Browse every company case study and business analysis we've published — filter by the kind of business case studies and lessons you want to learn.
This library is hand-written, not aggregated. Each case study starts from primary sources — shareholder letters, founder interviews, court filings, and the business history books listed at the bottom of every piece — and is then rewritten to answer one question: what decision actually decided this company's fate? That's why you'll find the Netflix–Blockbuster meeting next to Amul's cooperative model and Zepto's 10-minute delivery bet: the industry changes, but the strategic patterns repeat.
New here? Start with the editor's picks below — they're the three stories that best show how we work. Prefer a theme? Use the filters for failures, brand wars, Indian startups, or fintech. Every piece is a 10-minute read, researched by a named author, and updated when the facts change.
When Coca-Cola re-entered India in 1991, it crushed Campa Cola overnight. 30 years later, Mukesh Ambani's Reliance acquired the brand for ₹22 crore and relaunched it — not just as a drink, but as a war on Coke and Pepsi's ₹70,000 crore Indian soft drink market.
Amul started in 1946 as a tiny dairy cooperative in Anand, Gujarat, with just two villages and a few hundred litres of milk a day. Today it is a ₹80,000 crore brand owned by 36 lakh farmers, and the engine that turned India into the world's largest milk producer.
Zara's parent company Inditex did €35.9 billion in revenue in FY23 with a net profit of €5.4 billion — a 15% net margin in a brutal industry where rivals settle for 5–7%. The secret isn't fashion. It's a deliberately broken supply chain that turns artificial scarcity into a multi-billion euro moat.
In 1959, seven women in a Mumbai chawl borrowed ₹80 and started rolling papads on a terrace. 65 years later, Shri Mahila Griha Udyog Lijjat Papad does over ₹1,600 crore in annual revenue, employs 45,000+ women across 84 branches, and is owned entirely by its workers — with no CEO, no shareholders, and no outside investment ever taken.
Launched in 1929 as a swadeshi answer to British creams, Boroline today sells over 11 crore tubes a year, generates an estimated ₹150–200 crore in revenue, and quietly competes with Nivea, Vaseline, and Pond's — without ever changing its packaging, its formula, or even its smell.
The Indian Premier League is now valued at over $16 billion, sold its 2023–27 media rights for ₹48,390 crore, and on a per-match basis is the second most valuable sports league on earth after the NFL. This is the story of how the BCCI engineered the fastest-scaling sports business in history, deliberately, in 16 years.
Most meeting tools record what was said. Acta, a Made-in-India AI startup, is building a new category — meeting intelligence — that turns conversations into action items, owners and outcomes. It's a SaaS bet that the real problem isn't the meeting; it's everything that happens after it.
Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50M in 2000. Blockbuster laughed. Ten years later it was bankrupt — the textbook case of self-inflicted disruption.
Kodak literally invented the first digital camera in 1975 — and then sat on the patent for 30 years to protect its film business. By 2012, the company that controlled 90% of US film and coined the phrase 'Kodak Moment' was bankrupt. This is what happens when a company invents the future and then chooses not to sell it.
In 2007, Nokia controlled over 40% of the global mobile phone market and was the most profitable phone maker in history. Within six years, Microsoft bought what was left of its handset business for $7 billion. The Nokia collapse isn't a story about iPhones — it's about how a company can be killed by its own operating system.
In 1998, two Stanford PhD students offered to sell their search engine to Yahoo for $1 million. Yahoo said no. They tried again in 2002 for $5 billion. Yahoo said no. Today Google is worth over $2 trillion and Yahoo was sold for $4.5 billion in scrap. This is the most expensive 'no' in business history.
Ather Energy went from a garage startup in 2013 to a $1.3 billion unicorn in 11 years. Not by building a cheaper scooter — by building a smarter one and then owning the entire ecosystem around it: charging network, software, and data.
In 2021, two Stanford dropouts came back to Mumbai and promised to deliver groceries in 10 minutes — a number every logistics expert called impossible. Three years later Zepto is doing $2 billion+ in annualised GMV, valued at $5 billion, and has forced Blinkit, Instamart and BB Now into a war they didn't want to fight.
In 2014, two IIT Roorkee graduates couldn't accept online payments for their own startup — every Indian bank rejected them. So they built the payment gateway themselves. A decade later, Razorpay processes over $150 billion in annualised TPV, is valued at $7.5 billion, and quietly powers payments for 80 lakh+ Indian businesses including Facebook India, Swiggy, and the BCCI.
In the 1970s, Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface, the mouse, Ethernet, the laser printer, object-oriented programming, and the first personal computer — the Alto. Then Xerox handed the entire future of computing to Steve Jobs in a single afternoon for the price of $1 million in pre-IPO Apple stock. This is how the most innovative R&D lab in history made the biggest strategic blunder of the 20th century.
Kingfisher Airlines launched in 2005 as India's first true 5-star airline — leather seats, in-flight entertainment, gourmet meals in economy. By 2012 it was grounded, by 2016 Vijay Mallya had fled to London, and Indian banks were left holding over ₹9,000 crore of unpaid loans. This is how an airline built to be a flying brand campaign collapsed under fuel costs, the wrong acquisition, and an owner who confused luxury with a business model.
In 1969, a part-time chemist named Karsanbhai Patel started making detergent powder at home in Ahmedabad and selling it door-to-door at ₹3 per kg — one-third of Hindustan Lever's Surf. Within 15 years, Nirma was India's largest-selling detergent, had forced HUL to launch a cheaper brand (Wheel), and turned a ₹50,000 garage operation into a ₹7,000+ crore business empire. This is the textbook case study of how Indian frugal innovation broke an FMCG multinational on its home turf.
Rejected by every VC in Silicon Valley — seven times. Two broke designers sold $40 Obama-themed cereal boxes to survive, then built a $100B hotel killer.
In 2015, Ola and Uber laughed at the idea of bike taxis. Regulators called them illegal. VCs said the unit economics couldn't work. A decade later, Rapido is doing 32 lakh rides a day, has overtaken Ola in trip volume, and is the first bike-taxi company in the world to cross unicorn status — at a $1.1 billion valuation.
Sridhar Vembu started AdventNet in a Chennai apartment in 1996 with no venture capital, no IIT network, and no plans to chase the dot-com boom. 28 years later, Zoho serves 100 million users, powers 700,000+ businesses, and runs the world's most unlikely enterprise software company from a village in Tamil Nadu — without ever taking a rupee of external funding.
Yes. Every case study on this page is free, in full, forever. The site is funded by clearly labelled advertising and affiliate links to books we recommend — never by paywalling the core library.
Every piece is researched and written by Himanshu Agarwal, the site's founder and editor. Sources — shareholder letters, founder interviews, and business history books — are listed at the bottom of each case study, and our editorial policy explains the process in detail.
Business-school cases are written to be discussed for 90 minutes; ours are written to be finished in 10. We keep the decision that mattered, the numbers that prove it, and the lesson you can reuse — and cut the filler, exhibits, and academic framing.
We publish a new long-form article every week and add company deep-dives regularly. Subscribing to the free Sunday newsletter is the easiest way to get each new piece.
