Betting on play-to-bidding

In less than three months, a young enterprise has got 25,000 netizens hooked. That’s not all, the 29-year-old, who has started a play-to-bid auction site, has had to turn down several requests from private equity firms which want to invest in the venture.

Conceived by Kunal Mittal, the Internet-savvy founder and CEO of 90bids.com, the site is based on people’s aspirations and the reach of social media. Kunal was keen to start something of his own, something that would be exciting, totally user centric, built on the strength of social media sites, involve lots of college goers and ordinary people and give them deals that they only dream of.

At 90bids.com users can bid for as low as ₹10 and win products and services of their choice offered in 90 different categories. So, you have a youngster from Kolkata finding himself in possession of a Delhi-London-Delhi ticket for ₹250, an office goer able to take her family to a fancy dinner at ₹100, a housemaker with a premium spa voucher for ₹350 and a student winning a year long gym membership for ₹300.

As the weeks go by, the inventory on the site too is growing. Offers of tablets, beauty products, jewels, mobile phones, mobile recharge and watches have been added to airline tickets, hotel stays, spa vouchers and premium event tickets. “Soon you will see users bidding for fuel recharge coupons, movie tickets, we even have cars up for auction,” says Kunal.

Kunal is obviously not a novice to commerce. He comes from a family that dabbles in the steel and coal business. Though he is part of his family enterprise, Kunal always wished to fish in fresh waters, especially in the online world.

And now he is delighted with the outcome of his start-up. “Ever since my days at Delhi University, I had been thinking of Internet-based models that could be positive for people and put them in the successful zone. Whoever comes to the site wins something or the other,” he explains. Kunal’s site has been put together with the obvious knowledge that companies want to be promoted and in return are willing to pay in kind (freebies). And when all such firms come together on a single platform that attracts a large number of users, their goodwill increases and so does the chance for a user to win a product or a service.

“For instance,” explains Kunal, “if a travel agent gives me three tickets free for a Delhi-Bangalore trip. Throughout the auction of the tickets on my site the travel agent’s name is flashed and the winners too have to go to him to collect their booty. In one such case in return for ₹12,000 worth of tickets, the agent clocked Rs 1 lakh of business. Why will he not come back to the site again?”

Is bidding akin to gambling? The young entrepreneur says there is no comparison between the two because though there is an element of luck and a user may lose the bid to another user, but in return for his payment, he will get something or the other.

To make sure that the site only attracts genuine customers and that the same person doesn’t keep bidding all the time, 90bids.com has put in place safeguards that immediately inform them if someone is trying to change the rules. For instance, a user can only play-to-bid a 24-hour gap and only one member of a family can play at a time.

Kunal has got a strong revenue model in place based on users buying tokens to bid. Though fresh entrants to the site are initially given 20 tokens gratis, thereafter they have to pay ₹10 for each.

There is also a 30-day period for users to avail themselves of the bids they have won; if unclaimed, the offer is recycled into a fresh bid for new users.

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