You just read how I started. Here is where it led, and why you might want to keep reading.
In a world where everyone is a startup guru, here is a little more about me and what I have actually done. I started many businesses over the years, and most of them failed.
Along the way, I did these:
- Met the President of India, invited as a guest to the Festival of Innovation in 2017.
- Forbes fellow.
- Reach award winner from the Eric Weihenmayer Foundation in the US.
- Invited by Google to attend their largest developer conference, Google I/O, as a guest.
- Reached over 2 million people on Stack Overflow, top 4% in the world.
- Draper University alum.
- Wrote a Facebook app while learning to code, used by thousands of people every month.
- Developed and shipped over a dozen mobile apps.
- Built a developer community from scratch to over a thousand people, working with Google.
- Wrote a resource ebook to help people get started on Android, read by thousands of people every month across 42 countries.
I raised money in 10 years.
I raised a few million dollars for our business StartGlobal from some of the top investors in the world, including Biz Stone, cofounder of Twitter, Balaji Srinivasan, the Silicon Valley legend and CTO of Coinbase, John Ruffolo and Mark Maybank of Maverix Private Equity, Ali Moiz, James Beshara, and many other top tier investors in Silicon Valley and Canada. Raising money is never a measure of success. If anything, it is a measure of obligation toward your investors. We now do a lot more in revenue than we ever raised.
Success comes very slowly, and then all at once.
It is not a big deal by Silicon Valley standards to raise a couple of million dollars, but for me it is, because it took me 10 years to get here. We had over $4 million in interest when we were raising in a bear market, while everyone else had closed their wallets. It is surreal for me, because when I started my career I was making less than $100 a month, and I kept going on that salary for years. I made different products and started 15 businesses over 10 years. Some took months, some took years. Every one of them failed, and I kept going.
This year we are on track to do millions of dollars in revenue, and if there is one thing guaranteed to make you successful, it is getting back up every time you fall down. I have had near death experiences every couple of years, and somehow got up and kept going again.
My products in the last 10 years.
- Stock Market App (idea, no team, no prototype)
- Shopping Mall app (prototype, no takers)
- Scannr (built an early team, prototype, failed to onboard hypermarkets)
- Car showroom app for Jaguar and Land Rover (prototype, no takers)
- Fuel auto payment hardware (early team, hardware prototype, provisional patent, no takers)
- School Management ERP (product design, no takers)
- Glass factory operation management (product design, no takers)
- Travel booking and management app (product design, no takers)
- Sieve (8 person full time team, no traction), Sieve 2 (early market traction, failed to grow)
- TargetCompetitor (early market traction, not scalable)
- Seafood export management and consumer software (failed to convert)
- Construction management ERP (failed to convert)
- ToClient (early market traction, small market)
- Zentab (finished product, never launched)
- StartGlobal (made money, finally)
“Success comes to those who persevere, who keep going even when faced with failures and setbacks. It is the ability to get back up every time you fall down that ultimately leads to triumph. It is also important to know when to give up.”
I am writing this ebook to help people understand a little more about internet businesses, which are still a bit of a mystery, at least to some of the people where I live.