Wake Up!! Don't just be a Dreamer!
A first hand account of wha it takes to finally get off your bum and start a start-up.
Having a startup and doing something on your own is the latest dream, now leaving behind old fads like 'going to IIT and moving to US'. While a good number of people (as expected ) just dream it while nice and warm in their safe cushy jobs at large multinationals, a much larger than expected percentage have actually stepped out and are trying to make it big. This is my story and experience of what is needed to wake up! and take the final plunge.
Even with over 4200 startups registering a year , the fact that this is a high risk high return strategy cannot be denied. 90% startups fail every year and 9% just get by however the 1% which actually succeed go on to make a fortune that is difficult even to dream of. With these odds, it seems to bring out the gambler inside the Gen Y, people like us. It is therefore important to enter the battlefield with a solid, defined strategy in mind or the consequences can be catastrophic, and no strategy can be built without the three building blocks, namely, Drive, Time and Idea.
When I started dreaming about my start-up (and mind you, I am a dreamer) , I started studying ways to make it work. I thought of ideas, found partners, but always while sticking to my cushy job. It took me years to realize that that way was not gonna work, with crazy work culture in India, unless you live 5 mins from your office you do not have any time for eating, showering and sleeping (at-least a bit) much less working on a startup which, by itself, can be a pretty gruelling process. I knew what I needed to do, skills that I needed to learn, but I kept procrastinating because I was tired or hungry, or something important had come up.
My dreams started taking shape when I first quit my job. People think that I quit it because of my marriage, and that is partially true, I could not have continued on the job. But my other reason was to give my career a new look. I gave GRE, & TOEFL, learned front-end programming, applied to colleges, learned about google rankings and much more. and finally one fine day, while checking off our list of venture ideas (which we used to do every day) we found the problem. Getting your child admitted in a good school is very important and sounds like a very basic thing to have, however doing this is a major task (ask any parent in India, I have asked hundreds). and there I completed the three things required, drive, time and idea.
Me and my husband Anshul have just launched SchoolGully.com as a comprehensive guidebook on child education for parents (as our tagline says - Making admissions simpler), and we now will work to make it thrive.
