What an Idea!! (Highly profitable ideas)

I marveled at some of the ideas that some great thinkers in recent past thought of and made windfall profits. 'Windfall'- the phrase used for ultra high profits is making way for Indian businesses. These ideas were unconventional, properly planned and well executed. They had guaranteed profits. Lets look at some of the ideas I came across.

1. Telenor buying 60% stake at Unitech

What began as a haphazard exercise to auction off precious spectrum to telecom companies, (later changed to licensing under a fixed fee, )did marvels for this company.

It applied for spectrum in 22 circles and got spectrum in 6 circles at 1650 crores. Later Finnish telecom company Telenor bought 60% stake at Unitech Wireless at 6120 crores, six times the company bought its license for operations. Now that's a massive profit and without even spending any money on infrastructure, branding, marketing, costing etc. Everything is on paper, and you still manage to get close to four times profit.

Now lets take a look at the series of events. Very first, Unitech decides to venture into telecommunications, applies for a license in all circles. Manages to raise 1650 crores for spectrum and much more, close to 8000 crores for infrastructure through banks. Govt. allocates spectrum in 6 circles. Telenor approaches Unitech for equity, later buys 60% stake in Unitech Wireless for 6120 crores.

Its anyone's guess that how many companies manage to make such profits with so little spending in so little time.

2. The new 7 wonders of the world

This was a great eye-catching concept, where the entire world would vote for the ancient monuments to decide the new 7 wonders of the world. The idea was simple. It required an initial investment to setup the polling systems viainternet and phone. The founder Weber was a smart man. for every call and sms , some small proportion of money went to him. Considering the amount of votes and that this was the largest poll in terms of participation, he had a huge amount in doing just about nothing.

The competition gathered momentum and millions of votes were counted. In many countries, the competition was supported by telecom operators like Brazil and made it free of cost to cast a vote. In India, we had plenty of news channels, radio and celebrities coming out to pledge people to vote and many million votes poured in.

No check was put into place to check multiple casting and was declared null and void by some countries and institutions. The founder got huge sums and people acted in frenzy to vote for their country's monument.

So the idea was a very clever one and guaranteed profits, just the initial branding and advertising is required and you have huge profits. It may be counted as one of the largest money-making venture in which general people were involved with no public purpose.2.

3. Hotmail

Hotmail's name is always going to count whenever the history of internet is talked about. It was one of the major inventions of the internet and changed the scenario forever. In 1997 Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith co-founded Hotmail. There business strategy was simple "make it free".
At that time, only paid email service existed in the form of ISP's giving out email accounts and MS doing some business. It was so restricted that it was only used for business purpose.

Hotmail came as a big boost to advertising industry which was beginning to grow as dot com business was booming at that time. The second reason why hotmail become popular and so widely used is the fact that you need another person to have a hotmail account to send email to. Therefore, you create an account, urge your friends and family to get one so that both of you can communicate. So the word of mouth specially works here and it is the best marketing strategy.

Later Hotmail went to microsoft and large sum of money in their founder's kitty, enough to survive them for their lifetime and for future generations as well. This idea has inspired and created so much out of the Internet. Its contribution has been phenomenal.