IDEAS

PHOKATCOPY - He is no copycat

BY HIMANSHU BHAGAT


Past life All of 23, Harsh Narang graduated last month from the Indian Insti- tute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, with a five-year MTech degree in math and computing. As he puts it, student life was easy and the course-load, manageable. It left him with time to try out other things--help out an IIT professor with research in mathematical finance, intern at a university in Germany, work at an interna- tional investment bank's trading desk, and intern with a tech start-up firm on campus.
Working at the bank and the tech start-up were contrasting experiences--the bank was a 9-5 job in a structured environment in an air-conditioned building that housed 1,100 people and the start-up was a room with “six peo- ple and six machines“. Narang loved the vibe at the start-up.
Eureka moment Towards the end of Narang's third year, it was time to come up with an original business idea for one of those B-school busi- ness plan competitions where the team with the best idea gets a nice wad of cash. He and four of his IIT batchmates got to work. “We started going through our `pain points',“ he says. “Pain point“ is not management- speak; it merely refers to things that can be such a pain in day- to-day college life--such as hav- ing to shell out money for all that photocopying a student has to do. “About 500 sheets a month,“ Narang estimates.

And an idea was born--why not let college students photo- copy for free and stick an ad for a chocolate bar on the other side of the sheet? That way, the choc- olate maker pays for the photo- copy and the student can use the money saved for movies and pizza. The clincher, says Narang, was when he came up with the name for the service--Phokat- Copy. It sounded just right.
“With that name, I knew I had to go with it,“ he says. “It was gut feeling.“ Genesis The PhokatCopy idea won Narang and his team five B-Plan prizes. Somewhere along the line, while pitching it to judges at various competitions, Narang actually got sold on it himself. “I realized that I had to try this plan out in the real world,“ he says. “Otherwise I would always have this regret.“

In June 2009, while still in his final year, he, along with three friends, set up PhokatCopy Stu- dent Advertising Pvt. Ltd. The initial capital came from his par- ents and the money they had won in B-Plan competitions. The main task ahead was to sell his business model to potential advertisers--companies that would want to target the college crowd. By end-July they had their first customers--Career Launcher, Café Coffee Day, Nir- ula's and Fastrack.

His original plan after gradua- tion was to intern with a bank in Germany. But he got increas- ingly drawn into the busi- ness--the day he collected his German visa, he cancelled his plane ticket to Germany. The same day PhokatCopy got a prized customer--Apple Inc.
This was in August.
Reality check There have been hurdles aplenty. Narang points out that making cold calls to companies' marketing departments is never fun; the response is often indif- ferent or even rude. Nine out of 10 people don't have the time to listen to you. To keep them- selves motivated, the team members maintained a pleasant, informal working environment and gradually learnt how to make a pitch.

“We reached out to a lot of advertisers,“ says Narang, “and finally managed to convince some of them.“ The biggest change in plan was to not make the service free upfront. Phokat- Copy operates through photo- copying shops around campuses in Delhi and there was nothing to prevent the photocopy guy from getting free sheets from them and just giving it to the raddiwallah.

S o t h e m o d e l w a s refined--now a student pays for his PhokatCopies and gets a scratch card in return. He then registers on the PhokatCopy site, keys in the unique scratch card number and voila! The money paid for photocopies gets added to the student's cellphone pre- paid account. So if you spend `40 on photocopying 20 sheets, you get `40 credit on your cell- phone prepaid card. Narang says 95% college students have prepaid phone cards. So it's a perfect fit.

Narang also realized that it made business and ethical sense to use environment-friendly, wood-free paper (made from sugarcane pulp) and eco- friendly printer ink.
Plan B Harvard Business School loves to take failed entrepreneurs for its MBA programme! Secret sauce Passion. “I had an idea and I had to make it work,“ Narang says.
Entrepreneurship is not a glam- orous affair but he loves the idea of making an “impact“, as he puts it. Already catering to 50 colleges in Delhi, Narang esti- mates that PhokatCopy is reach- ing 75,000 students. Soon, the service will also be provided to 20 colleges in Mumbai.

EMAIL
himanshu.b@livemint.com