohammad, who is an independent UI/UX designer in Kochi, said.

Story continues below this ad

“The platform was way ahead of its time then, with features that were unheard of among internet users in small towns back then.”

Arriving two years before LinkedIn

LinkedIn launched in May 2003. Sermo, the first major physician social network in the US, arrived in 2005. Netodontist’s Dentist Club was live in 2001; archived snapshots preserved by the Wayback Machine show a members-only section that included features such as job listings, alumni groups, discussion forums and a marketplace for dental equipment. The archived pages also indicate that registration required a professional registration number.

On the website were features that would look mundane today but were extraordinary for their time. Members could join college alumni groups, post and browse dental job listings, share thesis work and clinical case studies, and participate in a live Q&A forum. A B2B equipment marketplace allowed dental suppliers and practitioners to transact within the platform.

“I thought about what I, as a dentist, actually needed. I had just passed out of dental college and wanted to stay in touch with my alumni, the people I had studied with,” said Haris.

Story continues below this ad

That instinct grew into something broader, shaping into an end-to-end professional infrastructure for an entire industry.

According to Haris, at its peak, the Dentist Club had 400 to 500 members. In a country with roughly 70,000 to 80,000 registered dentists at the time, that was a small but meaningful penetration, particularly in the near-total absence of a marketing budget.

An archived snapshot of Netodontist’s ‘Dentist Club’ from 2001 shows a members-only portal with features including dental jobs, alumni networks, thesis sharing, seminars, chat and a buy-and-sell marketplace. (Screenshot via Wayback Machine).

The platform’s second major innovation was its Online Consultant module, deployed in 2003. This was not an email form or a static contact page. It was a lightweight, browser-based live chat interface that allowed solo practitioners to conduct real-time digital consultations with patients anywhere in the world using a custom desktop control panel with colour codes and audio alerts to manage incoming queries.

According to Narayanan, the development was incremental. “We didn’t build everything at once. We started with the CRM and began marketing it. Mohammad worked on the design while we built the backend. Initially, the platform focused on helping dentists manage appointments, reminders, greeting cards, job postings and thesis sharing. The online consultant feature for doctor-patient interaction came later.”

Story continues below this ad

Browser-based remote consultations would become far more commonplace years later, particularly during the pandemic, when telemedicine saw widespread adoption worldwide. “I believed online consultation would become a massive driver, but that only really materialised during COVID in 2020,” said Narayanan.

The broader vision, Mohammad recalled, was always about building a community. “The biggest idea was bringing practitioners and students together so they could share ideas, knowledge and information within a community. It was designed to support collaboration and communication among dental professionals.”

The pitch that went nowhere

Haris approached two venture capital firms. One, called Ant Factory, reviewed the platform and told him to come back in a year. According to him, nobody ever came back. Attempts to sell banner advertising on the Dentist Club, a network that could reach 70,000 dental professionals across India, each spending thousands of rupees monthly on materials, met with similar indifference. He also approached the dental products brand, 3M, but the efforts were futile.

“The timing was just too early,” he said, with no evident bitterness. “The idea of building something over time and proving its worth didn’t exist in that environment; the expectation was that a business had to be profitable from day one.”

Story continues below this ad

Netodontist.com’s homepage, preserved on the Wayback Machine, shows an early attempt to combine dental information, practitioner discovery and interactive online services in the early 2000s. (Screenshot via Wayback Machine).

The challenge, Haris said, was not that the underlying concepts did not exist globally, but that they had little visibility in India’s nascent internet ecosystem. Terms like “professional networking” and “software-as-a-service” were yet to enter the mainstream vocabulary of businesses or consumers, making the platform difficult to explain to potential investors, advertisers and even prospective users.

In many ways, he wasn’t just pitching a product; he was trying to convince people of a way of using the internet that few had imagined at the time.

What might have been

Haris is clear-eyed about the scale of what he built. He had 400 members at peak and 200-250 patients transacting on the platform over three years. The figures could not be independently verified through surviving records. However, he is not claiming to have changed the world.

“I won’t claim I had the foresight to want the entire world using it, because the money was hard to come by, and building and marketing these systems was very costly. It was an absolute bootstrap,” said Haris.

Story continues below this ad

“The difference between Facebook and Netodontist is that they had Eduardo Saverin and Peter Thiel.”

He has no original digital records, as the server was shut down in 2003 and the data was lost. What survives is a printed brochure from 2000, several archived association websites he built as part of his marketing strategy, and the Wayback Machine snapshots of Netodontist itself.

Whether Netodontist was truly ahead of its time may remain open to debate. But the surviving archives suggest that from a small clinic in Kochi, Haris and his team were experimenting with ideas, from verified professional communities to browser-based consultations, that would become far more familiar in the following years.