This photo is from the day Abhyuday & Ramanuj launched iPleaders in Startup Saturday Kolkata. The year must be 2010.
We were two 4th year law students.
People asked us – how will you build a tech product, you don’t even have a tech cofounder? (incidentally we met our tech cofounder in this event, but he joined us later in 2018)
We had no answer. But we were not going to let small things like that come in the way 😂
We built something on wordpress and got going.
It was not easy at all.
Building a team was hard.
Getting funding was impossible.
But it was possible to get work.
There are always businesses & people with unsolved problems.
We had to find those problems. We had to figure out how we could solve them. We had to pitch. We had to build trust. We had to prove to them we could deliver results.
Initially we didn’t bother about getting paid. It was fine if we didn’t get paid, as long as we could get a testimonial or referrals.
As we went along, we could come up with better services. We started to get paid.
Then we realised we can productise our services.
We didn’t have experience, we didn’t have capital, we didn’t have back up.
We had some skills. I was good at writing. Abhyuday was a relentless learner & great executor. We had focus and perseverance.
We met many startups along the way. Most didn’t make it.
Many gave up due to lack of traction. Others gave up when they could not raise money.
We decided to hang on.
There was no guarantee that we would succeed. But we believed we would.
That was critical.
With time, we solved every obstacle.
We learned to make products & learned to sell.
Learned to hire.
We made profits that funded growth.
We learned how to manage our own despair, impatience & insecurity as we went through highs & lows of building a business.
We faced competition from global giants and startups that raised vast amounts of capital. We defeated them with way less resources.
It turned out to be a great adventure. We are now ranked #1 in the world in legal edtech – ahead of funded competitors around the world.
The process of learning, unlearning, failing and succeeding continues.
But looking back at how we started with nothing and how far we have come gives me great hope for the future.
We heard about the American Dream. Now we have an Indian Dream.
We can start from nothing and build a profitable business and become #1 in the world. This is the dream that India offers today to its youth.
You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to implement this strategy. You can do this in every career.
Find unsolved, burning problems.
Learn how to solve those problems.
Get good at solving.
Build a track record of solving problems, make it publicly demonstrable.
Don’t worry about lack of experience, do not focus on what you do not have.
Focus on what is possible to do given the situation.
And keep going.
That is all it takes to get an unusual level of success that most people consider unachievable.
We are training our learners to do that now.
Many of them are women who had to give up their career to raise a family.
Today, they earn 3x-5x more than domestic jobs by working remotely from their homes on a part-time or full-time basis, depending on their situation.
For example, Rakhee had a work experience of 9 years in the hospitality sector as a chef – she lived in Mumbai earlier, but then moved to Goa to start her own cafe.
Running her own cafe was very stressful, and she decided to take a step back.
She wanted to do something in Goa, without having to shift back to Mumbai. 6 months passed by.
She had created an Upwork profile earlier but was not pitching actively.
In August 2023, she started pursuing international remote work courses with Skill Arbitrage and uploaded work samples on her profile.
These work samples essentially were the course assignments that she performed in the course.
She also started actively sending proposals on Upwork.
She was able to secure 2 projects on Upwork within a month – one with an e-commerce startup in Thailand, another a US-based food startup.
She also works remotely for a client who runs a couple of restaurants in Singapore.
Her work is primarily that of a startup generalist and a virtual assistant – she does research, social media management and data entry work.
Today, she earns around USD 800-1000 (INR 60K-80K) per month approximately consistently for the past few months, and is pitching to new clients to ramp up her earnings further.
Some of her clients are likely to revise her remuneration in a couple of months given her contribution.
There are many others like her.
For example, Pooja Khicha had been working in a company for about 5 years, but in 2019 she had to take maternity leave.
She joined us in May 2023, created her Upwork profile in the same month and started applying for projects.
She secured her first project within just 10 days of updating her profile and earned a mere USD 45 from a US client.
Within the next two days, she obtained another project from a UK-based client.
She completed this assignment using an AI tool which she had learned about in the Skill Arbitrage course, and earned another USD 55. She got a bonus for USD 20 extra, for python based research, integrating whatsapp bot with chatgpt, for a UK based client.
She was working with US based company Dream Notary as a virtual assistant, which she got from Fiverr, earning task wise, USD 160, working for 2-3 hours per day. She got task wise payment. She used AI for this work, for Canva, social media handling, writing blogs, marketing. She worked for this client for 1.5 months.
She also worked with a US based real estate company as a virtual assistant for 6-7 hours a day for USD 35, this project is currently on hold.
She gave interviews for 2 more Upwork jobs, Australian client – technical documentation project (user manuals) USD 5 per hour, US based technical documentation for (for software documentation, SRA, requirement gathering) USD 300-500 per month approximately but the projects did not materialise due to some personal concerns.
She also has worked with a J&K client for content creation paying her INR 2000 for designing a workshop content. This project included only 7-8 hours of work.
She received offers and was interviewed by a couple of US clients to do 8 hours of work per day for 7 USD per hour but this was too much work so she had to decline.
Another US-based client has invited her for a technical writing and documentation project. She cracked the interview but refused the offer as she couldn’t work full time, then she was offered a part time role by the same client but she has put it on hold for now.
Recently she secured a Florida-based client for documentation of a technical user manual paying her USD 6 per hour working for 20 hours per week .
She is also working with a UK client who is paying her USD 5 for 1-2 hours a day work, helping her earn USD 150 per month. She does virtual assistant work, administrative work etc. for the client.
She got a client from India too, a technology company from Bangalore, where she is working as a virtual assistant. She works 20 hrs a month and gets paid 500 INR per hour. Another IT startup based in Thane reached out to her which did not materialise.
She doesn’t apply for the projects anymore. She only responds to the invitations and cracks the opportunity.
She is getting new clients every 3-4 days and turning down some opportunities due to time constraints.
She secured one more client from Fiverr, the deal is in the pipeline.
She has earned INR 1.5 lakhs till now from freelancing working 4 hours per day