The Summer Startup No One Noticed

The time was the 90’s in the southern part of India. Every summer, when schools shut down and the heat turned ruthless, three cousins would pack their bags and head off to their grandmother’s place in a quiet village tucked somewhere between mango orchards, paddy fields and dusty roads.

This village had no phones, no cable TV, and definitely no fancy toys. But it had lot of kids. Dozens of them. And that was all that mattered.

These kids used to play all kind of games like cricket, Jilla Kodi, seven stones, go swimming in the wells meant for farming and many more. The one game that fascinated two of these cousins was the marbles. What started off as a casual game turned into a full-blown passion. The games can be many that can be played with these marbles but it gave them a lot of high as it involved winning the marbles for yourself from the other players. They played it every day, hardly come home for meals, and it didn’t take long before they started winning. And winning. And winning. Within a few weeks, they had cornered almost every marble in the village and one of them earned the nick name “Shooter” for his accurate marksmenship.

But then, a problem arose.

The other kids ran out of marbles to play with. Which meant no more games. Which meant — no more fun. That’s when the cousins did something unexpected. They started selling the marbles back.

See, the nearest town was five kilometers away with buses plying only once or twice a day and personal vehicles in those days was rare. If you can reach this town, you could buy twenty marbles for a rupee. But not everyone could travel that far just for a few ones. The boys offered a sweet deal — sixteen marbles for a rupee. Immediate supply. No waiting. Business began.

But it didn’t stop there.

When the home village dried up again — in stock and skill — they took their “business” to neighboring villages which were few hundreds of meters away. What they found there was even more interesting. The standard rate in those places was eight marbles per rupee. The cousins offered twelve. The kids there thought it was Diwali. Sales exploded.

They sold. They played. They won the marbles back. And sold again. Basically, they had created their own circular economy.

Ofcourse not without its share of challenges. You see, some kids started complaining that old marbles weren’t worth paying the same price as new ones. So, the boys split the inventory. Old marbles sold for sixteen per rupee. Fresh, glossy, limited-edition looking ones? Premium category — twelve per rupee. People paid. Happily.

But summer doesn’t last forever.

Their business was seasonal. They were only in the village for two months a year. The other ten months? No action.

So, what did they do? They “recruited” local talent — two kids who were sharp players. These became their year-round team. With a bit of training and team work in the games, the new team ran the show until the founders returned next summer.

There were no Excel sheets, no revenue dashboards, no business cards. Just sweaty palms, playful competition, and the thrill of building something that made others come back for more.

That summer empire? It was worth a grand total of 120 rupees in two summers. But in the early '90s, for a bunch of ten-year-olds — it might as well have been a million-dollar unicorn.

And if you’re still reading and wondering — yes, this is a true story.

The founders? He is the author of this post. I am the shooter (https://www.linkedin.com/in/harikrishna-ramineni-3a021019/) and presently the founder at www.drinkjurru.shop

The other? Customer Engineer at Microsoft. (https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeep-g-36a30277/)

The team: They are like our brothers and both serving in the Indian army (One wears a black dress and one works for a regiment for things that zoom in the air…I don’t know much about their work, ofcourse they don’t share much either and I am proud of them)

30 years later I wonder, I am an engineer and have a MBA in finance now.

Ofcourse, now I realize that all the strategies we applied those days in the marbles game have names which we now learn on large digital boards in PPTs…Expertise, customer acquisition, Product differentiation, Geographical expansion, Price arbitrage, Partnerships and joint ventures, Business strategy.

You don’t need a business degree to learn strategy. Business is everywhere — in the playgrounds, in the summers, in childhood hustles, and in every honest attempt to make things work.

Sometimes, the best lessons don’t come from classrooms — they come from marbles.

Harikrishna Ramineni