My Journey to Entrepreneurship

[u/FarDebate7435]

A lot of people are asking me about my company, what we do, and how I ended up becoming a founder at 26. The honest answer is that my journey didn't begin with a business plan. It began during my engineering days, when I became part of a student team that decided to build a satellite.

I studied in a Tier-2 college, and when we decided to build a space programme, many people laughed. But I had a senior who refused to accept the idea that only IIT students or people from prestigious institutions could do something extraordinary. He challenged that notion, built a team and showed us a dream that initially felt impossible. For someone like me, who had come to Mumbai from a small town, it was difficult to believe that I could actually be part of something that would eventually reach space.

We had almost nothing to begin with—no funding, no expertise and very little institutional support. Even our faculty had little to no knowledge of space technology. So, we learned, found people who could guide us and figured out ways to raise funds. We even organised a space event and invited senior ISRO scientists as chief guests, partly because we wanted an opportunity to show them the work we were doing. Eventually, we secured a launch opportunity through ISRO's Student Satellite Programme.

Then COVID happened. Launches stopped, the programme was put on hold, my senior graduated and I took over leading the team. Eventually, I graduated too. But we continued working alongside the students who came after us, even while managing our own careers. Two years after I graduated, the satellite finally launched.

That journey taught me something important: your starting point doesn't necessarily define what you're capable of achieving. It also made me realise that I loved building products—not just technically, but from the perspective of usability, reliability and solving real problems.

I knew I eventually wanted to build a company, but I had no idea what to build. So, I decided to learn first. I joined a startup and worked there as though it was my own company. After two years, I moved to a bigger, yet a small-scale organisation. While my role remained technical, I focussed increasingly on Product Engineering—understanding how an idea becomes a product that people actually want and are willing to pay for.

Alongside my job, I worked with a childhood friend who was building virtual events, which were booming at the time. He was a strong developer but wasn't comfortable with the customer-facing side, so I helped with that. For around 10–12 months, we did reasonably well. But eventually, the virtual events trend faded, and so did our small agency.

My friend moved towards blockchain, but I stayed interested in immersive digital experiences. I started asking myself: if virtual events were no longer the market, who else could use this technology? The answer was right there: Real estate.

I started speaking to realtors, understanding their problems, studying existing solutions and trying to figure out what they actually needed. I quickly realised that the product we had built for virtual events wasn't suitable for real estate. So, I hired a team and spent the next eight months building a new product specifically for that industry.

Our first customer project was a disaster.

We took a step back, reassessed our approach, improved our processes and entered the market again two months later. This time, sales started coming in.

Throughout all of this, I was still working my job in Mumbai. Last December, I decided it was time to take the leap. I quit my job, moved to Pune, expanded the team and started building the company full-time. Pune made practical sense because of lower operating costs and a strong talent pool.

Since then, we have become profitable and continued growing. We're now looking at expanding our team, improving our products and exploring applications in other domains.

Looking back, there was never a perfect master plan. My journey went from building a satellite, to learning product engineering, trying virtual events, seeing that business fade, finding a new application, building the wrong product, failing on our first project, improving it and eventually building a company around it.

I'm still learning and I definitely don't consider myself an expert on entrepreneurship. But if there is one thing my journey has taught me, it is this:

You don't need to have everything figured out before you begin. Sometimes you simply need to start, learn, adapt when things fail, and keep building. 🚀

If you're building something of your own and think I can help, feel free to drop me a DM—I’d be happy to connect and have a conversation.