Dear Hustle, Happy 5th Year Anniversary!
5 year long rollercoaster ride.
It started back in my high school days. I belong to a very small town, Biharsharif, a few kilometers away from the land of learnings, Nalanda. After my class 10th, my parents sent me to Bansal Classes, which is situated at “so called” hub of engineering coaching centres, Kota. I had never heard of IIT till class 10th. But, my parents sent me there so that I can get into the best IIT and have a good career ahead.
I faced first failure in my life when I was not able to crack IIT JEE and couldn’t live up to my parent’s expectations. I felt bad. So bad that I got depressed.
My whole Kota Journey gave me the real experience about Life and Success through my coaching teachers. I found awesome friends like Prashant Kumar, Sagar Patidar and Irshad Alam.
First Year :
My life was full of adventures and accidents. I met with an accident in 2011 and got few stitches on my head. It gave me the freedom to pause in life and think how I wanted to go ahead.
Life is a rat race. And, we keep running without knowing where or when to stop.
I think everyone should take a break and rethink from scratch as to what you want to do in your life.
Stop. Think. Learn. Analyse. Restart.
I discovered “Entrepreneurship” using this time and decided not to get any degree anymore. But, my parents convinced me to continue studies while working to take a degree.
My bug of discovering entrepreneurship lead me to meet Imbesat Ahmad, and help them in organising events for students preparing for iit. It helped me to meet a lot of awesome entrepreneurs like Saif Khan.
The best advice I’ve been given was to ‘never stop learning’, because the moment you give up and think you know everything, you end your journey of becoming a leader. At that point in life you should just quit.
Second Year :
From the first day of college, I knew where I wanted to go in my life. I started HUSTLING every single day since then, for my dreams, for innovation and for change in the society.
I have been bankrupt many times. Many times I had to skip meals to save every single penny. I started living on my own. Attending college from 9am–5pm and then working from 6pm to 6am, till the sun came up. The sunrise was my hope for a better tomorrow and a desire to learn something new.
I heard a story in my childhood in which a guy carved a road between mountains through regular and authentic hard work. This story always helped me to keep my motivation up and flying when I was about to fall. You just have to keep going till you can, see the beauty of never giving up .
Being authentically passionate about what you do.
I got to meet two amazing entrepreneurs Prasad Ankit and Mohd Waseem who were building Touchtalent at that time. My desire to learn pushed me to take that leap and I started helping them with marketing and building community.
It was my first attempt at learning basics of marketing.
Third Year :
From that day, I have never stopped. I got lucky and worked with some amazing people in the first 2 years of my journey through college. From a content venture to selling t-shirts to colleges and corporates, I have never left the chance to learn and grow. Being with early stage startups, I had to wear multiple hats, and which pushed me harder to learn multiple things from operations, talent management, finance, and marketing.
Your mind is like a rubber band. The more you stretch yourself, the more you can learn.
You have to keep working hard till you attain escape velocity fueled by your will power to fly away. And, HUSTLE is the only key to achieve this in your life.
This year was full of ups and downs. I met another road accident and again had to take bed rest for few weeks. But I got to meet this amazing entrepreneur cum brother Abhineet Kumar, who is always ready to push you ahead when you are at it. We started The UnConference, a platform to bring global change makers on a single platform. We worked together on few projects. Learnt and improved from every mistake we made.
I also met a sales HERO who can sell anything to you. Veer Mishra started out by selling parathas and now he caters the best available technology to the world.
Fourth Year :
After 2 years of painful HUSTLE, I took an year gap to start a payment venture Cibola with the best people in my life.
I am a strong believer in serendipity and Pulkit has described it in the best possible way here. I have met one of my co-founder Utkarsh without any expectations of starting something together soon.
I have met awesome mentors like Shamir Karkal and Prateek Gupta because of serendipity, they became mentor cum friend and helped me to learn a lot of things about life. Even meeting this crazy Hustler Nikunj Jain happened without any expectations, who later became our first investor. He writes some awesome stuff on brutal truths of Life here
I wrote about my learnings from First 100 days of building Cibola with the coolest people on this planet here.
We had to shut down our venture in November 2014. It was very painful to see my creation die. As a holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote in, Man’s Search For Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
I had decided to move on and search for new quests of my life.
Benjamin has taught us that relentless entrepreneurs have an internal locus of control, which means they believe they are personally responsible for the outcomes of their lives. Lou Holtz, has famously said,
“Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.”
I have written about this year’s experiences and learning more in detail here.
Fifth Year :
Tim Grover has said “Pressure can bust pipes, but it also can make diamonds.”
“Implementing extreme ownership requires checking your ego and operating with a high degree of humility. Admitting mistakes, taking ownership and developing a plan to overcome challenges are integral to any successful team.”―Jocko Willink
You miss gold with every shot you don’t take. And most people don’t want to take that shot. Fear of failure paralyzes them.
I started with my hustle while trying to make good relationships with best people around me. It helped me to learn a lot of things and opened a lot of new dimensions for me. The satisfaction of overcoming challenges and obstacles is sublimely greater than any momentary pleasure.
If you want to create something powerful, you must be willing to fail in all of your nakedness. There have been times when I used to send mails and wait for months to get answered by my recipients. Every time I failed at something, I tried to take lessons from that and kept trying till I got the right result by doing improvements in my efforts. And, Eventually, they used to reply, after seeing my consistency and HUSTLE.
The concept is: Do something and don’t stop until it’s complete, no matter how long it takes.
Patience is the key behind success of most people.
I always knew that If you haven’t had your big break yet, keep going. Consistency is the most fundamental virtue to becoming the person you want to be.If you want it bad enough, you will do whatever it takes to make it happen. If you don’t, you won’t. Almost everyone can sprint for a while. But most burn-out and quit. Everything meaningful in life is a marathon — meant to test your commitment and it will. And, I know I am running a marathon and I can’t burnout.
Starting my sleep with Sunrise leading to few or no hours of sleep made me achieve a lot of things. I got to work with the best people around me and made some good friends during this journey.
From working with early stage startups like Spangle to working with 100 M USD Fund, Hatcher. I have learned the ethics and discipline of running a businesses more than all skill sets from these places.
I will write my next post on How I made 100,000 USD in a year while attending college and how can you do it?
I Learned how to scale user base from zero-100k in a month without spending a penny. I’ve made some amazing friends like Supriyo, Rabi, Amitt , Aman and Dhruv who have always motivated me during my ups and downs of my life.
Friends like Payoj and Abdul became my moral support during extensive HUSTLE days. Serendipity has always helped me to meet most amazing people. And, I made friends with Diwank because of this lifestyle. A person with whom you can talk about anything. A genius who has answers to any query you have. This crazy hustler I met through acquittance, Akshay Pruthi, who helped me to learn how to run your startup like bootstrap after raising funds.
Met this amazing guy Ayush Shukla, 5 years back on Orkut and finally, got to spend some weeks with him. This guy helped me learn ethics of finance management.
I always wanted to have a mentor who can challenge me daily. And, I have found that in Amit Agrawal. It took us a whole year of talking, sharing and brainstorming before we got into any professional contract. He made me learn the art of building businesses from 0–100 M USD in revenue by learning the hacks of doing sustainable businesses.
We have recently launched a campaign at India Goes Global, a mission to help entrepreneurs to take their ventures further and faster using our experience of scaling businesses. India Goes Global is an initiative that lends strategic advice to Indian internet start-ups to maximize their potential in a hyper-connected world. It helps driven entrepreneur teams with working products to scale up by leveraging global business trends.
If you need any help, just ping us here
Keep pushing your boundaries and keep moving forward. Your life is very beautiful. The very challenges you face, those risks you take, those moments your create, the love you graciously give — this is what transforms you into who you really are.
