Vishal Sharma, Founder, Yureekah Software Technologies Pvt Ltd

The second product is- Zimblee.com, which is a self serve advertising platform. In addition to being a transparent platform its features include scheduling a campaign, creation of an ad through a creator, making a payment and finally tracking the campaign. Both these products are completely free for use. In case of Zimblee though the advertiser pays only for the media that he buys, the other features mentioned above come at no cost.”      

The numbers are sound and the figures show that there is a great profit to be made if one has the mettle. Vishal explains “Globally the online advertising market is close to 45Billion USD and just in India it is close to 350 Crores. The growing internet penetration and the need of advertisers to go global and build market shares locally make us a preferred one stop destination. Small business owners, big brands, publishers (big and small), adnetworks, adservers and agencies are using our tools as on today.”

There may be other search engines floating around but none like what Vishal has created. His focus has been on the creation of a newer product that renders other obsolete. He states “Yureekah Search Engine: First of its kind search engine which allows one to do a competitor research of brands in the online display advertising landscape. Imagine doing a competitor research of brand across thousands of publishers globally and identify brand campaigns. It’s just not possible because of the dynamic nature of the web. In addition campaigns change with every impression (of a web page) and with every country which makes it all the more difficult to do this the manual way.”

“Zimblee: End to end self serve online advertising platform. An advertiser can schedule, create and launch a campaign across 50+ publishers in less than 5 minutes. And the numbers of publishers are growing each day. You no longer have to worry about planning your campaigns, hire designers to make ads and negotiate with multiple publishers to get the best rates. Zimblee allows a transparent way to achieve all this by sitting where you are.”

“Both the platforms are patent pending. We have several revenue models for Yureekah Search, but for now we are just focusing on building traffic. Users currently don’t pay anything to use the search engine.”

“Zimblee works on a model of the revenue share between us and the publishers. We don’t charge the advertiser for any of our services (scheduler, creator and tracker). He just pays for the media that is bought.”

Vishal has already chosen how their conquest of the market will proceed. He says “We would want to focus on the Indian market to begin and gain some good foothold. Within a timeframe of 6-12 months we wish to tap established and emerging markets like US, Europe, Middle East and few parts of Asia.”

“We have some unique global models which we wish to implement in the next 6-18 months.” 

Vishal finds it strange that someone need a reason to be an entrepreneur and says “I have been an entrepreneur all through my life. I think entrepreneurship is a decision which entrepreneurs would take irrespective of what they are doing in life. I know there would be several reasons which you might have come across from entrepreneurs including but not limiting to freedom to accelerate your growth, generating employment for others, building a global brand etc. However I think an entrepreneur will always be an entrepreneur. The passion to create something from scratch and build it to a successful global model is something which is the seed on which any entrepreneur thrives.”

“The simplest way to identify if you are an entrepreneur would be to ask yourself this question –You don’t have a 9 to 5 job and you would not have any job for the next 1 year. The answer to this question would define if you are an entrepreneur or not.”

His entrepreneurial essence was severely tested but he emerged knowing that he has what it takes. He recalls his trails saying “As a Startup challenges begin from the day you think about an idea and want other people to validate and endorse it. It then move towards building a prototype and get some industry validation.”

“The next sets of challenges begin when you have scale up and build revenues. I think if you are focused and determined then 50% of your challenges are solved here. The remaining 50% is tackled by building a culture of transparency, innovation and listening to customers across your organization.” 

He learnt some important lessons along the way and admonishes his past self.

“Not listening to your gut. At all times an entrepreneur has this inner conscience which tells him to take a particular decision, but due to a lot of external factors you tend to not go with the gut.” Says Vishal 

The future beckons to Vishal and Yureekah who have identified their key areas of growth. 

Vishal says “Being a product company our growth benchmarks are different from usual startup.

Our internal benchmarks would include:

1) Product Lifecycle Completion – (completed 2 so far and have 3 more in the pipeline)

2) Validation of product by industry specialists – We have users from more than 27 countries using our product.

3) Quality Hiring – We have grown from a team of 3 to 16. All these employees are domain experts and add some great value to the organization.

4) Industry validation -More than 70 leading publishers have been signed up.”

Their ace in the hole is a source of pride and joy and Vishal declares “Our flagship product the Yureekah search is still one of a kind and does not have any competition yet globally.”

He affirms his present and future status saying “Once and entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. There are endless things that can keep you motivated. On some days it might be the breakthrough in the technology, some times it might be the first big client, other times it might be solving a customer grievance or maybe catching up with an employee expectation. Its like if you think you can create a mini rollercoaster so that you can go at the top quickly and then create several mini roller coasters which make the roller coaster ride a smooth ride.”

Vishal has but one desire for Yureekah and says “We would like to constantly innovate and accelerate our offerings to the customers. In this process we will have to re-innovate which we think it is extremely important.”

Vishal mentions his past achievements which made him aware of his potential saying “More than a decade ago when I was the President of a youth forum called the Express Youth Forum, we managed to organize an intercollegiate fest called Verve with more than 185 colleges participating in it. I think this feat is by far more than any prestigious award that I can think of.”

In our opinion Yureekah and Vishal will live up to their connection to the Greek genius with their innovations. Vishal states his entrepreneurial watch words – “Think, Innovate, Progress, Sustain”. 

Yourstory wishes him the best in what he chooses to do and hopes that success shall smile upon him.