‘Chose Flipkart because at $8,it sounded cool,affordable’

“We searched for a domain name for our website for two days,and eventually chose Flipkart because at just eight US dollars,it sounded cool and was affordable,” Bansal said.

The young entrepreneur kept the students of the Management Development Institute (MDI) in Gurgaon spellbound as he shared anecdotes at the Idea Exchange organised by The Indian Express at the college campus on Tuesday.

Bansal is the chief operating officer and co-founder of flipkart.com,a popular online store for books and mobile phones that operates from six Indian cities and has at least 3,000 employees.

Looking for a cheap domain name was not the only problem Bansal faced while launching his start-up. “We started out from an apartment,so the banks wouldn’t give us a business account. That was quite a problem,” he said.

Originally from Chandigarh,both Binny Bansal and and the other co-founder Sachin Bansal passed out from the Indian Institute of Technology in 2005 as computer science graduates.

They both worked at amazon.com,but quit and decided to start an e-commerce company after doing intense research on the market space.

“Working for big companies wasn’t making sense. Sachin is from a business family,so we decided that we should start a business together. Our vision was to build a large e-commerce company,” Bansal said.

Responding to questions by management students,Bansal stressed on how starting the right venture at the right time is critical for its success. “If we had started the same thing (flipkart.com) in 2002,it may not have worked at all,” he said.

Bansal said his company decided to go to the market with books because there are no taxes on books. “There’s also no breakage problem and it is easy to convince people to pay Rs 300 to Rs 400 online,as opposed to convincing them to buy expensive items like electronic gadgets,” he said.

Bansal also shared with students his company’s expansion plans,saying at present flipkart.com plans to expand only in terms of products and services and not geographically. “We are focussing on the 100 million internet users in the country. We largely depend on word-of-mouth publicity and customer’s trust,” he said.

MDI students said they gained valuable management insights into the way a young successful entrepreneur works.