Tell us a little about yourself, how did you start your business?
I live in India, in a small town. Being from a very poor background, I began working at a local computer shop when I was just 14 years old. I had always been interested in marketing and used to sell keyboards and mice to people who would come to the shop. Each month I had a sales target for a certain number of computer accessories, failing which, I was told that I would be fired. It was one of those months during a cold winter in my home town of Noida, that I realized I was going to miss my target and was running the risk of losing my job.
Back then, I had a very cheap Android smartphone. I used it to post images of some computer accessories on Facebook and asked my friends to help me sell them. And, what happened next, was the start of the change of everything in my life. I sold 3 months worth of my sales target and got a bonus. Just one post and a polite but desperate request! That made me realize the kind of superpowers that social media and digital marketing held.
Over the next couple of years, I researched digital marketing systems and I learned to code. At the start of 2017, with a bit of money that I received as a loan from a group of my friends, along with my own skills, I started to build the ultimate digital media marketing platform. I heard about HubSpot, used it for a month, and soon realized I could create something better. It took me and my freelancers about a year to build and test the platform we built, and we launched it at the end of 2017, initially for a small fee. The response we got? None. Then we made a decision after a few months to make it free, so people could at-least try before they buy, and that was the game changer.
We now sell our subscription at half the price of HubSpot! In the two years that followed, we went from zero to making $180,000 a year, which was unbelievable. Our user count went from 0 to 40,000+ within a span of two years.