Serendipitous Experiments

16th November, 2022

Today, I am starting things again from scratch. It is day ZERO.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

- Steve Jobs

When I was 15, right into high school, I had my first business idea.

I would make a trivia website where people will participate to win mobile recharge. The trivia website will host ads and with enough people participating, it’d out pay the recharge voucher I would give away.

Yes, mobile recharge was a big thing back in 2010. If you’re a millennial, you probably know of the daily night-pack recharges that’d let you talk unlimitedly from 11 PM to 6 AM in the morning.

This idea would require a strong distribution network to work. I had no money to pay out of my own pockets.

This led me to create a meme page on Facebook that would go on to have 150,000 followers. I ditched the trivia website idea for another one. Once I had enough followers, I noticed smaller meme pages would reach out to be promoted at our prime engagement time (about 9-10 pm every day). I would have anywhere between 500 - 2000 bucks each month from this.

As a 16-year-old, I was rich.

When I was 18, I would charge small business money to build websites for them.

Once back in college, I visited my college souvenir store. I didn’t buy anything but soon after I started a merchandise business. Selling directly to the college administration. Next, I opened up an e-commerce website where students could shop directly. In less than a year, I had enough to cover my college tuition fee.

Right after college, I built a platform where people could buy from local stores instead of shopping for the smallest item from Amazon or Flipkart. After ten months of attempting to make this work, I went broke. I still kept pushing. Loaning money to keep the business afloat. Until I realized I had surmounted debt almost the size of what even the best job would pay me in a year.

I quit the idea to find a job that would allow me to pay back those debts. I worked as a software engineer, and then product manager for about three years.

Once I was clear of my debts and had some savings, I felt I was ready to try again.

I started a dev shop to build software for fast-growing startups.

Last month I shut down my dev shop after running it for over two years. While it was always profitable, I always had to be around to make sure it remained that way.

For some profound (or utterly stupid) reason I do not wish to spend the rest of my life working 8-12 hours a day running a business. I don’t think I will enjoy that very much.

For the last two months, I’ve been on a sabbatical. I treated this as a much-needed break to reevaluate what is important to me and what kind of life I want to build for myself. So far I have concluded there are much better ways to achieve all my goals than running a large team for a service business.

I have decided to go on a path that brings me the most joy, solving problems and building things. Creating a portfolio of profitable software businesses. Something that would not require me to be around every waking hour.

In the next 12 to 18 months, I am taking the path of experimenting with 4-6 ideas. Spend about 6-8 weeks to build and ship each startup. All these ideas will be under the banner of Webloom Labs.

Before I kickstart any of this, I will need a strong playbook to - ideate, validate, design, engineer, ship, and distribute a product.

I plan to spend the next four to six weeks working on building this playbook.

Do I know for sure if this will work? Absolutely not.

Will I have a lot of fun doing this? 💯

Today, I am nothing but grateful to have dared to experiment and I will continue to do so.