Small Business IDEAS in Bangalore
With job uncertainty increasing by the day, there has been a flurry of start-ups in the recent years. While no start-up is ever guaranteed to succeed, innovative ideas have come to light in the process.
Ever thought of leaving your job to start a venture of your own? From selling honey to environment friendly detergents, ET takes a look at seven simple start-up ideas that helped their founders earn lakhs and crores.
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Under the Mango Tree: Rs 60 lakh turnover by selling honey
For Vijaya Pastala, her dream enterprise, Under the Mango Tree (UTMT), took 14 years to shape up. After acquiring a post graduate degree in regional planning from the MIT, US, in 1993, Pastala returned to India and stumbled upon the name for her future venture.
When her son was born in 2003, she changed career tracks. It took Pastala about a year to zero in on exactly what she wanted to do. According to her, the concept of honey is generic in India, where the packaging seldom specifies the kind of honey being sold.
The business model of the company is simple. The sourced honey is tested, certified, packaged and labelled in a production plant on rented premises in an industrial area, in Mumbai. The packaged products are sold online, delivered to over 100 shops in Mumbai and Bangalore, as well as to a lot of B2B partners like Taj Hotels. In fact, this month, the company has tied up with Nature's Basket to supply in the National Capital Region. Over the next few years, UTMT plans to have a pan-India presence.
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IndiBlogger: A Rs 1 crore venture
For most people, blogging serves as a good pastime, a forum to air or read views and opinions. However, for four yuppies from Chennai, harnessing the power of blogs has proved to be a money-minting venture—a Rs 1 crore business, to be precise.
Launched in August 2007, IndiBlogger.in started as a free blogging platform for Indians. However, the founders—Renie Ravin, Karthik DR, Vineet Rajan and Anoop Johnson—had a bigger game plan: to mobilise the blogosphere, a nascent field at the time, so that companies and brands could engage with their customers.
Luckily for the founders, they found an angel investor in their friend Nitin Bindal, who chipped in with the seed capital of Rs 32 lakh. The money was spent on building infrastructure and marketing.
Here's how IndiBlogger works: Registering one's blog is free of charge, but members must publish at least five blog posts to continue to be a part of the community. The company's eight-strong team handles support and moderation from Chennai and Bangalore. The revenue comes from connecting brands and bloggers via unique blogging contests and meets, which are organised periodically across the country.
Today, their clients include Lakme, Castrol, Apollo Hospitals, Mahindra & Mahindra, Cleartrip, Vodafone, Dove, Samsung, Surf Excel and Fiat, to name a few.
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IIM graduates' detergent Krya averages sales of Rs 1 lakh a month
Meet Chennai-based Preethi Sukumaran and Srinivas Krishnaswamy, spouses-turned-business partners, both IIM graduates who opted out of the corporate rat race on the same day, 31 January 2009, with one sure idea: to work on an environment-related concept.
The couple, who got married in 2003, decided to see the world while waiting for inspiration to strike. THey did not set up the venture in the traditional way, that is, first launching and then promoting it. In fact, they did the reverse. "After registering our company, while we were looking at sourcing our product, working on the website design and other back-end issues, we started a Facebook page and a blog, " says Sukumaran.
