Kicking The Tyres
Automartindia.com

Founded: 2001
Investors: Promoters include Mahindra & Mahindra, HDFC, and Sah & Sanghi
Initial Business Model: Online customer acquisition; offline gratification
Current Business Model: Ditto
Revenues: Rs 125 crore (2004-05)
Net Profit: Break-even level

As easy as ABC: (From L to R) Automartindia's Vinay Sanghi, BharatMatrimony's Janakiraman Murugavel and Contests2win's Alok Kejriwal

This is one company that had it figured out from the start if CEO Vinay Sanghi is to be believed. "We started to roll out our outlets soon after the website was set up," he says. Automartindia, in which auto major M&M has a 72 per cent stake, was created to service the used car market in the country and today boasts 65 outlets across India. It refurbishes used cars and sells them (with warranties); some 7,000 (serious) customers trawl the site every month. "The idea was to create an online community for used car buyers and sellers which we've done but there was never any doubt that the fulfillment had to be offline," says Sanghi matter of factly.

-Priya Srinivasan

Single, But Looking
BharatMatrimony.com

Founded: 1997 as sysindia.com in the US; 2000 in India as bharatmatrimony.com
Investors: 100 per cent owned by the promoter Janakiraman Murugavel
Initial Business Model: A portal for Indians all over the world
Current Business Model: A match-making site with 7.5 million members, presence in 24 countries, and a US-based magazine called Desi Match
Revenues: Rs 45 crore
Net Profit: Not disclosed (gross profit: Rs 4.5-6.75 crore)

If J. Murugavel had had his way back in 1997, sysindia.com would have become a community site for non-resident Indians in the US. However, when he realised that the most visited segment of the site was its matrimonial listings, he quickly moved back to India and founded BharatMatrimony. "The Indian community in the us is relatively small," he says. "The potential here is much larger." Apart from serving as a simple online listing, the site also leverages the power of the net to allow prospective matches to interact. And its revenues come from a service charge for hosting listings.

-Venkatesha Babu

Pure Play
Contests2win.com

Founded: 1998
Investors: ICICI Venture, eVentures. In mobile content company Mobile2Win, the investors are Softbank China and Siemens Mobile Acceleration Fund
Initial Business Model: Hosting online contests
Current Business Model: Facilitating brand interaction through internet, mobile and fixed line telephones
Revenues: $2.5 million (Rs 11.25 crore) in 2004-05 (expects to close 2005-06 with $5 million, Rs 22 crore)
Net Profit: $0.7 million (Rs 3.15 crore) in 2004-05 (expects to close 2005-06 with $1 million, Rs 4.4 crore)

Remember Indian idol, the television talent show where viewers voted to pick a winner from the talent on display? Well, the deluge of SMSes (some viewers voted through messages on their mobile phones) was handled and processed by Mobile2win, the mobile content company promoted by Contests2win. Actually Indian Idol was different because Contests2win usually designs the promotions that evoke a response from the consumer, something founder Alok Kejriwal realised the company needed to do when he first approached fast moving consumer goods major Hindustan Lever Limited with a proposal to host its contests. We make soap, not contests, was the response. "That's when I realised I needed to create the contests and not just host them," says Kejriwal whose company is now designing "adver-gaming" for companies in India, China and Oman. "A key milestone was the dotcom meltdown, which made us realise that we just have to make money; we broke even that year (2001)." It might have been baptism by fire, but it's a lesson Kejriwal won't forget in a hurry.

-Priya Srinivasan

THE BUILDING BLOCKS
Whatever happened to all those hosting and site-building firms?

The dotcom boom spawned a host of companies offering services such as domain registration, website design, maintenance and hosting. Players like Planetasia (one of the earliest; it began operations in 1997) and Netpilgrim were two such. However, such services turned commodities rapidly. Domain registration and hosting became the monopoly of the cheapest service provider. Everyone, it emerged, could build a website. Some companies like Netpilgrim could not weather the storm and shut down operations. Planetasia managed to completely overhaul its business model and is a pale shadow (it has morphed into a services solutions provider or just another code factory) of what it promised to be.

The Right Bid
eBay.in

Founded: 2000
Investors: Newscorp, ICICI Venture, Chrysalis (Now ChrysCapital), Newbridge, Viventures. All of them sold their stake to eBay in 2004 for a total consideration of Rs 250 crore
Initial Business Model: Auction site
Current Business Model: Auction site; also provide platform for small companies to sell products
Revenues: $100 million (gross merchandise value of Rs 460 crore in 2003-04)
Net Profit: Not disclosed

Successful smiles, eh? (From L) eBay India's Avnish Bajaj and Hungama's Neeraj Roy

It's been nothing short of a roller-coaster ride in terms of learnings for the Harvard Business School educated promoters of Baazee.com (now eBay India). First, the realities of the market simply flipped their premise-they went from being a peer-to-peer site for used goods trading to a full-fledged b2c model that today helps a few thousand sellers make a living. With 1.7 million registered users and 125,000 live listings, and a solid on-ground infrastructure to back that (Baazee got courier companies to agree to cash on delivery across 60 cities by sheer dint of the volumes transacted), Baazee effectively ran a high volume b2c business online. Paisa Pay, the company's online payment gateway facility, helped too. "In Mumbai you would get access to the latest mobile gizmo across dealers, but in a smaller city like Indore, it would probably be available in just one store. So buyers here get on our site and have the advantage of choosing between at least five sellers," explains Avnish Bajaj, Chairman, eBay India, drawing out the entire rationale behind the success of the site. Well eBay it is and eBay it isn't.

-Priya Srinivasan

Digital DNA
Hungama.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: ICICI Venture; stake since bought back by promoters
Initial Business Model: Online advertising
Current Business Model: Using digital interface, but supplementing that with a large physical presence in everything from advertising to loyalty programme management.
Revenues: $4 million (Rs 17.6 crore)
Net Profit: Not disclosed

When Neeraj Roy founded hungama.com, he wanted it to be an online advertising company that went beyond banners. Then, a universal trend forced it into a logical diversification. "Globally, companies were moving away from traditional advertising into promotional marketing," says Roy. "So, we began operating in six or seven vectors of which the net became one." Today, the company has completed 1,000 internet campaigns and 500 mobile telephony-based ones (it diversified into that too) for 300 brands. It managed a recent promotion for Unilever's Dove across 12 countries; and it manages Bharat Petroleum's loyalty programme, Petrocard, which covers two million customers. Does Hungama qualify as an e-venture? "The DNA of the company is digital, but we look at promotions, both online and offline, as an integrated offering," explains Roy. That's yes and no.

-Priya Srinivasan

WHO'S BETTER? WHO'S BEST?
Whatever happened to multinational dotcoms?

The lure of a huge market in the making (actually, with 39 million users, it is still being made) drew a number of international horizontal portals and search firms to India in 2000. One of the first to set up shop was Lycos, which entered the Indian market in February 2000; a mere 18 months later it shut shop and sacked its entire 30-member team. AltaVista's experience wasn't very different. Yahoo India and MSN India, however, have survived the slump. "India has been good from Yahoo's perspective, both for sourcing talent and as a market," says Venkat Panchapakesan, CEO, Yahoo India Software Development. Then, the experience of these transnational players and that of Google, which landed much later in India (and which continues to thrive here), reflects the fortunes of their parents rather anything else.

Word Of Mouse
ICICIdirect.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: Incubated by ICICI Ltd (now ICICI Bank)
Initial Business Model: Net-based brokerage
Current Business Model: Ditto
Revenues: Not disclosed
Net Profit: Not disclosed

The Is have it: (From L) ICICIdirect's Anup Bagchi, Indiabulls' Sameer Gehlaut and Indiacar's Ashwin Sanghi

Icicidirect MD & CEO Anup Bagchi sees the universe as one big grid. "We have about 256 grids to fill," he says. "It's all about permutations and combinations while servicing customers with five or six products across four or five geographies." The company's products include equity, derivatives, fixed income products like RBI bonds, postal savings schemes, general and life insurance, and mutual funds. With 350 customer sub-segments, 700,000 customers and 180,000 orders processed every day, Bagchi claims icicidirect is India's largest online broking and financial products company. All customers also have the option of simply picking up the phone to transact too. As for the offline network-a no brainer, really-it's the ICICI Bank one. Now, that's a business synergy if ever there was one.

-Priya Srinivasan

Dot And More
Indiabulls.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: Infinity, Transatlantic, L.N. Mittal Ventures; went for an IPO in September 2004; sold a 33-per cent stake in Indiabulls Financial Services to Farallon
Initial Business Model: Online brokerage
Current Business Model: Online and offline brokerage, real estate, secured and unsecured lending
Revenues: Rs 169.4 crore (2004-05)
Net Profit: Rs 56.7 crore

Was (note the tense) Indiabulls a dotcom company? Yes, because, when it was launched in 1999, it was positioned as a personal finance portal and an e-broking company. The focus was on content and eyeballs, it was funded by new economy VCs such as Infinity and L.N. Mittal Ventures, and it was founded by three young iitians-Sameer Gehlaut, Rajiv Rattan and Saurabh Mittal-just like several other dotcoms of the time. Indiabulls had developed an e-trading platform and boasted that technology was its edge. Circa 2005, the company has transformed itself into a brick and mortar entity, harps on its branches (over 100), and has diversified into other businesses like real estate (it picked up two mills in Mumbai for a combined value of Rs 710 crore). Today, almost half its broking revenues originate online, but no one is likely to call it a dotcom.

-Sahad P.V.

Gone In 60 Seconds
Indiacar.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: M.K. Sanghi Group, Kotak Mahindra Bank
Initial Business Model: Aggregator of information on cars available in the market
Current Business Model: An intermediary between the auto dealer and customer
Revenues: Rs 7.13 crore (2004-05)
Net Profit: Rs 2.88 crore

We thought of ourselves as a purely online aggregator of information," grins Indiacar CEO Ashwin Sanghi, as if the very notion is laughable. Today, the company is an intermediary with a far more lucid business model. Indiacar provides customers with information on all cars available in the market, aggregates demand and taps preferred dealers for substantial discounts. In some cases, claims Sanghi, the discount could be as high as 50 per cent. If the customer wishes to finance the car, Indiacar takes care of that too. That's a true intermediary.

-Priya Srinivasan

Indigenous clicks: (From L) Indiagames' Vishal Gondal, Indiamarkets' Rohan Ajila and IRCTC's M.N. Chopra

No Free Lunch
Indiagames.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: Infinity, IL&Fs. A majority stake was sold to Tomonline of China in 2004. Most recent investors are Cisco and Macromedia
Initial Business Model: Online games site with an advertising-based revenue model
Current Business Model: Games developer
Revenues: $3-5 million (Rs 13.5-22.5 crore) as of January 2005
Net Profit: Upwards of $1.5 million (Rs 6.75 crore)

Red herring magazine (yes, it is still around) may have just included Indiagames in its Asia 100 listing of the top private technology companies in the country, but CEO Vishal Gondal can attribute it all to the fact that his company is no longer a dotcom. In early 2001, he closed down the portal that offered free games and hoped to make money from advertising. Around the same time, he decided to work with leading studios and handset makers to develop games for mobile phones (think Spiderman). "We really started to see growth in the second half of 2003," says Gondal. "That was when mobile gaming took off internationally." Today, more than 50 per cent of Indiagames' revenues come from the international market. And Chinese content firm Tomonline's acquisition of a 62 per cent stake in it (at a company valuation of $22 million or Rs 96.8 crore) has given Indiagames the key to the most happening mobile telephone market in the world.

-Priya Srinivasan

Smart Buying
Indiamarkets.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: Warburg Pincus and Intel Capital
Initial Business Model: B2B marketplace
Current Business Model: e-procurement service provider
Revenues: Not disclosed
Net Profit: Not disclosed

Weak supply chains, poor pricing mechanisms, and lack of accurate information for buyers and sellers sounds like just the setting for an online platform that can cut the flab and bring in greater efficiences. It was with this idea that Rohan Ajila started one of the country's earliest b2b marketplaces. "We realised that industrial buying was not standardised, catalogue or off-the-shelf," says Ajila. "It requires a lot of customisation and knowledge of each industry." While other b2b marketplaces and exchanges have gone belly up, Ajila claims his company's vendor list of 100,000 gives it an edge (he also says Indiamarkets is breaking even). "It is hard for others to replicate our validated vendor base," he says. However, it may actually be Indiamarkets' relationships with customers such as Britannia and Marico (it has become an integral part of their established purchase process) that has helped its cause.

-Venkatesha Babu

Online, On-track
IRCTC.co.in

Founded: 2001
Investors: Part of Indian Railways
Initial Business Model: Online ticket booking (in Delhi online)
Current Business Model: Online ticket booking (across 160 cities including overseas ones); mobile-telephone based ticket booking
Revenues: Rs 10 crore (2004-05)
Net Profit: Rs 90 lakh

Had Indian railways catering and tourist corporation been just another dotcom, it would have advertised the magnitude of its business in terms of billings. However, being part of the government-owned Indian Railways, it neither advertises, nor believes in billing-based calculations. For the record, IRCTC charges users between Rs 40 and Rs 60 for tickets booked online and its revenues of Rs 10 crore come from this (in billing terms, the ticket value would be around Rs 225 crore, which would make IRCTC India's biggest dotcom). Online bookings (IRCTC's charges include delivering tickets at the desired location within the country; overseas customers have to make do with paperless tickets), says M.N. Chopra, Managing Director, IRCTC, have taken off largely on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity. Today, IRCTC issues some 7,000 tickets a day; that's a start.

-Supriya Shrinate

Online Home
Indiaproperties.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: Passion Fund (angel investor), Star TV
Initial Business Model: Listing of properties
Current Business Model: Aggregator of information on the real estate market, but primarily still a listing site
Revenues: Not disclosed
Net Profit: Not disclosed

The i-list and the i-paper: (From L) Indiaproperties' Naresh Malkani and Indiatimes' Mahendra Swarup

In an interview that awaits publication on the site, Indiaproperties CEO Naresh Malkani makes the point that when "our original business plan was drawn up during 1996, there was no such thing as an 'internet business'. Internet was merely a tool. It was 'listing of properties' that was and even today continues to be our business". True to that claim, the site features thousands of listings in almost 200 cities across the country and over 124,000 unique visitors from some 70 countries visit the site every month to search for properties to rent or buy. The listings-based business model has served the company well. Right through the dotcom boom, one famous prognosis (there was actually one for each sector) was that the real estate portal would be the death of intermediaries like the broker. That has not happened and Malkani is unlikely to be surprised by that as he has always maintained that the listings model "does not dispense with intermediaries like brokers; on the contrary these listings (which are mostly provided by brokers and builders) are their way of disseminating information".

-Priya Srinivasan

The Young Lady Of BSZ Marg
Indiatimes.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: Promoted by BCCL, publishers of The Times of India; WestBridge and Sequoia picked up a 15 per cent stake in the company for $36 million (Rs 158.4 crore) in 2005
Initial Business Model: Pure content company with multiple channels on news, astrology, education, movies and the like
Current Business Model: Content-driven advertising, commerce, auctions, ticketing & travel, hotel booking, events, and mobile value-added services
Revenues: Rs 100 crore
Net Profit: Not disclosed

Nowhere in the world does a publishing company directly sell white goods, hawk air tickets, or auction hotel rooms. Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd (BCCL) does, albeit through a new economy avatar, Indiatimes.com. The publisher of the world's most read English newspaper is also one of India's largest e-tailers and sells a variety of goods and services from air conditioners to fridges, mobile phones to air tickets, digital cameras to DVDs, and movie tickets to mobile ring tones. "We are the most diversified internet company in the world," says Mahendra Swarup, CEO, Times Internet, who, the buzz in India Inc. goes, is among the highest paid execs in the country. The man is right: what began as an interactive division of a media company has become a dotcom with a business model that could be described as Yahoo plus Amazon plus eBay plus whatever else.

With the internet advertising model not going anywhere, Indiatimes tweaked its business model in 2001-02, and entered the e-commerce domain. Now it's not just a web company, but a mobile technology (its 8888 service is arguably the most popular mobile content one in the country) and a knowledge events one (it organises seminars addressed by gurus such as Philip Kotler and Edward de Bono) to boot. The WestBridge and Sequoia deal values the company at $240 million (Rs 1,056 crore). That's a bit for a dotcom.

-Sahad P.V.

Just money? Nah: (From L) JobsAhead's Puneet Dalmia, MakeMyTrip's D. Kalra and Naukri's Sanjeev Bikhchandani

The Other One
JobsAhead.com

Founded: 1999
Investors: Chrysalis (now ChrysCapital) and Infinity
Initial Business Model: A youth portal with focus on eyeballs and ad revenues
Current Business Model: A jobs site
Revenues: Rs 15 crore (2003-04)
Net Profit: Rs 6 crore

Jobsahead was one of the four channels of a youth portal, Zipahead.com. When the founders realised that 80 per cent of the traffic was going to the jobs channel, they decided to focus just on jobs. Says Puneet Dalmia, co-founder of JobsAhead, "I am glad that we did it; I don't think we would have survived otherwise." In May 2004, global e-recruiting giant Monster.com acquired JobsAhead for Rs 40 crore. JobsAhead is a success story for two reasons: First, from a burn rate of Rs 80 lakh a month and zero revenues in the first two years, it managed to rejig its business model and was returning a profit of Rs 50 lakh on revenues of Rs 1.25 crore a month last year. Second, after Monster bought out the company, its investors (ChrysCap had invested Rs 10 crore for a 40 per cent stake) and the employees did make money. Still, this was only a fraction of the Rs 300 crore tag a VC put on JobsAhead once.

-Sahad P.V.

E-tripper
MakeMyTrip.com

Founded: April 2000
Investors: In May 2005 Softbank invested $10 million (Rs 44 crore)
Initial Business Model: Inbound, outbound, domestic travel agency
Current Business Model: Largely inbound travel agency
Revenues: Rs 12 crore (2004-05) commission revenue
Net Profit: Rs 1.25 crore

Travel, it can be said with the benefit of hindsight, was one of those things that was bound to succeed as an internet business. In 2000, convinced that he could make an India-based travel agency click on the net, Deep Kalra abandoned his upwardly mobile career at GE and founded MakeMyTrip.com. "As opposed to a traditional model where the customer has to depend on the ability and motivation of the travel agent, an online model like this one immediately shifts the control away from the travel agent to the customer," says Kalra. Still, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Kalra; he realised, soon after MakeMyTrip started operations, that the Indian outbound and domestic markets were not really net-ready. He shifted focus to inbound tourism that today accounts for 90 per cent of the revenues. The man is convinced that outbound and domestic tourism will take off too and plans to use some of the money he raised from Softbank to grow these segments.

-Supriya Shrinate

Home-grown Monster
Naukri.com

Founded: 1997
Investors: Boot-strapped for the first three years; in April 2000, ICICI Venture invested Rs 7.3 crore for a 15 per cent stake
Initial Business Model: Job listings
Current Business Model: Products like listing, response management and a resume database at several price points ranging from Rs 500 to Rs 30 lakh
Revenues: Rs 45 crore (2004-05)
Net Profit: Rs 8.4 crore

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, 42, will be remembered in India's dotcom history as the man who built the country's first profitable dotcom. Naukri registered revenues of Rs 2.5 lakh in the first year, which grew to Rs 20 lakh in the second year. "That's when we knew that we had a business," he recalls. Bikhchandani is the odd man among Indian dotcommers: he runs the business conservatively and has avoided burning money on flashy offices, high salaries, or expensive campaigns. The result: Naukri.com is arguably India's largest e-recruitment portal with 3.5 million registered users and 15,000 corporate clients. And Bikhchandani is eyeing Rs 100 crore in revenues and Rs 20 crore in profits this year.

-Sahad P.V.

Online Medium?
Rediff.com

Founded: 1995
Investors: Draper International, Warburg Pincus, FIIs and retail investors; Listed on NASDAQ
Initial Business Model: Horizontal portal
Current Business Model: Horizontal portal, subscription based e-mail, mobile and e-commerce. Newspaper in the US targeting Indian community (India Abroad)
Revenues: $12.6 million (Rs 56.7 crore in 2004-05)
Net Loss: $1.4 million (Rs 6.3 crore in 2004-05)

Of right stuff and soul mates: (From L) Rediff's Ajit Balakrishnan and Shaadi's Anupam Mittal

When Rediff started operations in India, it boasted a business model that was part Yahoo (horizontal portal) and part Salon (high quality journalism). The site still continues to surprise regulars with Salon-like stories (although less frequently than it used to) but it has, to paraphrase an analyst's recent assessment of Yahoo's turnaround that has made it all things to all people, become a bit of a tart. Advertising is no longer the company's sole source of revenue; it offers a range of services. Think value-added e-mail services. Think mobile e-mail alerts ("You've Got Mail" beeps on your phone). Think instant messaging. And better believe it, a print vehicle in the US targeting the Indian community. Then there's e-commerce. As you can see, patient reader, the point about the analyst was well made. Still, Rediff remains, arguably, the strongest Indian brand online. Someday, this writer hopes, it will revert to its Salon heritage. And make money from it.

-Priya Srinivasan

Five Million Matches
Shaadi.com

Founded: 1997 (Shaadi is part of People Interactive, which runs other verticals as well)
Investors: Promoted by Anupam Mittal and family
Initial Business Model: Matrimonial site
Current Business Model: Matrimonial site with physical network of 'matrimonial centres'
Revenues: $10 million (Rs 44 crore, 2005-06, for parent)
Net Profit: Broke even in FY2005, expects 30 per cent net margins from 2005-06 onwards

When Anupam Mittal, an MBA from Boston College, founded a web development company under the name People Interactive to develop and host dotcoms, "the idea was eventually to have our own web properties and promote them". Then, he met some marriage brokers, got talking to them, and got lucky with his first web property, Shaadi.com. Today, the site boasts five million members, People Interactive has jettisoned its web development business, and Mittal has moved offline with Shaadi Points, branded match-making centres, targeted at, as he explains, "parents of people looking for life partners since in India parents are still very much involved in the process and most of them do not operate the net". The company has 50 such points of presence across the country and expects to have at least 500 in place soon. People Interactive's other forays include Fropper.com, a networking site and Astrolife.com, which is still work in progress. Who says dotcoms are dead?

-Priya Srinivasan

Ssstill there: (From L) Sify's Zacharias, Sulekha's Prabhakar and Sharekhan's Arora (front) and CEO Tarun Shah

India's AOL
Sify.com

Founded: 1998
Investors: Promoted by Satyam. Raised $80 million in 1999 and $140 million in 2000. Listed on Nasdaq
Initial Business Model: ISP, portal, B2B and B2C commerce, eLearning , corporate services, cybercafes
Current Business Model: ISP (corporate services largely, and hosting and internet telephony), cyber cafes, and portal
Revenues: Rs 360 crore (2004-05)
Net Loss: Rs 30 crore

At its prime, the Nasdaq-listed Sify was valued at $10 billion (Rs 44,000 crore). The company was India's AOL and Yahoo rolled into one. The retail ISP business, however, became a commodity-play, B2B and B2C commerce never really took off in India, and in 2001, Sify recorded losses of Rs 130 crore. "We realised that we spread overselves too thin, but back in 1998-2000, anything seemed possible," says George Zacharias, President and coo, Sify. "We re-oriented ourselves quickly." That re-orientation is along three dimensions: corporate services from which it derives nearly 50 per cent revenues, cyber cafes (25 per cent of revenues from some 2,800 cyber cafes), and dial-up access and other services (rest). This decade, some analysts reckon, could well be Sify's.

-Venkatesha Babu

Good Writing
Sulekha.com

Founded: 1998
Investors: Angel investors (Rs 18 crore)
Initial Business Model: Mailing list for alumni of IIM, Calcutta
Current Business Model: Encourages people to write. Site earns income through sale and syndication of content. Also earns money through transaction services, such as online ticketing for organisations and companies, and classifieds.
Revenues: $5.85 million (Rs 25.7 crore)
Net Profit: 20 per cent margins (Rs 5 crore, BT estimates)

The idea of Sulekha originated from an e-mail list, unpretentiously named Dakghar (post office in Hindi) that connected the alumni of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. The list used to carry articles and essays written by the alumni. One alum, Satya Prabhkar, was inspired by the idea. He and his wife created a website in 1998 to publish articles written by Indians from around the world. Today, the site gets 20 million page views every month. Pengiun has even published books on select articles from Sulekha called Sulekha Select and Black, White and Various shades of Brown. The company earns money from classifieds, syndication of content, advertising, and ticketing (for Indian movies and events in the us). Who says there is no money in writing?

-Venkatesha Babu

Paperless Tiger
Sharekhan.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: Sripal Morakhia (SSKI) & Fly, HSBC, Carlyle, Intel
Initial Business Model: Online brokerage
Current Business Model: Online-offline brokerage
Revenues: Rs 100 crore
Net Profit: Not disclosed

A year after its launch, Sharekhan had to cope with the double-whammy of the dotcom bust and a stock market scam. It was then that the company took some firm decisions such as opting for an offline presence. Over the last three years, the company has expanded its presence to about 300 outlets across 130 cities and offers products such as equity, equity derivatives, commodities, and, soon, mutual funds. Sharekhan has 130,000 broking customers, and adds 7,000-8,000 every month. "This whole business model goes with technology," says Jaideep Arora, the director in charge of online business at Sharekhan. "The online business represents 10 per cent of the overall business on an exchange like the NSE (National Stock Exchange of India). In the us that is about 35 per cent," he adds bullishly. Or should that read tigerishly?

-Priya Srinivasan

Banking On Travel
Traveljini.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: ICICI Venture, Rediff
Initial Business Model: B2C travel portal
Current Business Model: B2C travel portal, booking engine, complete holiday packages, travel loans and corporate events
Revenues: Rs 4.5 crore
Net Profit: Not disclosed (3-5 per cent net margin)

Travelling angel and 'Your' man: (From L) ICICI Venture's Renuka Ramnath and YourManInIndia's P. Sundar

Traveljini was always clear about one thing: the site would have an online booking engine, everything else would be built around that. So with ICICI as the payment gateway (it helps that ICICI Venture is an investor) the company has been carrying out online booking for leisure travel (which is what they specialise in) since 2001. Of the site's 145,000 registered users, about 10 per cent have availed of the online booking facility and in the next two-three years, Vijay Fernandes, Vice President, Traveljini, expects another 15-10 per cent to do so. Meanwhile offline activities like organising corporate events, conferences and meetings keep the cash register ringing.

-Priya Srinivasan

A Country Of Parents
YourManInIndia.com

Founded: 2000
Investors: Promoted by the TTK Group
Initial Business Model: Healthcare facilities to India resident relatives of NRIs
Current Business Model: A host of services for NRIs, including sourcing certificates and documents, delivering gifts, and doing background checks on prospective spouses, to something as esoteric as arranging priests for a marriage
Revenues: Rs 2.5 crore (BT estimates)
Net Profit: Rs 1.25 crore-Rs 1.5 crore (BT estimates)

To people south of the Vindhyas, TTK is a name synonymous with trust and longevity (the group makes the Prestige brand of pressure cookers that last for at least a generation). The story goes that when some of TTK Prestige's executives were travelling in the us to promote their products (in case you hadn't noticed, dear reader, the Valley is crowded with it-types from Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka), they came across Indians struggling to cope with the healthcare needs of elderly relatives back home. Thus was born ttkbharatplanet.com, which later morphed into YourManInIndia, but as coo P. Sundar says, "There were problems like health insurance being largely a public sector domain and lack of national chain of hospitals." In December 2003, the company refocussed itself as a local contact for NRIs, an entity that could liaise with local administrative bodies for documentation, handle divorces and civil disputes, even deliver gifts. Now, buoyed by the site's success, Sundar is considering venturing into China and the US (getfriday.com, which says it can get tickets for the big Chicago Bulls game, for instance, is just up).

-Venkatesha Babu