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Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal- Journey to start Labnol of first-ever professional Technical blogger of India

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The picture of blogging seen today was way different in the past. People took it as a way of expressing thoughts only. Of course, blogs are the best medium to express thoughts but one can also earn good money through blogging. However, in 2000-04, it was not as easy as it is today. In such time, Amit Agarwal decided to use blogging as a way of earning bread and butter. That time, many people crossed his idea to earn money from blogging. But Amit proved them wrong and become the first professional blogger of India to start a technical blog.

Early life of Amit

Amit is raised in a family with having a business background, and he has an engineering background. He was one of the studious children in the family, having command over mathematics. Yet he was not interested in engineering, rather he wanted to join the family business during his teenage. But as he grew, his interest leaned towards technology and he decided to study engineering.

Amit Agarwal
Image Source: Youtube.com

Education

He got selected in IIT-Roorkee and opted for Computer Science engineering. Everything was just the opposite as he decided in his childhood. Still, he managed to be in the toppers list.

Generally, computer science students focus on coding. However, Amit was more interested in software installation. In fact, he has always been curious to know how it works? How the files are modified due to installing new software? Amit always tries to find the answers to all his questions. Today, he is answering such questions of his audience. That time, he would have never thought that his curiosity will help him in the future.

Career

After graduating in 1999, he started working at ADP inc, Hyderabad. He worked on the database for about 5 years. During his job, work is appreciated and he got the chance to lead the team in a very short duration. However, he shifted his focus from the technical field to management. Apparently, a person from the family having a business background couldn’t stop the inner businessman. But he learned many new things during his first and last job. The technical experience turned out useful in his blogging career.

The backstory to become a professional blogger

Amit is from a typical joint family of India. His mother and other ladies of the family wanted him to work at the native place. However, he decided to shift to Hyderabad for Job, though he wanted to stay with family. After spending 5 years in Hyderabad, he finally decided to go back to home town, Agra.

That time, he had very few career options to choose, and most of them are either seasonal or offering less money. For that, he started a blog and started posting his skills, technical knowledge, etc. Initially, his pure intention to start a blog was to get noticed by employers.

Turning point

It is said that everyone has some turning points in life, the same happened in the case of Amit. He casually posted detailed information about the HP printer on his blog. Surprisingly, many viewers read the blog post and asked their doubts. Thereafter, he started posting similar tech-related posts which became popular among the audience. This incident made Amit think to become a professional blogger and he followed his inner voice.

Rise of first professional technical blogger of India

Blogging was not that familiar to Indian people in 2004. At that time, Amit Agarwal decided to choose blogging as a career. In fact, it was a very different environment for bloggers than it is today. No social media, very few online networking tools, and several other challenges were there. However, Amit decided to become a blogger and started Labnol in this period.

When Desipundit picked his content, Amit got the much-needed reach and his audiences raised enormously. It all happened within one year of starting the blog. Also, he tried several other ways to get noticed like he attended many blog camps. With different strategies and quality content, Amit rise as the first professional blogger in India.

About Labnol

It is a technical blog that started in 2004. Amit selected the name as Labnol just because it is unique, unlike his name. He wrote software reviews based on his experience on Labnol blog post. As well, he shares genuine information about technical products based on his experience.

Over the years, Labnol blogs have improved and the audience still loves it. Because Labnol did not shift the focus from consumer software from 11 years. Though the blog becomes world-famous, the information is still genuine and not written for promotional purposes.

 Bottom line

Amit Agarwal has set an example for many entrepreneurs who want to do something new. He proved that if you have a passion for something, you can make a living out of it.

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Evan Williams : The Man Behind Major Startups Including Blogger, Twitter, and Medium

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Entrepreneurship demands skills and experience, but for some people, it comes all by birth. They do not need much experience, instead, their passion helps them to reach their goals. One such name is Evan Williams, who is the founder of the biggest blogging websites, Blogger and Medium. He has also co-founded some other ventures and is one of the co-inventors of the largest micro-blogging website, Twitter. From a part-time farmer to an internet entrepreneur, Williams’ story, definitely, includes motivation for people.

Early Life

Evan Williams was born as Evan Clark Williams on March 1972 in Clarks, Nebraska, to Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. His family was into farming, so he also worked in the farms in the summer holidays as help. After completing high school from a local government school, Williams joined the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he also became a member of the FarmHouse Fraternity. But as he was more into starting his own business and making a career, he left college only after a year and a half.

Career

Blogger co-founder Evan Williams
Image Source: wefornews.com

Looking for a better work opportunity, Williams ended up working with a few startup companies based in various parts of Florida, Texas, and Austin. Later, he moved to Sebastopol, California, to join the marketing team of O’Reilly Media. While working at O’Reilly, he switched to the coding department of the company. He was successful in learning the required skills and developed a personal blog website EvHead.com. Eventually, he left the job to become a freelance coder. As a freelancer, he worked with companies, like Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

Founding Blogger

Evan Williams along with Meg Hourihan co-founded Pyra Labs. The aim behind founding the company was to create management software for businesses. The first product that the company produced was a web application named ‘Pyra’, which included a project manager, contact manager, and a to-do list.

I999, they used the elements of ‘Pyra’ and created a blog-publishing tool named Blogger. It was officially launched in August in the same year. The platform was entirely free, so it faced a lot of trouble to survive. But soon, when it started getting ads, it began to stabilise. Soon Williams added some premium features to the platform, to monetise it. Hourihan left the company just after a few years of the inception of the company.

In February 2003, Google acquired PyraLabs, and eventually, Blogger. With the acquisition, the premium features of Blogger also became free to use. Williams continued to work with Google for one year after the takeover and left the company in 2004.

With Google, Blogger got new redesigns every few years and became the number one blogging platform. Blogger has provided its users with the freedom to create blogs for free. It provides the users to create beautiful looking designs for their blogs, and also, buy a separate domain to host their blogs as a distinct channel.

After PyraLabs: Obvious Corporation, Twitter, Medium

After PyraLabs, Williams went on to found Odeo, a podcast company, in October 2004. Sonic Mountain later acquired the company in 2007. He also co-founded Obvious Corporation in late 2006.

The famous micro-blogging website, Twitter, was one of the various projects that Williams co-worked on along with other key members of Obvious Corporation. Later April in 2007, Twitter was spun off to become a separate company. Williams held the position of the CEO of Twitter, the most successful venture he has worked on, in 2008. After serving the company for two years, Williams stepped down as the CEO to focus entirely on product development. Williams holds around 30-35 per cent stake in Twitter.

After Twitter, Williams wanted to develop a platform that would provide the users with an increased character-limit to write their blogs, as in the beginning, Twitter allowed writing 140- characters. So, in 2012, he founded Medium. Initially, it was only open to the early adopters, but later, it was opened for public.

In the first two years of its inception, the platform did not have much of users, but by March 2015, the platform recorded over 1.5 million hours reading time by its visitors. The company hired a staff of writers and editors to put good content over the platform. In 2015, the platform was nominated for the National Magazine Award.

In May 2017, Medium.com had gained an average of over 60 million unique monthly readers. By this time, the company started paying the writers based on the likes and the number of readers their posts had on Medium. Williams added ad banners to the platform, such that to make some profits through ads, but this business model did not work for the company, and he had to remove those ads from the platform.

Personal Life

William is married to Sara Williams and has two children. He lives in San Francisco with his family. He has a net worth higher than $1 billion.

William got his name under the list of top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35 in the MIT Technology Review TR100, in 2003. In the next year, he was named “People of the Year” along with his partners Hourihan and Paul Bausch in one of the PC Magazines.

Harsh Agarwal : The Success Story of Indian Blog Scientist & the Founder of ShoutMeLoud

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“Follow your passion and the success will follow you!” the phrase that has become quite common today, and actually has done wonders for many. Same is the story of Delhi-based entrepreneur, Harsh Agarwal, who left a job (many of us dream of) just to follow his passion, and indeed the phrase set true for him, too.

Early Life

Born on 22 June 1987, Harsh Agarwal was a curious child and was always into learning new things. When he was 14, he became interested in computers and started saving to buy one. In 2002, he along with his family moved to Delhi, where he joined the Laxman Public School to pursue high school. After completing his school education, he joined the Sharda University and pursued a B.Tech degree in Information Technology.

Like any other parents, it was expected from him, too, to get a good job in an MNC and settle for a regular life. But it was not what Agarwal had ever thought. Having a curious mind, he was always into creative things and even got a certification in ethical hacking while in college.

Career

Soon the time for the placements came, his knowledge and creativity landed up him getting a job with one of the biggest MNCs, Accenture, in 2008. Since there was enough time between his graduation and joining with Accenture, he started working for Convergys.

harsh agarwal
Image Source: Twitter

Along with his job with Convergys, he started writing about things he knew and the things he was learning, at the BlogSpot platform. At that time, blogging was not as popular as it is today. Soon he also received his acceptance letter and joined a regular job at Accenture.

Along with his job, Agrawal was continuously working on his blog. He was interested in network and computer security, so he started a community named Underground World on Orkut. Soon the community started approaching more people, and Aggrwawal decided to build a blog with the same name. He tried to get a domain with the same name on BlogSpot, but the domain was not available, so he started a blog with name virgintech.blogspot. The first paycheque that he received from his online job was of $10, and the first money that he earned from AdSense was of $40.

Soon, the blog was making enough money with AdSense and other sources, such that Agarwal was able to pay his daily needs. After six months of his blogging career, he decided to devote all his time to his blog and left his job. His prime focus was to work on his blog, so he migrated his blog to a WordPress website and chose Shout-Me-Loud as the name for his blog.

Turning Point

On 29th June 2009, Agrawal met with a terrible accident, and the doctors advised him to stay on bed for the next six months. The accident was so bad that doctors had informed him that he won’t be able to walk again. Agarwal was shaken and had lost all hopes. But all he could do was try. Being bedridden, Agrawal had plenty of time to study and work on his blog. Along with working on his health, he was constantly working on the growth of his blog. According to Agarwal, it was a life-changing experience for him.

After seven months of practice and treatment, he was back on his feet. In December 2009, he met with another Blogger from Pune and partnered with him for a new venture. The two started working on a new project, and Agrawal became the B.D.O. of the firm. In just six months the company was financially independent, but the partnership was not going quite well. So, Agarwal decided to end the partnership and move back to Delhi.

ShoutMeLoud Growth

When Agarwal moved to Pune, he hardly got time for ShoutMeLoud, but when he came back to Delhi, it was the only thing which he was dedicated to. Soon the blog came back on track, and Agarwal started blogging to create awareness about making money from blogging. In just two years, ShoutMeLoud became one of the best blogs in India, and in 2013, even won the “Best Indian blog by Indiblogger” award.

By the year 2014-15, Agarwal received recognition as a public speaker, too. He organised plenty of workshops, and also, organised a blogger awareness trip ‘ShoutMeet’ from Delhi to Kanyakumari, in 2015.

Currently, ShoutMeLoud is operating under its parent company ShoutDreams and other than ShoutMeLoud, ShoutDreams is hosting WPhostingDiscount, ShoutMeTech, WPSutra, and CoinSutra blogs. In the past ten years, ShoutMeLoud has grown to a company of its own name, and many other bloggers are getting inspiration from the success story of Harsh Agarwal.

Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging

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Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.

Early Life

Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.

Early Career

After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.

winer
Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.

In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.

UserLand

The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”

In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.

During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.

By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.

DaveNet

In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.

Podcasting

Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.

Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.

In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.