The "net" income

[Kalyan]

The "net" income

"If you have a product or a service, that can sell, both, online or offline and if you compare the cost of investment or marketing etc, the online model, by far, would give your product more visibility and generate more sales as compared to the old brick and motor model," says Hiten Turakhia, Managing Director, of an online library that offers a wide selection of books to its readers at low costs.

Turakhia belongs to today's league of new age entrepreneurs who believe in the power of the internet. "A lot of opportunities are opening up in the online domain as many funding companies are showing keen interest towards investing in web-based startups, today," opines Turakhia.

"During our college days, we found the entire process of renting books highly inconvenient and purchasing the book, at all times, due to its lack of availability in the library was certainly not the solution. The concept of renting DVDs through a DVD rental website had caught on, a couple of months ago and immediately, I realised that the same model could be applied in case of books as well," he adds.

Thus, Librarywala was started in Mumbai, in 2007.

Through the online medium, Turakhia hopes to remove all the hassles that one usually faces in a quest to foster the habit of reading like high costs of books, lack of time to purchase books from bookstores, unavailability of certain books, etc. But setting up the library was not an easy task. "The customers' (read: readers) tastes are diverse and building up an inventory of books to cover every genre of books and cater to a wide cross section of readers were major obstacles that had to be overcome," says Turakhia.

"Also, this being a unique business proposition, there were people (read: employees) skeptical to join our business. However, eventually, after the implementation of a thorough training programme, we were able to keep employee skepticism at bay," adds Turakhia.

Even after starting the operations, increasing our customer base was a huge hurdle. Winning their confidence and persuading them to join the library by paying the membership fee was a challenge for Turakhia and his team, because people were unconvinced about the credibility of the company.

"We realised that these grievances had to be addressed and this could only be achieved if we carried out our services in a transparent manner. Through various modes of communication, we reached out to our customers and invited them over to our huge physical library to clarify their uncertainties," informs Turakhia. And since that day, Turakhia hasn't looked back and enjoys his current stint as an entrepreneur.

Ticket to entrepreneurship

"When a techie thinks of starting something on his/her own, it's natural that he/she displays a keen interest towards exploring opportunities in the online domain," believes Phanindra Sama, CEO, redBus.in, an online travel portal for booking bus tickets which was started by three BITS-Pilani alumni in 2006.

"The concept of redBus was born out of a need. Once, I was trying to book a bus ticket to go to my home town, during Diwali, but couldn't get a ticket and had to cancel my trip. On exploring options, I discovered that the operations in this industry were unsophisticated and unorganised. I discussed this with my friends and after further research, we saw a huge opportunity in front of us," explains Sama.

The first medium that came to their minds, who were working with leading IT firms in Bangalore, was the internet, to launch their business.

"In those days, there was a lot of activity happening in the travel space on the web with several companies gaining immense prominence. Also, the cost of creating the solution was lower and conceivable to us techies," says Sama.

The team did a lot of ground work before initiating the business and also interacted with a lot of bus operators to understand their operations and created the first version of the software.

The software was intended to provide tools to the bus operator to manage his/her inventory efficiently. Timely help came from The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) Bangalore chapter when Sama's concept got selected for mentoring from TiE.

"The mentoring from TiE mentors helped us further refine our plan and strategy and we focused on creating a customer-centric travel brand; thus redBus.in was born," says Sama.

But the initial days were not so easy for redBus. It was not easy to change the mindset of bus operators who were used to dealing with their traditional brick-and-mortar travel agents. Marketing the task was also difficult.

"After we launched the website, it was difficult to get the first set of customers quickly, as we had wishfully hoped. We had to reach out to each of our potential customers and market the product ourselves," informs Sama.

However, Sama was confident that if people start using the website and start liking it, its popularity can be escalated through word of mouth. "My gut proved to be true and people starting spreading the word and the number of hits on our website began to increase," adds Sama.

Sama is a happy person today and vouches for the growing internet business.

"The future is bright for online businesses. Consumers are realising the value addition of online businesses. Today, they can not only read reviews of the product before they buy but also compare prices from multiple vendors at the click of a button. The value addition along with decreased internet costs and multi-lingual offerings on the internet would fuel the growth of online businesses in India," believes Sama.

With the growing internet penetration and increasing number of mobile phones equipped with internet accessing capabilities, Indian online businesses are set for a steady growth.

Also, the growing number of entrepreneurs who believe that a presence in the virtual world is a must is also changing the entrepreneurial landscape of the country.

source : economic times

[ganeshbala]

Good information

Thanks for the post

[dhoni]

now a days
most of us selling and getting products from online itself
that can grown net income