Six unusual & successful online startups

03 Oct 2013, 12:31 PM IST

1 / 7 Six unusual & successful online startups ET Bureau



With job uncertainty increasingly lingering on the minds of people, many in the last few years have taken the startup route. Innovative and unusual business ideas have flourished giving way to money-minting ventures springing up across India.



From catering to your ticketing, food and educational needs, to finding jobs for you...here is a look at six unusual startups that are raking in money:

2 / 7 MeriCAR.com Setting up a date to get your car serviced is mostly a time-consuming and expensive affair. To alleviate the tedium, Delhi-based Rakesh Sidana came up with a one-stop web portal, MeriCAR.com, for car service and repairs in the National Capital Region.



Here's how it works: you register on the site, fill in your car details, basic personal information, choose a booking date, a convenient time and the service required. Then you pick a dealer or workshop from the given list—it throws up results close to your residential address, which are screened on the basis of customer reviews and quality checks by the MeriCAR team—and click on send enquiry.



You will get a call from the dealer/workshop in no time. The icing on the cake? The site offers discounts of 10-50% for services such as tyre replacement, batteries, car cleaning, and the like.

3 / 7 RentMyText.in Engineering is an expensive degree, not just in terms of the tuition fee, but also the prohibitive cost of books. Realising how it impacted the students from low socio-economic groups, Bangalore-based Vishesh Jayawanth decided to do something about it.



The result? RentMyText.in, India's first online book renting store for engineering students.



Here's how the website works: students can pick any book depending on the semester, pay a refundable deposit, which is the maximum retail price of the book, and have it delivered at their doorstep in 1-5 days for a price. There is no limit on the books that can be rented and there are two payment options: cash on delivery, or transfer money to the company's account. After the semester ends, one needs to return the books in mint condition to have 60-70% of the deposit refunded.



While it results in a saving of up to 60% of the cost of books for students, it also offers a green advantage—saving on paper.

4 / 7 AbhiBus Sudhakar Chirra's AbhiBus facilitates the booking of bus tickets. A major part of the seed capital, nearly Rs 8 lakh, went into the development of the ticket booking software.



Expectedly, the first year of operations was full of challenges. Chirra had a hard time convincing the bus operators to have a ticket quota for AbhiBus. In fact, he did not sell a single ticket for the first four months. He got his first breakthrough in January 2008, when several bus operators agreed to integrate their bookings with our software.



It caters to the entire bandwidth of the industry, ranging from government and private operators to individual travellers. It has enabled the vehicle tracking solutions system for the Rajasthan State Road Transport Corporation.

5 / 7 4thAmbit After graduating from Model Engineering College, Kerala, in 2000, batchmates Ruby Peethambaran, Jikku Jolly and Shyam Menon went their separate ways in pursuit of higher education or corporate careers. But the trio promised to keep in touch.



Little did they know that their paths would cross again a decade later, and they would together set up an institution-based networking portal called 4th Ambit.



Here's how 4th Ambit works: The company approaches various colleges and sets up hierarchical, structured networks for them, which the team calls 'circuits'. To do this, the team collects the education information of every student who studied in the college as well as the current batch. From there on, they send invites to these students, and ask them to join 4thAmbit.



The students get a login ID and are connected on three levels -their classmates, their batch mates and the larger alumni network. Members can endorse each other to ensure that they have the necessary validations, which recruiters so desire. As the circuits are close-ended, a circuit of one college does not get involved with the other. The idea is to provide validated, certified resumes to recruiters, thereby ensuring a general high standard of efficiency.

6 / 7 Explara.com It was listening to a South Asian radio station in the United Kingdom that triggered the idea of starting an online ticketing service to eBay employee Santosh Panda in 2009.



During a startup event in Bangalore, he met Google India managing director Rajan Anandan who introduced him to Ravi Gururaj and Raj Chinai, cofounders of HBS Angels. Anandan with HBS Angels looped in Srijan Capital and Blume Ventures, who were already interested. All four angels co-invested an undisclosed sum in the startup.



The company's revenues come from a commission of 1.99% on every ticket sold, coupled with a Rs 15 'convenience fee.' For customisation, the commission goes as high as 7%. In India, online ticketing and event management is a Rs 5,000-crore industry, growing at the rate of 20-25% every year. However, events is also a seasonal market in India.



The company will now start exploring markets, such as Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and the Middle-East, in the next six months. Worldover, event management is a $25 billion (Rs 1.5 lakh crore) industry, the largest player being Ticketmaster, which has over $10 billion (Rs 60,000 crore) in revenues.