Whoever said that “youth is wasted on the young” should look at the new wave of youngsters who have left their well-paying jobs to start out on their own.
Amar Deb, the former Head of Channel V, is busy with his own online venture centred on entertainment content. Yogesh Bansal, who used to run a social networking site for his friends in the US, has now launched a career networking portal called ApnaCircle. And, 26-year old Sorav Narula has even given up his job in London to start an online career counselling business. The list is long. There are many more Debs, Bansals and Narulas, who have embarked on similar ventures after saying goodbye to their jobs.
According to the latest Juxt Consult report, four out of every five internet users in India are in the age group of 19-35 years. And, given the fact that India has 50 million internet users, the population of young surfers is a huge 40 million. Clearly, the young India is keen to give the online business model a chance as it is about making you worth so much money in a short period of time. And that too, sitting at home, working on a laptop.
Yogesh Bansal of ApnaCircle was not a 20-something college junkie desperate for instant success. An MBA from the University of North Carolina, he came back to India three years ago and launched ApnaCircle, a career networking site for Indian internet users, with Sabeer Bhatia as its director. Bansal was quick to close an all-stock deal with French business networking site ViaDeo. The deal is cashless and the existing investors of ApnaCircle will get stake in ViaDeo, which has over 6.5 million subscribers. Nine years ago too, Bansal had launched a social networking site for his close group of friends in the US to minimise the cost of incoming calls on cellphones. “It was a hit among the users and was bought over by a company for less than a million dollars,” says Bansal.
Bansal, who is now overseeing ApnaCircle’s expansion plans in India, is aiming to grow from the present half a million to a million plus subscribers by 2010. “In the next five months, we will integrate ViaDeo, ViaDeo’s most recently acquired Chinese networking portal Tianji and ApnaCircle platforms, so that users have access to businesses from Europe and China on our portal.”
But don’t get fooled by swift success, warns Sorav Narula, who founded ienexus.com with an investment of Rs 5 lakh two months ago. His portal, www.ienexus.info, provides online counselling to students who wish to study abroad and has clocked nearly 35,000-page views in less than 60 days. “We found the traditional shop-based counselling business model too costly and hence decided to do this online, where initial investments are limited but the reach is global,” says Narula.
With investments restricted to the portal and the software that helps students locate appropriate universities suiting their budgets and desired courses, Narula is able to provide counselling services at about one-fourth of the cost charged by offline counsellors. “Already we have six people on board to run the website and we are adding more educational institutions and universities across the globe. The more universities we add as partners, the more money we will make,” he says as a matter-of-factly. Narula plans to pump in Rs 15 lakh more to market his site and add more sophisticated software to help students find the best universities and courses.
For computer science graduate Harish Bhal, it was an easy start when he founded Smile, an Internet Business Solutions company, in India in 1999. But having survived the dot com bust, the serial entrepreneur decided to establish an incubator programme, Studio Smile, to accelerate digital business ideas. “Since then, Studio Smile has successfully incubated ventures such as Zoomtra, a travel search engine, Zumtra, a travel technology company, and Quasar Media, a digital media and e-business solutions company,” Bhal says.
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Meanwhile, he has also seized the opportunity in the online ad market, which was growing 60 per cent year-on-year. Bhal launched Tyroo, a self-serve technology platform which ensured that advertisers reached out to the right websites using the platform’s inventory of publishers. With an initial finding of $1 million from Studio Smile, Tyroo built a proprietary technology platform for itself.
Bhal’s venture now helps both larger companies and SMEs run their ad campaigns in over 200 countries with budgets as low as Rs 2,500. In July 2007, Yahoo bought over 35 per cent stake in Tyroo. The proceeds were used to upgrade technology and ramp up sales network to reach out to small and medium advertisers and publishers in India.
However, not all start-ups get an overwhelming response like Narula and Bhal. Komli Media, a digital advertising and marketing company, struggled to grow in the fledgling web space when it launched in 2006. Its co-founder, 30-year-old Akshay Garg, found that people were sceptical about start-ups. Starting out with “a couple of hundred thousand dollars”, today Komli is listed as one of the top-50 innovative start-ups by Business Week. An Economics post-graduate from Switzerland, Garg worked as an analyst at the United Nations in Geneva and at Deloitte Consulting in Seattle.
For Garg, getting people on board was a tough task as it was hard to find people who could leave the security of a regular job and venture into something new and uncertain. However, Komli soon succeeded in roping in names such as Yahoo, Lycos, HSBC, Shaadi.com, BharatMatrimony.com, Makemytrip.com and Cleartrip.com. Garg and his team are now working on delivering accurate and reliable India-specific web statistics for media planners, media buyers and marketers through an online media planning tool called ViziSense MediaMix.
In Garg’s own words, “The next test for us was to manage our growth as handling change itself was quite a task.”
— With inputs from Manisha Pande