Sooner or later, those who win are those who think they can. — Paul Tournier
This is one of the methods I used when I started making money. It was at the beginning of my diploma course that I got deep into Pathanamthitta. As you know, I have always been interested in earning money. My diploma is under SBTE Kerala, and there is a rule in our course that we must earn 60 activity points to get the completion certificate. Even if we clear all papers, we still need these 60 activity points. This rule felt normal to me until I heard something else. If we complete an external course and submit the certificate, we can get 30 to 40 activity points. That hit me. That made my brain work.
At that time, I had not teamed up with Sayanth, and my friend circle consisted of Anandhu B Dev and Vaishnav. Vaishnav asked me why we could not buy a course, complete it, get the certificate, and then refund it within the 30-day refund period. I found out that it was not possible. He even thought about designing fake certificates, but I did not want that to happen. The profit might be huge, but it is not bulletproof and feels like a ticking time bomb. If someone gets caught, it is over. I wanted a perfect plan, and I got it.
The LoopHole
There is something called an offer sale on platforms like Udemy, where we can purchase courses for ₹399, ₹449, ₹499, ₹519, etc., depending on the offer. I thought about it like this: why not buy the course during an offer at around ₹1,000 and provide the certificate to students? Our students are mostly lazy and do not want to go through the hurdles of watching or understanding the course. They just need the certificate and the activity points. The main attraction was that they only had to pay the amount and wait, and they would receive a course completion certificate that was real, not forged. At that time, I was not good at psychology or communication like I am now, though I am still developing. However, I used some tricks to make it a better option for them.
Trick 1: Comparison
This happened after our first three-week internship. Almost all students had spent around ₹5,000, and they received only 15 to 20 activity points. That idea was already in their minds, so I used it to give them a different perspective and make them feel that this option was better than spending more. I raised the question in another way: “You spent ₹5,000 and got only 15 activity points. Why not buy a course from someone I know for ₹800 to ₹1,000? I do not remember the exact amount, and in the first round it was not ₹1,000, I think. This would easily give you 30 activity points, and you would get the certificate within one week.” That is half of the activity points we need, which made them rethink, and some people got into it.
Trick 2: Tension Building
I created a sense of urgency among some people by explaining that if they waited and were not active in sports or arts, only prize winners would get meaningful activity points. If they waited longer, they might have to attend other workshops in Ernakulam, Thiruvananthapuram, or Thrissur, where they would still get only 10 to 15 activity points. When including travel, food, and entry fees, the cost would exceed ₹1,500. This made others rethink their options, and some of them purchased the course from me.
The Exact Plan
I would check when an offer might happen, predict a possible date, or wait for the offer period and see how much time I had. After confirming, I would inform people and collect the names of those who were interested and wanted to buy the course from me. I would make a potential list or call people in our college whom I know. The first rule was not to mention the exact course platform. I would give vague names like Coursera or something similar, and sometimes mention Udemy, but without emphasis, while emphasizing Coursera more. I did this because I did not want to risk them visiting the site and seeing the offer. After they paid me, I would ask them to wait for one week. That one week was for the course offer to end. Otherwise, there was a chance that some of them might check the site after receiving the certificate, see the offer price, and that would break my business and credibility.
The other problem, or the reason I don’t tell them that I am the one providing this service, is that my classmates are the kind of people who don’t think first about what they are getting; they think about who it comes from. Even if they want the service, they don’t want it from their classmates. That’s the problem. They start negotiating unnecessarily, and some of them may delay giving the money, and there is a limit to how much we can push them.
Now, some of you may think, where are Anandhu and Vaishnav, the ones who already knew about this plan? They did not completely know how to execute it or handle those kinds of things. Vaishnav dropped out before this. I told Anandhu about doing this and asked him to collect some people’s names and call them, but he did not do it. He told me there was enough time and that there was no need to push unnecessarily. So I did not wait for that and started doing it myself. More importantly, at that time he had some health issues and was not attending classes either.
Conclusion
Anyway, the plan was highly successful, as I made about 10k–15k through 2–3 rounds of doing this. It also helped me upskill my communication and sales skills. Another thing is that my future teammate, Sayanth, also bought from me at that time. Now he knows the secret, as I already told him about it, and he is okay with it because he got what he paid for. That’s why he is different from others in my class.
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