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As a third-year IIT student, Prabhkiran Singh started selling flavoured lassi. The venture failed, but taught him many important lessons about life. The ‘lassiwallah’ now runs a 5 crore youth-focused online business.
In the year 1999, Kanwal Rekhi set up an incubator at IIT Bombay – one of the first initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship on campus. Students and faculty came forward with ideas related to technology – algorithms, robotics, semi-conductors, internet solutions, to name a few.
Bhai, IIT hai – kuch dimaag wala kaam to hona chahiye!
Along came Prabhkiran Singh – a lad from Ludhiana who started a lassi business. Right outside the IIT gate. ‘Khadke Glassi’ made waves on campus and even became a national news item.
The common refrain was, “Bhai, yehi karna tha toh IIT kyon join kiya. This is waste of a seat!”
As luck would have it, the lassi business tanked. But Prabhkiran teamed up with his batchmate, Siddharth, and got into the T-shirt business. Which then morphed into Bewakoof.com – an irreverent brand for the youth.
Today, the young entrepreneurs sell funky clothing and accessories online – with orders crossing 1 crore a month. The Bewakoof brand has largely been built through its Facebook page with over 1.4 million followers (none of them paid).
You don’t need to be an IIT grad to start such a business – you need to be confident, you need to be bold. You need to be different and break the mould.
‘Success’ is like JEE, except there’s no coaching. Just choose the door you want and keep knocking!
TWO IDIOTS
Prabhkiran Singh & Siddharth Munot (IIT Bombay)
BEWAKOOF BRANDS
Prabhkiran Singh was born and brought up in Ludhiana.
“My dad was in business and my mom is a housewife. I studied in Sacred Heart Convent School.”
After Class 10, Prabhkiran went to Kota for IIT coaching. Actually, at that time, he had no idea ki IIT hai kya. He just went because his friends were going.
“It was only later that I came to know the importance of IIT, so I became serious and studied hard for it.”
Prabhkiran opted for civil engineering – not the most preferred branch. But he was excited because it had always been his dream to go to Mumbai.
The first and second year at IIT Bombay were fairly routine. In the third year came the time for internship. At IIT, this is an important time, when students start thinking , aage kya karna hai? (what should I do in life?). While most of his batchmates were choosing between finance, consulting and technical jobs, Prabhkiran was on a completely different trip.
He did apply to the first company which came on campus – Deutsche Bank – but did not get shortlisted. Although disappointed, he was also relieved. The pre-placement talk made the job sound so constrained and boring – was he really cut out for it?
“Bas, after that, I stopped applying to jobs. I decided to start something of my own.”
But where does one start? One day at Crossword Bookshop, Prabhkiran came across a book called Stay Hungry Stay Foolish. It featured the success stories of entrepreneurs from IIM Ahmedabad. He bought it, read it and re-read it.
“Stay Hungry was my first non-fiction book and it inspired me a lot. After that, I read Polyester Prince (Dhirubhai Ambani’s story), It Happened in India (Kishore Biyani) and many others.”
The first thing you need to start a business is a business idea. Prabhkiran spent 3-4 months looking for that ‘killer idea’, but almost anything he thought of had already been done. Or didn’t excite him.
Around this time, Prabhkiran happened to make 2-3 train journeys. During these trips, he happened to sample ‘flavoured lassi’ – strawberry lassi in Pune and rose lassi in Agra. Now, this was interesting!
Lassi flows in the veins of every Punjabi puttar but it is either sweet or salty. The idea of lassi with flavours caught the young man’s fancy.
“I was fascinated by the Starbucks story and in India we have Jumbo King. I thought we can do something similar, but with lassi.”
It was October 2009. Prabhkiran roped in his best friend Himanshu Dhiman to work on the idea.
Thanks to some events organised by the IIT Bombay E-Cell, the boys knew about something called a
‘business plan’.
At that time, everyone was like, if you have a good idea, you will get funding. If you have a good business plan, you can go out and start!”
But how does one actually make this plan? You can enter any number on that Excel sheet but how do you know it’s ‘right’? There is no logic, no formula which tells you pehle mahine kitna bikega, doosre mahine kitna bikega. The boys were mighty confused.
“Then we thought, during the summer break, we will raise 2 lakh from friends and family and with that, we will start an outlet.”
They started planning kya karenge, kaise karenge – slowly, steadily. But everything changed on 18 February 2010. Prabhkiran met a gentleman called Devashish Chakravorty who gave him a piece of practical advice.
“If you have a product, start selling it!”
Wow – could it be as simple as that? Then and there, Prabhkiran decided to ‘just do it’ and set a deadline of 3 days. Himanshu contributed his monthly pocket money ( 5000) and Prabhkiran did the same ( 3000). With this grand sum, they bought a cheap mixer, a blender and some utensils. But where would they sell from?
The boys roamed up and down the streets of Powai, looking for premises. But shop rentals ranged from 20,000 to 40,000 per month, with a 2 lakh deposit to boot. Way beyond their reach.
“Then we tried the subzi mandi outside the IIT gate but even that place is reserved for hawkers who pay BMC, so it did not work out.”
Finally, they stumbled upon a newly opened cake shop whose business was yet to pick up. There was a small space outside the shop which was unutilised. The boys approached the owner with an offer – let us use this space, we will pay you 6000 as ‘rent’.
“We gave 2000 advance and said, ‘Once we start earning, we will pay the rest.’ And he agreed to that!”
There were still a couple of problems, like what would be the menu? For the next 4-5 days frantic experiments were conducted in the hostel room using curd stolen from the student mess. Friends tasted and reviewed various flavours before the final 4 were selected – chocolate, strawberry, rose and grape (ice cream optional).