I am from a very poor family. When I was a toddler, my grandmother asked my father to leave the joint family because he did not earn enough. In 1991, at the peak of the recession, my parents moved to a 150 sq ft one-room government flat with two toddlers. I was three, my sister was one.

Very soon, we were unable to pay electricity bills and the connection was cut.

After my father left for the office, my mother would cry alone because she had no food to eat. Whatever was there she would feed to me and my sister, and wait for the month to end.

She started looking for jobs but they were hard to come by. After many years of failed effort, she got a job as a teacher, after which our situation improved a bit.

I decided as a kid that I would not be poor and suffer like my parents. I would grow up and be successful, and make my parents happy.

I studied very hard because I was told this was the way to be successful and escape poverty.

I topped the national law entrance exam and got into a top law college – NUJS. I was motivated to do this because I had heard that graduates from this college got jobs that paid Rs 1 lakh per month in top law firms. I wanted that.

My parents did not have enough money to pay the fees, but I got an education loan from SBI. I was very happy. Finally, I could see the end of the tunnel.

A few more years, and then my family would never be poor again!

And then my dream turned into a nightmare. At the end of my first year, the college doubled the fees overnight. From Rs 67,000, it was suddenly 1,37,000 per month.

The bank refused to increase the loan amount without collateral, and we had nothing. My mother tried to console me by saying she would sell her jewellery.

That day I cried, because all my hard work was failing, and my mother certainly did not have enough jewellery. Was there no way out?

This is actually when I started a blog. I wrote a post about my situation and circulated it. 

People gave me sympathy, but nobody helped.

But I could not have imagined at the time that starting the blog and beginning to tell my story would change my life forever. The problem itself contained the seed of its solution, as I would eventually discover. 

The move to content writing

Somehow, I was moved to content writing by the situation, and one day I would build a multi-million dollar business on the back of it. Only, I had no idea at the time.

I realised that my loan would run out in my third year. If I couldn’t start earning myself, I would not be able to complete my studies.

Since I had started a blog, I now felt obliged to write more posts. Mostly nobody read them, but I would write something and post it on my Facebook and Orkut pages anyway. Yes, Orkut it was, back in 2007!

Slowly, some people started finding my blog on Google too. Posts piled up.

I wrote about the experience of a law student, so the blog was called ‘A first taste of law’.

Based on this, I soon got many opportunities.

I wrote a paper on space law which was accepted at the International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow and later cited in the most widely read textbook on space law.

I got opportunities to ghost write articles and books for successful people which made a lot of money, more than I needed to pay my college fees.

I also worked with famous historian Ramchandra Guha, who I assisted with research. Usually, he would ask me to translate books on Gandhi from Bengali to English as these were original texts.

I got one of my best internships because of my flair for writing in Mumbai with India’s top shipping lawyer.

Regular writing also helped me grow my social media presence. By the time I finished college, I had 6,000 followers on Facebook, and 20,000 on Linkedin! This acted like a turbocharger for my career, for anything I wanted to do.

A step into the unknown

When I quit my law firm job to launch my own startup in 2011, I had no idea how I would pay my rent and put food on the table.

A startup called Gyancentral used to pay me Rs 4,000 per article I wrote for them, plus Rs 1,000 bonus if the article got more than 100 Facebook likes (this used to be a thing once upon a time)!

You bet I got Rs 5,000 for each article, and they wanted me to write an article every week, which made sure my expenses were paid and I could focus all my time on the startup.

Also, when I launched my own startup, I realised that I had an existing community of readers who appreciated my insights and ideas. And they were ready to buy what I was selling, because I had built trust with them through my content over the years.

My parents and teachers had told me that studying hard and scoring a lot of marks would help me escape poverty.

In reality, content writing did that for me.

My parents could not understand. Not even when I received the President’s Award for creative writing in 2004, while I was still in high school.

I went to Rashtrapati Bhavan with my whole family as a state guest, and received an award from President Abdul Kalam.

I thought my father would be proud. I asked him what he thought. He asked: how will this help? Will your writing help you get a job? Well Baba, my writing helped me build a company that gives jobs to 400+ people from all over the world. Our annualised revenue run rate is over USD 6 million and growing rapidly.  Writing indeed saved my life and made me who I am today. But remember that the same blog-writing work that I performed after quitting my law firm job would be insufficient to build a company of this size and impact.  I had to go up the value chain over time.  I learned how to write amazing landing pages.  I learned how to conceptualise course designs that are breakthrough and light years ahead of what is being taught in the market and then write it down. I learned to capture personal stories about my pains and victories, how to articulate my mission and shared it regularly with my community so that people who identified with my mission could reach out to me and associate with me as team members or collaborators.  That helped me to build a high-performance team.   I learned how to create content to make technical disciplines palatable for an uninitiated audience.  Then, I learned how to create ad scripts that make people interested in knowing more. I learned how to create amazing webinar content. I kept stacking up many additional highly valuable content creation skills.  That is how, step by step, I was able to build a new age edtech company that enables people to get 3x-5x more high-paying jobs.    If I had not done that, I would have remained a content writer at the bottom of the food chain, and I could even have been replaced by AI.  Not anymore.  Today, as we continue to grow further, I realise that we are ourselves in dire need of content writers who can enable us to continuously produce such results.  This problem is not limited to me or other edtech founders. Every startup founder, SME owner or service professional is in dire need of people who can create content that enables them to generate more leads, to nurture them, to convert them, and to delight them through their journey as they consume a product/service.   Even though they may be experts in their domain, they need assistance from content writers to generate inquiries and paying clients.  However, content writers who can create highly valuable content are so hard to find. Everywhere I find people writing very poor, generic, average quality content. By working from India or other developing economies for international startups, SMEs and services professionals in the US, UK, Singapore, Canada, Dubai, Australia and other advanced economies, you will have an unbeatable cost advantage over other foreign content writers.