Pizza Mutiny, a smart way to smarter minds
A group of IIT-M students joined to develop this concept.
Chennai: Pizza Mutiny — this is neither a mutiny for pizzas nor any kind of rebellion but the name of the famous notebook brand at higher educational institutions in Tamil Nadu, including the IIT, NIT and VIT, Chennai.
A group of IIT-M students joined to develop this concept, which comes along with free coupons from top shops in the city. The scheme sold over 10,000 notebooks last year.
Asked why they named their notebook as Pizza Mutiny, Rohan Kora, co-founder of CollegeConnect.me, which has developed the notebook, said pizza represents the young and carefree side of students, while mutiny represents the potential for us to see beyond what society feeds us and make an actual impact on the world.
The company started to provide 1,500 free photocopies every day to students at IIT Madras, with the help of revenue generated from advertisers who wanted to reach out to the student community.
“We had already thought about the idea of smart notebooks (Pizza Mutiny) with offer coupons, a bunk meter and other organising options,” he said.
Exploiting the fact that top brands want to reach out to students, the start-up charged them in return for advertising in the notebook and the added revenue gets invested in the notebooks to make quality products.
The team behind the success includes Farhan Niyaz , Prashanth Ashok, Maharishi R.B and Rohan Kora. The company released a batch of 10,000 notebooks in the first week of August last year in 17 major colleges in Chennai, including IIT-Madras, Anna University, SSN College of Engineering, VIT Chennai, Stella Mary’s, etc. With over 8,000 notebooks getting sold in the first month, the team also managed to amass good online publicity with over 1,000 likes even in the first six days.
Pizza Mutiny even overtook the sales of some top multinational brands in higher education institutions. The National Institute of Tiruchy released 4,000 notebooks for their cultural festival — Festember - this was the first time that a college released a set of notebooks for their festival.
With grand success in the notebook field, CollegeConnect.me plans to expand its portfolio to include technology-oriented products too.