The Spirit of BBM: The Joy of a Start-Up

"Start-ups are cool", said someone in a random motivational talk video on YouTube. that had over a million views. In a country, where every college student wants to drop-out and every fed-up youngster wants to become an entrepreneur, it is not easy to start your own business. 

I had worked on SpringTide, an online youth magazine for 4 years and it became one of the most popular online portal for social issues and youth concerns, across college campuses and students' circles. At this point, I got in touch with one of my school juniors Deepanshu, who had just started an online news platform for global tech coverage and start-up funding news. I was intrigued with the idea and decided to help him with this. The journey which started as a mutual exchange of support and ideas, could turn into a dream, a vision, a task, was unimaginable. 

Exactly an year back, we raised our first round of funds from angel investors. Something that seemed to be a big feat to us, soon turned out to be a mountain that needed to be explored. With that, we became a part of the rapidly changing start-up ecosystem of the country. There were doubts, challenges, struggles and moments that made us feel, "WTF! Let us chuck this and get back to our routine jobs!" 

But we continued with determination and a strong will and one a single minded aim, that we wish to change the way India reads digitally. We wanted to make more and more people to read online and provide them with awesome, good quality curated online content. 

People questioned our being headquartered in Jaipur, but we never questioned ourselves even once. The city that brought us up, the city that made "us" could not be forgotten in our quest for fame and money. Likewise, I truly believe that more and more youngsters need to begin start-ups in Tier II and Tier III cities, because this is something that can bring these cities forward in true sense, and create quality job opportunities in this space. 

There were mentors and advisors who told us that we are entering into Digital Media, and we are 20 years ahead in India. But we were not shaken. We continued to move ahead.

Today, one year down the line and two rounds of funding raised, we are a 35-people strong company, with employees / interns spread across the country, we own and manage properties that include India's leading website for global tech and Indian start-ups news 'The Tech Portal' (www.thetechportal.in), the network of city-centirc websites that is bringing Tier II and Tier III cities of India online 'The Digital Network' (www.jaipur.digital, www.varanasi.digital and www.guwahati.digital), the ultimate home for hosting college fests and events 'SpringTide Stories' (www.stories.springtide.in). 

Even today, we are constantly innovating and working on two new and dynamic products that are going to change the way digital media in India has operated. We are in the early stage of development of these products - one in the online video content space and the other in Data Analysis. This, being the first ever public announcement of these products, on this (rather auspicious :P ) occasion of one year of our seed round. 

It gives me immense pleasure and satisfaction to realize that while I sit here at this moment to type down this post, someone in my team is scouting for associations, someone in some part of the country is writing hundreds and thousands of lines of complex codes, someone is working on the backend to maintain the traffic on our websites, someone is editing our content, someone is writing content for our portals, and somewhere, some college student snuggled up in his bed is reading that content on his / her mobile or tablet or laptop. That young college student is our end user for whom my whole team is working. That college student makes "India"! 

Cheers!