by Varun Mayya
Our apartment/office in Gurgaon
A makeshift tripod stand
A makeshift standing desk
The way we worked for the next three months DEFINED shoestring. My back was giving up, so we made a makeshift microwave standing desk. We used borrowed thermocol to make a video rig to explain the video resume part of our product. We were really crunched. In March, we had a complete product that looked and felt awesome. We were stressed and tired, but the product was finally completed. We decided not to do any PR or marketing.
“Let’s just tell people,” I said.
Mohak brought on our first few companies while the rest of us randomly spoke to people on LinkedIn asking them to use Jobspire. It was amazing to see a few people using the platform. We had 70 sign-ups that month. A year later, we had nearly 1,000 sign-ups a day—still spending nothing on marketing. Over 1,500 companies ended up using Jobspire.
To counter the stress from working hard and sleeping so little, we played all sorts of indoor games, from Pictionary to a weird version of indoor badminton to just sitting and telling each other our fears and goals in life. We were becoming family.
As we grew, we met investors. We couldn’t keep burning the money we had made from SIZR. The first investor I met ran a famous media company. I had traveled nearly four hours to reach his place and I didn’t have any clue on how valuation economics worked.
“What valuation are you looking at?” he asked, slowly sipping a cup of tea.
“I’m not sure,” I said, thinking at the back of my mind that I’d have to go to Quora and check out what that meant.
“I don’t want to invest cash in you, at least not entirely.”
I was upset. We worked so hard and here’s an investor telling us he’s not going to invest cash.
After Anshumani, our mentor’s advice, I read a lot about angel investing, deal metrics in India, etc. This was not before I embarrassed myself in front of several other investors. We were preparing for another pitch event (In my experience, these are useless. No deal happens on stage.), when Nikunj Jain and a few other investors happened to interview me on Skype. Nikunj absolutely loved the product.
“Yes, I’ll invest,” he said.
His confidence helped us through a particularly rough patch we were having. The minute he said he would put in some cash, the team suddenly stood up and hit fifth gear again. We haven’t slowed down since that day.
Part Three: Bengaluru
At this point, we took a call and moved to Bengaluru. The weather in Delhi was horrible and we realized that we were still young and needed friends. Nobody in the team had gone out of the house for four months. Isolation can drive you insane. We made the switch to a place where we had friends and where the weather was calmer. I wasn’t a believer in things like weather or environment affecting people—but here I was, wrong yet again.
It was at around this point when we met Ravi Srivastava from Purvi Capital. Initially, Ravi had committed ₹3 lakhs and wanted to take on a mentorship role, but we were really pushing the traction and we saw incredible growth spurts. Ravi was raising a fund at that point and he asked me if we’d like to be a part of his portfolio. I was an expert on deal metrics by then but I didn’t even think about the valuation.
I’d realized that angel deals are not about the percentage you dilute or the valuation of the company, it’s about the people you’d like to work with. We thought Ravi and Nikunj were awesome, self-driven people who thought like us, so we said yes. We got a pretty good (multi-million) dollar valuation at the end of it all. Towards the end, a lot of investors saw us as a good deal and everybody wanted to jump in and put in cash. We were very oversubscribed and had to make decisions on who to remove from the round!
A term sheet for ₹1.7 crores came through and while the paperwork took some time, we finally managed to raise a round and make sure we have amazing people involved.
We went on to hire over 20 new people, ex-Amazon, ex-Twitter and ex-Zomato employees, including people much older than us, and rented a decent office space in Ulsoor that we re-did ourselves to reflect our culture back in the old days. We even re-hired some of the people who we had to let go. The most impressive fact? At that point we didn’t even have our degrees.
Businesses can fail at any time. There are just too many variables, some out of your control and some in your control. For us, this was never about the business. It was about family, and sticking together—through sadness, failure and success.
So why did I take us on a trip down memory lane? To tell you what freelancing really helped me do – take the plunge into starting up and play on the grandest stage of them all – the funded start-up game. But this isn’t the only progression from being a freelancer.
The other alternative – building a smaller product start-up
Over the last few years, I’ve come to realize that there’s another natural progression to freelancing—building and scaling a product. The math is simple. If you build something customers will pay $10 for every month, at 100 customers, that’s an incoming monthly revenue of $1,000. If you scale up to 10,000 customers, you’re suddenly making $100,000 a month!
Product Success Formula—Charge something for a simple product * Sell it to enough customers
People in the start-up world tend to overcomplicate the above math—they throw in buzzwords like valuations, innovation, freemium and thought leadership. But in essence the formula is simple—you sell more of something than is required to sustain you and the people that work with you. Buffer and 37 signals are great examples of companies that follow that simple formula—and do it very well. Passive income completely removes the need for you to work and according to me employees at companies like Buffer and Basecamp have the best quality of life compared to the crash and burn lifestyle of (almost every) VC-funded start-up.
You Can’t Do It Alone
Whether it’s a funded start-up or a small business, you’ll need a team. My argument to running a company over personal freelancing has been simple—you need someone to take the load off you. There are times as a freelancer where you will be sick, or are handling too much. This is where a team will help you. Every digital business today requires at bare minimum just one person from each Pyjama Category—everything else can be outsourced.
Here’s what you will need:
A product developer to lead the product
A UI/UX designer to figure out design and interaction (you can sometimes eliminate the need for a designer by using commercially available templates and themes)
A back-end developer
A website designer, also called a front-end developer (sometimes, a freelancer can be both a back-end and front-end developer, also called a “Full-Stack” developer)
A marketing person to do your digital marketing
A salesperson to scrape leads and send email sequences
An outsourced legal and CA consultant
With this team, you could build almost any Software as a Service (SaaS) tool out there right now. A SaaS tool is generally a software tool that is based on the cloud so that nobody needs to download, yet provides some value to a customer such that he or she pays some money for every month in “recurring monthly payments” You need to come up with a great idea to build, but with enough experience we’re confident you can build great products that make passive income. However, you should be prepared for the possibility of your first few products failing.
Most freelancers end up building small remote teams and work on such tools. I’ve yet to meet a freelancer who has worked more than four years in his field and not started something of their own. The backbone and safety net that freelance gives you allows you to take some risks and if it works out, could make you sweet passive income.
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About the Authors
Varun is a computer science engineer from Manipal Institute of Technolog
y who raised funding in India at the age of 20 for the recruitment platform, Jobspire. Since then, he has hired over 200 people and now runs the 40-man Avalon Labs, a profitable holdings company that owns multiple businesses and dabbles in edge technology like artificial reality, blockchain and AI.
Abhinav is a UI/UX designer with a degree in computer science from Manipal Institute of Technology. Starting out as a freelancer, he has worked with over 60 tech start-ups in India and Silicon Valley. Abhinav currently leads UI/UX design at Unacademy, a like-minded start-up in Bengaluru.
