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Sorav Jain : An Indian Entrepreneur Crusing Down the Bay of Digital Marketing

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The traditional ways of marketing have been outweighed by digitalized promotions as soon as we stepped into the era of digitalization. But, since the last few years, online marketing space has been overcrowded by people with low experience and claimed professionals. The presence of such freelancers, who have a very minimal idea about digital marketing and social media, creates confusion among the customers which reduces trust in the long run. So, the effectiveness of a good digital marketing company gradually loses its demanding position while people with basically no knowledge-creating havoc in the digital world.

And, to clear the mind of people and help them chose the best, Sorav Jain, a young Indian entrepreneur created some offbeat strategies for his digital marketing company, echoVME. He built the company out of pure passion, as he was ever really into studying biotechnology, though he pursued it. But, later he made his mind to create something of his own, like his father and uncles and went abroad to study marketing management.

Family Background and Early Life

Sorav Jain belonged to a family where creating your own ship cruise was appreciated more than working on a royal one. His father and uncles were established businessmen, so going the unconventional way and turning down tempting jobs were absolutely supported by his family members.socialsamosa.com

Sorav Jain
Image Source: digitalscholar.in

Sorav went to Loyola College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biotechnology in 2007. While being an undergraduate student, he already mastered the art of SEO, and hence, joined Contempo Technologies as an SEO and Content Executive in January 2006. By this time, Sorav already chalked out his plan to start off his venture and explore the entrepreneurial endeavours. He went to the University of Leeds to complete his master’s degree in International Marketing Management and joined CMO Axis as a Digital Marketing Specialist after graduating. Working for CMO Axis, a global digital marketing firm fascinated him even more about the world of advertising.

Setting up echoVME

Sorav Jain still continued working at CMO Axis, while he was building his own empire. Quite a business mind!

An entire plan was set up, and Sorav started assembling the building blocks of the company from December 2009. The company became operational from March of the next year, a couple of months after leaving CMO Axis. So, like any other young entrepreneur, Sorav dived into his business with the utmost passion and energy to bring a significant change in digital marketing.

The company started with a team of 10 members operating from Mumbai and Chennai.

At People’s Best Interest

echoVME wasn’t established with the regular idea of going around, convincing people, taking in clients and earning money. Sorav really wanted to put some effort to make young minds, especially college students, learn about digital marketing so that the quality of freelancers available in the marketplace improves and more students get exposed to the light of digital marketing.

Since its establishment, a lot of training sessions and workshops are conducted by echoVME. Apart from covering major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, echoVME has also spread its wings to Sri Lanka. It was a really smart strategy from the owner to conduct such workshops, as they received humungous positive feedbacks, even from CEOs, CMOs, and Executive Officers of many famous brands.

Within few months of founding the company, it made deals worth $10 million through corporate blogging strategy.

Obstacles and Competitors

For Sorav Jain the hardest challenge was time management and implementing every theoretical statement from the heavy books of business administration in real life. He said that when you set up a business, it is more than just the bookish definition of the business terminologies, as you have to deal with real people and real crisis. But, that’s how one learns, isn’t it?

Sorav gives very vague answers, every time it comes down to mentioning echoVME’s competitors. In an interview, he said that every company that is trying to reach a standard position in digital marketing, especially blogging-centric marketing, are the competitors.

Success of echoVME

Presently, echoVME has trained more than 2000 professionals and brands through their training programs and workshops. More than 100 workshops have been conducted echoVME in major cities of India till date. The training sector of echoVME, SOCIALME has gained unexpected popularity from the very first day.

What after echoVME?

Sorav founded Digital Scholar, an agency-based learning institute in July 2019. Apart from this, Sorav has also been a guest lecturer at many famous educational institutes, like IIT Madras and Leeds Metropolitan University.

grammarly

Grammarly : The Founding Story of the Best Tool for Enhancing One’s Creative Writing

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With the increasing power of the internet to dominate mankind, digital contents have become quintessential parts of the online marketplace. We all know ‘a pen is mightier than the sword’ and in this era of modernization the true power of writing is revealed, given that it reaches out to more and more people worldwide.

So, when a person can influence the entire world through his writings, why not make it even better? A piece of writing can make significant changes if written in appropriate style and clarity with no grammatical errors. Moreover, the digital contents are supposed to be plagiarism free, a key rule that every writer must abide by. So, how about software that can provide all the essential tools for delivering a proper piece of writing?

With businesses flourishing through digital content writings, it is a pre-requisite for every blogger out there to have Grammarly. Grammarly is a software launched on 1st July 2009 to detect any kind of writing errors including grammatical flaws, spellings, punctuation, style mistakes, etc. Moreover, it not only detects the mistakes but corrects it by giving specific suggestions. The software is also a plagiarism checker. All you need is to drop the text, and then, it will do its job.

grammarly founders
Image Source: kamloopsmatters.com

The Birth of an Idea

The birth of the idea for Grammarly dates back to the time when Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn went to International Christian University, Ukraine together. In 2000, when the internet just started getting popular, these two students noticed that almost everyone was downloading essays from the internet without anybody realizing it. Thus, the students were getting corrupted very easily, not harnessing the power of their own creativity.

Shevchenko started writing software to eradicate this tainted idea from the minds of students, and thus by 2004, he came up with a service called My Dropbox. He, along with Lytvyn and 15 other people, created a team and worked on this project. The prime utility of the software was to check plagiarism for essays. It was a charged service, and yet, 800 universities were using this product by 2007. My Dropbox was a huge success for the team because apart from this, there was only one company in the entire world doing business with the same technology. The very year, the product was sold to Blackboard, a renowned company for educational platforms.

Founding Grammarly

The conditions led by Blackboard while buying the company was that Lytvyn has to work for them for the next two years, and while working for the company, the other founder cannot work on a similar project. Lytvyn accepted the offer, but the very day the deal with Blackboard ended he fled to Toronto to work with Shevchenko. And, within a few days, they launched their new product, Grammarly.

Though at first, they decided to limit the use of Grammarly only for the educational institutions and students. But they did expand it and made it available to every the commoner as well. Today, anyone can buy the software and get access to all the tools and benefits of Grammarly.

To found Grammarly, Lytvyn and Shevchenko didn’t bring any investors in-house, rather they spent the money which was received from selling their first product.

Success of Grammarly

The best part of Grammarly is that it not only tracks the grammatical errors or punctuations but also points out an incorrectly formed sentence. It also suggests the user with some options to rectify their mistakes along with proper explanations where it went wrong.

One of the main problems with this kind of product is system imperfection. It’s the same reason for which Microsoft also oversees typos and some major errors. But, turning this into a strength Grammarly has set upvoting system for the changes it makes. So, the user defines which one is correct or more appropriate and not the system. Moreover, Grammarly uses machine learning and deep learning algorithms for its product to make it more efficient.

In 2012, the company made around $10 million, and by 2017, Grammarly had around 6.9 million active users. In 2017, the company also raised $110 million from General Catalyst, IVP and Spark Capital. This was the first-ever venture round of Grammarly, and the investors came around with utter interest. Everyone witnessed the profits of Grammarly, rising in geometric progression over the years.

Today, apart from browser extension Grammarly is also available as an application for both Android and iOS.

Superside

Fredrik Thomassen : The Founder of Superside, A Startup to Make Businesses Better and Time-efficient

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A proper presentation can work wonders when it comes to impressing your clients. One might have some strong strategies for the growth of the company, but presenting it accurately is also a very big deal. But, the employers of a company often spend way too much time making PowerPoint presentations, proofreading, etc. Now, hiring a freelancer for the creative furnishing of these tasks is always the priority, but what if you set a deadline?

Websites like Fiverr do offer services that are needed for business projects, but you cannot get things done every time, especially in the eleventh hour. So, Fredrik Thomassen created Superside, an online creative service which ensures both quality and delivery by time. For example, if one needs a project to be done within 24 hours, Superside makes a team according to the demand of projects and availability of the freelancers, so that the project is delivered on time, ensuring the excellence as well.

Fredrik Thomassen decided to create such a company, as he went through the troubles of spending hours on a project, designing, data entry, and much more when he worked at McKinsey & Company.

Education

Fredrik Thomassen
Image Source: forbes.com

Fredrik attended ESSEC Business School in 2009 and went to Norwegian School of Economics straight after that. He graduated from there in 2010 with a bachelor’s degree in economics followed by graduating from London School of Economics and Political Science in 2011.

Career

After graduating with a master’s in Econometrics and Mathematical Engineering, Thomassen joined as a Journalist in Agderposten. He worked there for more than five years, and then, joined McKinsey & Company.

While working as an Associate in this company, Thomassen faced many problems related to the desk works, especially in creating project presentations in PowerPoint. According to him, it was time-consuming, and the “not-so-skilled-people” were trying their hands to give their projects a professional touch. So, instead of facing these troubles, why not hire a freelancer?

This was when the idea of creating Superside (formerly known as Konsus) started peeking in his mind. But, he already knew that platforms like Fiverr and Freelancer.com are already entertaining quite a robust number of both customers and freelancers. So, he needed to think outside the box to get his start-up running and successfully flourishing.

Founding Superside

According to the reports of Harvard Business Review, an average skilled office employee spends 40% of his time doing jobs like data entry and PowerPoint presentations. He can certainly put the efforts on core tasks, that is, for what he was actually hired, once these extra jobs get done by someone else.

Thus, to eliminate this problem for once and all, Fredrik Thomassen founded Superside in August 2015 in Oslo, Norway. Thomassen built Superside especially for the big firms whose workload gets doubled, as they needed to focus both on business and the creative presentations for clients. So, the company was built to ease the pressure for big corporations and also ensuring job security for the freelancers as well. After the company joined Y Combinator, the growth is increasing at 10% on a weekly basis.

Success of Superside

Superside has a very tough screening process to ensure the quality of work that is provided to the clients. Only a very handful of people, probably the experts at every field, are hired by Superside. So, there’s no need to worry about your project, once it has been assigned to a Superside team. Moreover, for the freelancers, it’s always a threat that they might be out of a job any time. Superside ensures a fixed number of jobs for certain freelancers who reach a given target, thus ensuring a constant source of income. Moreover, each freelancer gets paid around $15 to $20 for a single hour which is quite appealing for a freelancer.

By 2016, after joining Y Combinator, it really helped the company to reach its peak. Within a year of its launch, the company had clients from more than 500 companies coming from 60 different countries. There were over 200 vetted freelancers then, and most of them were from Eastern Europe. So, the biggest market for Superside was the U.S.

By early 2018, the company already raised $1.7 million from investors like Acequia Capital, Liquid2 Ventures and a few others.

Apart from Superside

Fredrik Thomassen has also served as the CEO and was the co-founder of Zalora Group, Zalora Indonesia. It is an e-commerce platform for fashion which is now a part of Global Fashion Group.

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David Crane : The Famous Videogame Guru and Co-founder of Activision

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Video games have introduced us to a new world, and every game lover might be familiar with the names like Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier. These are the video game designers who are none less than the Hollywood superstars. But at the beginning of the video games, despite developing the most famous games, the designers did not get the due credits. They were sitting behind the name of the company that launched the game and just kept working months of tedious and insomniac hours. But then, some of the designers took control in their hands, and it was the time for a change. One such video game designer is David Crane, the co-founder of Activision, who is a superstar designer and is widely known for the video game Pitfall!.

Crane is an American programmer and video game designer who was born in Nappanee, Indiana, the US in 1953. After completing his school education from a local high school, he went to the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona, where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree. Soon after graduating as an engineer, he joined National Semiconductor as a hardware designer.

With time, he became interested in video game designing and development, so at the age of 29, he started working for Atari. He took the responsibility of developing games for Atari 2600. He also became the part of the team that was working on the Atari 800 computer operating system.

David Crane Activision
Image Source: ivghof.info

During the late 70s, the main game developers, including Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, of the company were in talks with the company management to get the developers their due credit. At the time, the company was also under the acquisition of its new owner Warner Communications, and it has many unsolved issues as well. The company refused to give those developers any extra financial compensation or credits, as it was afraid that those developers could get better options elsewhere.

Based on a memo of the best-selling video games of the past few years, Crane had designed few of the best selling games of the company, yet he was not given any bonuses or even the credits for that. With 20 million sold copies of games developed by him, he only earned a $20,000 salary.

One fine day, during a Tennis match, Crane and Miller got into a serious discussion about how the companies were taking all the credit for the game development when it was all the hard work of the designer. Concluding to this, they planned to leave their jobs and start a new gaming company that would not only promote the company, but also the designer who designed the games.

In 1979, along with Miller, Kaplan and Whitehead, Crane left Atari to start their own company. But they had no idea from where to start, as at that time only the companies that manufactured the consoles published the games. To start a business, they needed the money and for that, they met another budding entrepreneur Jim Levy, who was already planning to start a business of manufacturing cassette tape drives. With the help of Levy, they managed to raise US$1 million in capital from Sutter Hill Ventures.

The five co-founders finally founded Activision on 1 October 1979. But they were hit by a lawsuit from Atari, claiming that the four developers from Atari had stolen the company secrets. So, despite the knowledge of Atari 2600 and its gaming development, they had to create Activision’s own version of games that differ from the Atari games visually.

But since all the four were experienced enough, the games that they built were way better and had credits for the developers along with the instruction manual.

In 1982, Crane developed the most successful game of his career, i.e., Pitfall!. Within one year of its launch, Activision sold 4 million copies of the game and became the second best-selling game of the year. It also made a total revenue of US$60 million in just one year for Activision. The game maintained its place in the Billboard charts for 64 weeks and was also awarded the game of the year in 1982. This was a game-changer for Crane, and he was famous in no time.

By 1983, the company has already hired around 60 employees. After working for seven years with Activision, Crane left the company in 1986 and co-founded Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. With Absolute, he developed two of the most famous games of his career, David Crane’s Amazing Tennis and A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia. In his entire career, he has developed over 30 video games.

Crane came with another venture in 1995, named as Skyworks Technologies and served the company as the CTO. His last known game as a game designer is March of the Penguins (2006). His estimated worth as reported in 2016 was $200 million. Currently, he is working as an independent video game developer and video game expert witness. The decision he, and his fellow programmers, to build a company that promoted the designers of the video games, not only made them celebrities, but the other designers in the world also started getting their deserved recognition.

zozotown

Yusaku Maezawa : Self-made Japanese Billionaire who Bought SpaceX’s First Ticket to Moon

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Though the 9 to 5 jobs are secure and have opportunities for growth, not many resemble the very idea. Despite that, there are only a few who take the step to make their lives different from that. It requires lots of courage to deal with what comes with the risk one takes to get an unusual but better life. One such person who never liked the idea of living the life of a salaryman is the Japanese entrepreneur and founder of Zozotown, Yusaku Maezawa.

Early Life

Yusaku Maezawa was born and brought up in Chiba City near Tokyo in Japan. While growing up, he got the opportunity to study at the Jitsugyo high school; a school affiliated from the prestigious Waseda University. Usually, it took him to reach the school around one and a half hour trough the train. While travelling on the train, Maezawa saw many salaried men around him, and he could never relate to them as well as the idea of 9 to 5 jobs. This was the time when he decided that he would never go for a salaried job but will do something more interesting and maybe something on his own.

While at school, Maezawa got introduced to a punk band named Switch Style, which later, he joined as a guitarist. Soon, he learnt to play other instruments as well and became the main drummer of the band. With the band, he got to travel to different cities and even countries. Once, when he went on a tour to New York with his band, he was quite amused by looking at how the new internet technology was developing there. Maezawa found out that the growth of the internet has also produced many opportunities for the people as well.

Starting Entrepreneurial Journey

Yusaku Maezawa
Image Source: observer.com

When back from the tour, Maezawa realised that even without knowing, he ultimately had caught into a salaried job. But he had no plans to continue. In 1998, to pursue his dream of starting his own business, he alongside his job in the band, started selling music CDs, under the company name Start Today. It was a mail-order business. Influenced by the rise of the internet, in 2000, he took his business online. Soon, Maezawa started stocking up clothes and fashion accessories on the platform. With the rise in demand and to focus entirely on his business, he quit his music career in 2001.

The company was rebranded as Zozotown, which in 2005, became solely a fashion eCommerce website, as Maezawa cut the Music CD selling business free the same year. Within two years, the company grew enough to go public in the Tokyo Mothers Market in 2007.

Interest in Art and Culture

Yusaku Maezawa, apart from being a former musician, has always been interested in art and culture and had dreamt of working in the same regard. So, in 2012, he founded Contemporary Art Foundation; a foundation that entirely focusses on art and promoting young artists through awards and grants. He also had the plans to establish an art museum in Chiba. So for his non-existing museum too, Maezawa was always looking for great art pieces that he now exhibits through his foundation every year.

In 2017, Zozotown integrated an online measurement system, named Zozosuit, and the same year, Zozotown became Zozo.

Maezawa has always had free-thinking and is known for his progressive management style. In fact, he started a 6-hour working day system in June 2012 to make his employees spend more time with their family. His company also offers extra housing allowance to the employees who live far from their homes to work in the company. He is also into charity works.

Accomplishments

In 2017 his estimated worth was 1.5 billion. According to 2018’s Forbe report, Maezawa is the 14th richest person in Japan with a net worth of $2.7 billion. His company has raised to over 2000 employees, and the online platform has got over 3 million registered users. Maezawa holds around 59% of shares in Zozo. Besides art and culture, he is also very interested in travelling, and 60% of his time, he is out of Japan, travelling.

Talking about travelling as his hobby, Maezawa is the first person who will be travelling to the moon with Elon Musk’s BFR rocket in 2023. He will also be inviting a few artists with him to travel. According to him, he has already made a down payment for the ticket for the moon mission to SpaceX.

naukri.com

Sanjeev Bikhchandani : The Man who Gave Hope to New India with Naukri.com

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India is pioneering in the business world not recently but from a long good time. Maybe the number of successful Indian start-ups has increased in recent times, but our country has many influential businessmen who have been changing the economic status of our country from time bygone. Employment is one of the key ways to improve the economic status of a nation and delving deeper into this mission, Sanjeev Bikhchandani founded Naukri.com in 1997. Naukri.com is an online job portal under Info Edge, which was also founded by this very person.

Bikhchandani came up from an economically “not-so-stable” family. So, because the circumstances of his upbringing, he had the vision to build something big for himself from a very young age.

No Business Background

sanjeev bikhchandani naukri.com
Image Source: forbesindia.com

It is a common perception in India that the People from Sindhi descent always belong to a lavish business background, but there are exceptions in every situation. Bikhchandani is also an exception when it comes to his family background, as he was raised by a government-employed father and a housewife mother. His father was a government doctor, but life was definitely not a bed of roses for Bikhchandani, as he grew up in a government colony with a middle-class lifestyle.

Born in 1963, he completed his schooling from St. Columbus’s School, Delhi in 1981 and pursued a bachelor’s degree in economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. After he graduated in 1984, he went to IIM Ahmedabad to complete his MBA.

Bikhchandani was impressed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial side of the professional world, and hence, he decided to create his own business after getting a taste of corporate life.

Stepping into the Work-life

Before joining IIM Ahmedabad, he worked as an Account Executive at Lintas for three years. After post graduating with a Diploma in Management and Entrepreneurship, he started working for HMM Hindustan MilkFood Manufacturers), now known as GlaxoSmithKline. He worked there as a Product Executive and controlled the marketing of Horlicks.

While working at the company, Bikhchandani was paid Rs. 8000 per month, which was not at all an unsatisfactory amount in that period of time. But, he eventually got sick of the monotonous life given that he had bigger things on his mind from a very young age. Bikhchandani quit the job in 1990, and the next phase was definitely very difficult for him.

Starting the Entrepreneurial Journey

Since Bikhchandani was prepared for a long time to start his own business, he knew life was going to be rough. He is grateful to his wife for being supportive of him as after Bikhchandani left his job, the family completed relied on his wife. His wife, Surbhi, worked at Nestle, and this young couple was totally fine with the idea of being dependable, as they knew what it is going to take to become successful, and kudos they did it!

Bikhchandani founded two companies, Landmark and Info Edge in 1990, with another business partner. The former company dealt with the database of trademarks, while the latter dealt with salary surveys. After three years, with both the companies and a partner, they decided to split with each one getting to keep one company. So, in late 1993, Bikhchandani settled with Info Edge and started everything from scratch.

Founding Naukri.com

Since Bikhchandani needed to make a fresh start, he kept his expenses low for the next four years. The idea of Naukri.com burst in his mind after he attended an event of IT Asia Exhibition in Delhi. He planned to create a website and start executing what he had in his mind.

Since the internet just arrived in India then, all servers were US-based. It was not possible for him to create a website, and thus, he called up his brother, who was a professor in the US and hired a server. Bikhchandani also took capital from his brother to start the business, and that is how he founded Naukri.com. He provided his father with a 5% stake in the company.

The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.The company was all about resumes, jobs and recruitment consultants, that lured both the unemployed and the employed in search of better jobs. Within a couple of years, Naukri.com made around INR 22 lakhs and gave 15% stake of the company to ICICI Ventures for INR 7.3 crores.

This was the turning point of the business, after which, the growth curve was never disappointing. In 2004, the company made Rs INR crores, and in 2006, it became country’s first Dot Com Company to make its place in the list of Bombay & National Stock Exchanges.

Apart from Naukri.com

The parent company of Naukri.com is Info Edge which also established Shiksha.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, Quadrangle and many other websites as well. Bikhchandani’s Info Edge also holds stakes in Zomato, Meritnation, Policybazaar, Happilyunmarried, etc. Bikhchandani is also the recipient of the award Ernst and Young- Entrepreneur of the Year 2008.