2021 LookBack

Rishav Agarwal
3 min readDec 31, 2021

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We generally talk about what we achieved in a year but in this, I am gonna highlight more on what I didn’t able to achieve in 2021, but took everything as learning of my life!

It's always not about Achievements it's also about Failures and Losses which you will have each year. We as individuals have become very comfortable in sharing our achievements but not our losses will be talking about them.

I did keep an aim of crossing 500K+ Downloads of Picxele App by 2021 end that too organically as things shot up well at the beginning of 2021 but unfortunately it didn’t happen as expected and being a bootstrapped startup and lack of cash flow I wasn’t able to push that via any means of marketing.

Wanted to improve our product to a certain extent but due to lack of good resources, we didn’t able to, which also resulted in us losing many users and weren’t able to retain them as we needed to do remarketing.

But looking to hire a CTO at Picxele soon by offering Equity and also soon planning to reach our 500K Mark in 2022 to accelerate our growth and userbase so that more and more Gig Workers and Can earn money by doing the simplest of the tasks.

We had a huge Loss in terms of Money from a Company by making the biggest defaulter for us after being working with them for 2 Years which shooked me very badly in terms of sustaining the Company but as I always say it's all about resilience and your intentions. If you want to do something correctly things might be slower but not worse for you.

Hence, I became more skeptical in terms of working and picking up and tried going slowly in 2021 so that can bring back things in normal, and yes by end of December we are back to normal looking forward to rolling again in 2022 just like never before.

We saw an amazing funding spree in Indian Market in 2021 with 44 Indian Startups becoming unicorns, there were several people who always used to ask me why Picxele isn't funded yet, arent you guys raising you arent getting investors. We did get commitments I was planning to raise in Q2 of 2021 but again my mind changed of remaining a Bootstrapped startup. Informed all Confirmed Investors and they agreed with my decision and a few are Mentoring us and helping us.

In a startup it's not always about Investment or Valuation it is built by people and relations you generate among your network. That is gonna stay with you for life and will be helpful in various ways, just be generous to people be it any circumstances and yes I was able to learn this in my entire entrepreneurship journey.

Overall I would say as a Company we didn’t have a great year, as an individual, I learned a lot and reformed myself.

Now let's talk about something interesting which I started doing in 2021

I never invested in stocks but I started doing it in 2021 and got a few IPO’s too and also started investing in Mutual Funds etc.

The most exciting part which I did is Mentoring Student Entrepreneurs I started my 30 Mins Session and did speak to around 120 Students in the entire 2021 and also mentored around 10 Student Startups which felt really good in terms of sharing my knowledge being from that background and helping fellow student entrepreneurs.

Started Angel Investing and invested in 9 Startups in 2021 naming them Vidyakul, Pushstart, Crib, Skyber, Deciwood, Happy Ratio, ReadOn, Wrky.ai, and Tyke

Become Mentor on some of the Amazing platforms like Mentorkart, Expertrons, and SimpliClariFy

Did Multiple Podcasts on Gig Economy, Startups, and Investing with Jaso Radio, ConfidenceShala, ConfidencePoint and TBCY

Did joined TUMMOC who was my client for 1 year and now started working as Part-Time Growth Head with them

Became a Creator on Crater.Club and did multiple sessions with them and soon about to launch something amazing with them

Met some amazing people throughout the year and they have been a great support at every stage and really happy to get along. In the entire journey, you lose something or you achieve something only thing which remains constant is learning and for a founder be resilient enough to be in this journey.

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2022 :-)

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Rishav Agarwal
Rishav Agarwal

Written by Rishav Agarwal

Founder, Picxele (Bootstrapped to 10Cr+ Revenue & 750K+ Users) | Angel Investor in 60 Startups | Dhandho Fellowship, Mentoring over 100+ Startups