The dream is free but the hustle is sold separately! What does it take to make it on your own and achieve breakthrough success? In The DEN (Dynamic Entrepreneurial Network) is a series focused on getting up-close and personal with entrepreneurs of today! These entrepreneurs have proved the naysayers wrong! This gives us an opportunity to understand their journey and learn from it.
Story Time folks,
So It was the summer of ’14, having realised early on in college life that the teaching can at times be sub standard , I relied heavily on online courses, MOOCs as they say, to skill myself and to learn new technologies. I also got the picture right that the current curriculum is not at par with what the industry is seeking in graduates’ i.e; it’s outdated. I made the most of the opportunities that I got through the internet and while searching for Online courses to do , the biggest pain point I encountered was that there were too many websites offering similar courses or content and finding good courses was a challenge. That was my apple tree moment. Having benefitted from these courses myself, I always wondered how I could encourage people/my peers facing the similar problem, to take these courses.
That’s when my Friend Hassan and I got onto the task. We realised that if we could somehow collate all the information in a concise manner under one platform, it’ll help a lot of people make better decision much faster.
We started working on the idea. The real problem or challenge was to get the big names of the business to let them list their courses on our website. Eventually it turned out to be more challenging than we’d imagined. I remember writing emails to all the Big names from coursera, udemy, edX etc.
The website was ready to go live, but we’d managed to get only 4 course providers to let them list their courses and we launched with that.
The website was launched at a technology competition at our college and it was an instant hit. We got tremendous response and people requested us to list more courses. We even won the competition! That was our taste at success!
We hit our 1st roadblock when we ran out of new courses to list on our platform. We weren’t getting replies from the course providers and hence we didn’t have any new content.
In this short entrepreneurial journey of mine, I did learn a few very important lessons. Our failures to convince course providers, taught us persistence. The sudden fall of things also taught us the value of consistent hard work. This whole exercise did teach us lessons in patience and determination, and while that was the start of the fall of our little empire, it did make us more confident and give us that much needed little taste of success.
Today When I look back to this short stint of mine at Entrepreneurship, although it was never all sunshine and rainbows, I realise it has shaped me into the man that I am today. I am currently employed as a software developer at BookMyShow and I hope to get on this journey again in the near tomorrow!
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