Young Achievers

Alok Kejriwal
The winner takes it all…

Call him a trailblazer! While at college, he developed a transport business, traded on the stock market, transacted in the LC discounting business, before settling down in the family business. At 29, Alok Kejriwal felt that he was not doing enough. It was then that he decided to quit his family business to begin his own. With Rs 5,000 in his pocket, a borrowed laptop, in 1998 he started contest2win.com that is valued at 90 crores. The statistics are mind-boggling. c2w has a registered user base of over 2,95,000 Indian members, with 45,000 new members joining every month, generating over 7.5 million page views per month. Talk about how to run a successful business on the Net!!!!

The inspiration was simply a consumer's frustration married to his business instinct that was translated into a business. Sounds confusing??? He explains, "I was fond of entering contests, but I refused to use competition postcards. I found it difficult to believe that anyone would sit down with a pen and paper to watch television! That's when he thought of creating an electronic post office for receiving contest entries. The overriding thrill was to create a business on the Internet!

Starting off with 9.5 lakhs a part funded by VC, and some of his own savings, he believes that his hard work has paid off. In 1998, the Net mania had not yet infused the Indians, that was a risk he was taking. " That's the main reason why I did not implement a revenue model". It was logical that brand owners would not pay for an untried and untested concept. Instead, I pioneered and implemented a 'media barter' model. I offered contests to my clients for free in the sense that no money changed hands. The contests were in lieu of c2w branding on all forms of communication - print ads, television supers, and, of course, MTV veejays screaming "visit us at c2w.com!"

His first break came with Gunendar Kapur at Hindustan Lever with a contest for Kissan Annapurna Salt - the Bright Kids contest that was launched on August 2, 1998.

The big transition c2w has seen is creating contests around the 'play2win" theme. They are interactive games that are fun and winning sometimes becomes incidental. c2w gives 'credits' for every contest the member enters - so the I-will-not-win syndrome is taken care of!

Alok has seen the ups and downs, but the thought of quitting never crossed his mind. The Nasdaq crash has not affected the dotcom either. He believes that the valuation has risen instead! Talk about the revenue and he just rattles off "We started our revenue stream in April 2000. For the quarter ended June 2000 we clocked a revenue of Rs 83 lakh and saved Rs 7 lakh as profits. In July, we hope to clock Rs 40 lakh as revenue. At our last valuation, c2w was valued at Rs 135 crore".

The reason for success is his attitude "When you run a business like a business, market movements just seem like changing weather. It doesn't matter because work rushes along"!

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