Business Munchies: Helicopter Rentals, TID fund for Profitable Businesses, Wealth Management with Social Commerce & Opportunities with Carbon Allowances in India

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) have some fun discussing the helicopter rental industry in India and how it's shockingly profitable. We have some exciting business ideas that we discuss on this episode of business munchies.

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Timestamps:

(0:45) - The Indian Dream Fund for Bootstrapped/Profitable Businesses
(11:05) - The Economics of the Helicopter Rental Business in India
(26:25) - Wealth Management with Social Commerce
(37:00) - Opportunities in the Carbon Allowances Market

Topics we discussed:

1. The Indian Dream Fund for Bootstrapped/Profitable Businesses: Our primary goal at The Indian Dream is to promote entrepreneurship and as part of this Podcast and the community we're trying to build - we meet many people who're on the verge of starting their own business or have just started one and are looking for new ideas. Our thought is that once our audience is large enough (10x - 100x of the current size), we can raise a fund to help people start their own profit oriented businesses (instead of VC funded hyper growth machines). There is a big gap in the market for people who want to & can build profitable businesses but don't have the capital to do it & can't raise that capital for banks. We are envisioning a fund that would bridge this gap.
2. Blog for Crypto Accounting in India & How People can Invest Abroad
3. The Economics of the Helicopter Rental Business: Sahil spoke to a friend who works in the helicopter rental space and got all the numbers about the economics of this business. They cost anywhere from 2cr to 25cr to buy, maintenance is ~8,000 rs. per flight hour, fuel ~ 20,000 rs. per hour, take off/landing charges ~rs. 10 - 15,000 & pilot salaries are ~3,00,000 per month. Apparently, 150 hours of flying time per year is the break even point for helicopter rentals. There are some big players operating throughout the country with some having revenues of 10 crores per helicopter. Siddharth is optimistic that this industry will grow as India gets richer.
4. Wealth Management with Social Commerce: Wealth Management advisory is a broken industry with broken incentives. Wealth Advisors only recommend products that give themselves the highest commissions instead of products that would actually be best for the client. Is there a way to make this industry better through social commerce. Perhaps social marketing like meesho combined with content creators to ensure that investors are getting the right information.
5. Opportunities in the Carbon Allowances Market: Carbon Allowances in the EU alone is a €200 billion industry in Europe itself in 2019 and this grew substantially in 2020 - in 2021, the prices peaked at €40 euros - up from just €15 a few years ago. Tesla earned nearly $500 million from carbon allowances in 2020 - this was one of the major contributors to its profits in 2020. Along with this, California and the US as a whole are experimenting with the idea of setting up a carbon allowance system. This system is only going to grow in the near future as climate change becomes a bigger threat with a high possibility of a global carbon allowance system. Entrepreneurs in India have already started buying up forest land and other resources that count as carbon sinks so that they can sell these allowances to companies in Europe and other parts of the world.