Alright, so it seems you’ve come beyond the homepage and really want to know about me.
Well, I’ll break it down into a few sections then…
Childhood
Growing up in India my family moved around quite a bit and I attended more than 5 different schools.
Developed a knack for computer programming in grade 6.
Grade 7 – started my first business spotting a gap in the market. It was a comic book library and had a pretty good run until my mom found out about it.
Grade 8 – Income from the library business helped me buy various PC magazines that helped me develop further interest in computers and helped many of my friends install various software products that would come with the CDs.
High School
CD Sales – learning Flash and other programming languages.
College Years
Got really good at programming.
Started the Matrix Club.
Launched the College Magazine.
Created many side projects.
Assembled Computers and sold them to 100s of people.
My college actually became one of my clients.
Made 100s of TV ads that ran on the local TV channels.
Had some of the top commercial brands as my clients.
My first startup.
During college, I figured out there is a serious lack of information about job openings and campus placement news in most of the cities in India (except the metro cities). Even though internet was still not available in every household, a lot of students would access info from Cyber Cafes.
Also there was no way to access really good educational content for engineering students.
So KoolKampus was created as a jobs portal / elearning website to cater to this need.
Took me 3 months to code it by hand in Notepad.
Learnt PHP / MySQL for this.
It was never part of our curriculum.
This was my final year project.
Launched by many reputed scientists of ISRO who were visiting our college for another event.
To work on this I hired 3 of my classmates to regularly update the content and keep adding new jobs.
We use Yahoo Groups as a mailing list and started marketing the site.
From word of mouth to guerilla marketing tactics like paying a student in each college of our city to change the wallpaper of every computer in the Lab.
After a good 6 months we had a decent amount of daily traffic.
Fast forward to 1 year… we had about 18K daily active visitors to the site.
Even though I got placed with Accenture for a job.
I never joined and this became my first startup.
We earned ad revenue from Adsense.
Later expanded to Sponsorships from educational institutes, coaching classes.
At the peak we had 60k unique visitors per day on our site.
Move to Bangalore
Here’s what happened.
Move to Dubai
Here’s what happened – Digital Nomading.
Scaling Up
Growing leads, sales, traffic…
Building an empire
Here’s what happened.