8 Ways to Get Your Web Startup Rolling While Still in College

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The art of money is the art of enterpriseWhile I certainly miss sitting in the parking lot of my college and planning the next big thing in business with my best friend, I also realize these days that I could have put my time to better use then. The best thing that colleges in India give you is ample of free time. Just see Preshit’s number of tweets if you don’t believe me. :P Actually you could do well to see all the stuff he does while still being in college, so technically this could have been a post best done by him. That and Rajiv’s post on Saturday Startups sort of is making me write this post now.

Nevertheless, I will keep this blabber aside and get straight to the point.

Presenting 8 ideas to go be a startup while still taking money from your parents, with a little help from the web:

Start a Web Hosting Company

Though internationally the web hosting market is saturated, it still presents a lot of opportunity locally especially in untapped markets like India. The good part is that a lot of these international players have reseller systems that you can use if you know a little about servers and web hosting in general. They can even take care of the support you need to provide to your customers. The best place to start - your college festival site of course. :)

Become a Content Provider

Visit forums like Digital Point and you will be inundated with the amount of article writing and graphic design work that these guys want to freelance. Get a couple of friends along and start a small company providing content and providing it fast, you anyway don’t have much to do otherwise, so you can.

Start a blog that makes money Start an Online Magazine and Then Another

Don’t start a blog about making money, make a blog that makes money instead. Google has been kind enough to let us mere mortals also earn a bit of their revenue, so make the most while the hay shines. Point to note here though is that a blog on why you think the system needs to change and parents don’t listen might not be the best bet in this case. But why you think Pamela Anderson is hot might just click, maybe Rushabh can talk about it better.

That’s about blogs, but I feel you can better invest your time and make an online magazine. Platforms like wordpress or more powerful frameworks like Drupal makes it really easy to start one and can be the perfect launchpad for a media company.

Start a Forum/Community/Website

I have personally seen three of my friends start a forum when they were in college and have now become successful companies. Though with open source and web 2.0 making their mark you can perhaps make an even better community than a regular message board. In fact, if you are serious about it you can get a site made in a jiffy these days, and with some good marketing brains working on it you can have a pretty nifty website that you can leverage on for money.

Start a Marketing Services Company

You are in college, you don’t need to worry whether the competition is too much or not. Start a web marketing company - learn SEO, put your graphic designing or video editing skills to use to make viral content or ad banners, do logo designing, do article marketing or provide copywriting services. Don’t do it for someone else though, then you are just a college kid not a startup.

Start an Ebay Store

There are tonnes of ways to make Ebay work for your business, and they have been in vogue so long that they seem ancient. But the fact is that they still work, it is a little like being an online Baniya, but then even Wal-Mart is one then (a baniya not an Ebay store).

Use your coding skills

The opportunities are plenty, you can make social networking apps, to open source scripts to games. Just build some sense enough to make these profitable ventures and you are set on a road to product development firm. The difference between being a coding freelancer and a business is in building your brand and being regular in getting new code stories (i.e. products out). Have a small plan, and decide on at least 3 or 4 programs before launching the first one so that you don’t lose the opportunity to be a fairly successful business.

Your Art Can be Big

Create a portfolio of work, and help other make one to. Become an online art studio/gallery. There is no better place than the web to do it. So sing and record a video and have it up on YouTube, get others to do that too and you are now a music producer. Have your art on Deviantart and sell those good stuff that you paint.

The possibilities that the web provides when it comes to being entrepreneurial is limitless. Now there can be better ways to set your business up, however, using the web as a platform certainly makes it easier to get things started. And we all know so many dudes who did such stuff while in college and went on to make truckloads of truckloads of money.

Go be enterprising!


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About the Author

Maneesh Madambath

Maneesh has been actively blogging on various blogs since over a year. He writes about social media and entrepreneurship mostly, and adds liberal doses on online advertising once in a while. He also sings the strangest of songs and makes the weirdest of faces when left in a room full of people. You can reach him at maneesh[@]watconsult[.]com.

8 Responses to “ 8 Ways to Get Your Web Startup Rolling While Still in College ”

  1. I feel bad reading your post now! I passed college 3 years back! :(

  2. haha.. welcome to the club :D .. imagine all those silly BMS project we spent our time on.. this could have been so much better :P

  3. what abt you ? why dont u start something using these handy pointers :-) hehe just kidding

  4. Hmm… Well for one I am out of college and I don’t feel any less than an entrepreneur working at WAT haha…

  5. Hi,
    suggested ideas are great.And i will try to implement it immediately which will suites me.Thanks.

  6. what a pathetic article…………….I wonder if rajiv is still there

  7. @gp: Hey very much here.. Infact I blog atleast 2-3 blogs a day! The very fact that there are more bloggers at WATBlog is because we want different views as I feel one person will only bring that much to a blog.. :) Hang around and check out other posts. Im sure you will find great stuff written by others on WATBlog.

  8. Great post. Sometimes I wished I either had an older sibling in the space to guide me or access to motivational material … I fortunately had the opportunity to start a few web based start-ups while in college. One thing I learned is creative destruction can be very detrimental to your product/team/company. You have an idea you sketched out behind a bar napkin … build it and then release it. Forget waiting to give your “submit” button a glossy effect or adding that favicon. Release often … release early, it keeps you engaged with your audience and keeps your mind on the larger idea … I guaranteee you won’t get lost in the weeds as we did.

    https://subtledisruption.com
    https://navajeet.com

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