Cycle hai? Bech De! — Story of one of my college days business

I was in my 8th semester of B. Tech at IIT Kanpur and one night, me and my friend Shashwat were walking in the hostel garden and discussing business ideas. Shashwat is a creative and intelligent person and its always lovely talking to him. Shashwat told me that bicycles were a lifeline for IIT Kanpur students, and many students left their bicycles on campus after graduation and didn’t consider selling them to bicycle vendors. That semester, along with Shashwat, many more students were graduating. This observation opened a new path for a business opportunity.

He asked me, if we can run a small business on this observation where we need to sell students’ bicycles to vendors and deduct our commission from that transaction? That time I was working on my other startup, but I’m always excited about new business opportunities, and it seemed like a small and straight-forward business which didn’t require many efforts (we were proved wrong later 😄😄, earning money is never easy!!). I agreed to work with him, and we started our market research.

Student Research

We talked to graduating students, bicycle vendors and conducted surveys by circulating google forms throughout campus and drew the following conclusions.

1. 20% of students donate their bicycles to nearby village children
2. Less than 10% of them sell their bicycle to vendors
3. Among the remaining students, while some of them don’t have cycles in the first place, the large remaining chunk of students simply leave their cycles in their hostel parking lots. We found out that the main reason for this was that students don’t want to get into the hustle and chaos of selling their bicycle.

After doing this research, we defined our solution in such a way where students get a reasonable price for their bicycle just sitting in their rooms. We decided to follow the auctioning model, where we ask students to park their bicycle at a parking spot. After that, we call vendors for auction and let’s say we get maximum 1500 Rs for a bicycle from the auction, then we deduct our commission (which range from 100 Rs — 300 Rs) and ask the student whether s/he agreed to sell bicycle at the remaining price. If the student agrees then a sale is closed, and the vendor gets the bicycle, we get our commission and remaining money is transferred to student’s account. If a student didn’t agree, then we go for further rounds of auctioning on that.

After deciding this plan, we visited nearby bicycle vendors and asked them whether they would like to come for the auction or not and what were their views on this auction.

After a certain point, we realised that the workload is going to increase and we have to onboard one more member with us. I asked my friend Harish to work with us. Harish is a very mature and smart person. After a discussion, he agreed to work with us.

Promotion of our services among students

After getting all set, time to start promoting our services among students, our target was to get at least 150+ responses from students who are willing to sell their bicycles.

Phase 1 — Marketing with conventional methods

We added a QR code scanner of google form in the poster along with other information and shared those posters on social media and pasted these posters in various hostels. We were optimistic, but later we got only 20 responses in the first five days. Everyone was aware of our service, but no one was willing to fill the form.

Phase 2 — E-mail marketing

One day, while taking a shower, I was struck with an idea of personally mailing to each graduating student, stating our service along with the google form. I extracted all the information of graduating students from IITK’s database and sent everyone a personal mail. This idea worked, and responses increased from 20 to 80 in the next 24 hrs.

Phase 3 — Marketing with Vouchers

We are still halfway behind our target. Harish suggested that we approach Bangalore based bicycle vendors for vouchers, since 80% of students will be joining companies in Bangalore. He talked to them, and they agreed to send their coupons. After a few days, we again sent personal mail to students along with exciting bicycle vouchers, and this strategy worked, and responses increased to 160+.

Show Time

Finally, our exams got over, and we just had a time of three days for executing this business. After that, I had a train, and my parents strictly told me to come home along with my sister because I didn’t visit home for a long time.

Our business process was simple, we called students to park their bicycle at a specific parking spot before lunch, and after lunch, we called vendors for bidding. My role was of an auctioneer, Shashwat was supposed to manage our accounts and Harish had to get confirmation from students for their bicycle. Once all auctioning was completed, we took money from vendors, removed our commission and sent the remaining amount to students’ accounts.

Day 1

On day 1, we decided to have a small auctioning and called a few bicycles and a few vendors because no one in our team had prior experience in selling bicycles and dealing with vendors. This day, auctioning went well and we got the experience of real auctioning.

Day 2 and Day 3

We called a large number of students before lunch and vendors after lunch as we planned. The process we defined was going well, but we encountered some challenges at the time of auctioning.

1. Few sweepers along with their children came and requested us to sell bicycles to them at a low price, vendors also requested us on their behalf not to auction some bicycles. So we didn’t auction those bicycles, but still, we managed to get our commission from those sales as student’s agreed at that price.
2. Auctioning is only beneficial when there is a competition among buyers. If they don’t compete, then the bid will not increase. Among vendors, they had a great brotherhood, so we faced this challenge as well but managed to resolve it by bifurcating auction timings accordingly and managed to sell bicycles at a reasonable price.

Final Words

Whatever business you are doing, you must have a strong and united team. If your team is strong, you can come across from any challenge. And any business requires three domains — technology/product, marketing and operations which has to be managed and executed successfully. Your business should generate some value to your end-users, if they are getting value, then they don’t hesitate to pay you.

Finally, the value of any product is proportional to the amount perceived by the consumer. It may be possible that someone will not agree to purchase a product even for a hundred rupees because that product is not creating value for him/her and some agree to give you 1000 Rs for the same product. It’s just a matter of how much value the end-user is perceiving.

It was a fabulous experience in executing this business at the college level. I would like to thank my startup buddies — Harish Goswami and Shashwat Narhatiyar. Without their support, this business would never be executed successfully.