I’m back! (and the hookah cafe idea)

It’s been a busy last week, I was spending most of my days this last week travelling all over Bombay looking for a shop that Amit Lewis (an old friend and co-founder of a company we started back in 2000 “General Exports” that was to be an export company but eventually became yet another internet marketing company) and I can rent to start a “Hookah” cafe that will be in business sometime next month. Hopefully, I’ll be blogging again a lot more this week, and unlike this post, mostly about “e-Business 2.1″.

Smoking “Hookahs” or water pipes, has become the latest fad here in Bombay - Very famous with kids 15-25. especially those in the age group of 15-18. Because cigarettes aren’t sold to those under 18 in India, kids try out Hookahs, that contain what is called flavoured tobacco - which isn’t any tobaco, but an array of what is really various scents - ranging from cola and red bull to more fruity flavours like strawberry and apple, that one can smoke with the steam from water in the hookah pipe. A hookah in one of these cafes is sold for anything between $4-$10 on a smoke as much as you want in an hour basis.

Now, most Hookah cafes in bombay do it the traditional way - since they are a coffee shop and it would be a outright silly to not serve anything to eat or drink with the hookahs, they have their own kitchens, and chefs and cooks and all that. It’s a lot of cost to run a hookah cafe and if you’re new in the business, building up a brand may take a while and the salaries are a large part of the cost to run the place meanwhile.

We have thought of a slightly different concept with our hookah shop.  What we are doing here, is that we are making the place an “open platform” kinda like facebook. When looking for the shops, the places we short-listed had to meet one criteria: there has to be at least: one coffee shop, one ice cream shop, one restaurant and one bakery nearby. The menu of our coffee shop will contain of everything these shops sell - and will be co-branded. Unlike other restaurants, we will not only allow but encourage guests to bring “outside food” to the table - and they may order anything from one of these restaurants right from where they’re smoking their hookah - all we do is call up the restaurant(s) and have the food or beverage delivered to our cafe, track what we ordered from where, and collect a commission on each sale we send to any of these restaurants. Later on, if the place gets any popular, we plan to give access to local retailers of non eat-or-drinkables to the cafe and sell their stuff right there. Whether this concept works or not is to be seen - but it feels kinda cool to take what one learns doing business on the internet and put those ideas to use in, of all things, a suburban Bombay hookah cafe.

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