Entrepreneurship

Average student to ambitious entrepreneur, here’s an inspiring life story of Yash Shah

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“I have been average at a lot of things. Average at studies, badminton, cricket, table tennis, lawn tennis, etc.”

A large portion of our 7.2 billion world population is average. So, on a scale of 0-100, most of us lie are in the middle. Is that defeat? I don’t know, but what I do know is that it is that being the jack of all trades doesn’t mean you can’t master any. This one isn’t a mathematical equation and you needn’t balance it.

“If players are being picked to represent a kabbadi team, I’ll make it to the team but I won’t stand out as a performer. For some reason, maybe I am not that good a player. That’s the curse, isn’t it? Making it to the team but not being good enough.”

Yash Shah, who was brought up in a nuclear family, with his father a businessman and mother a homemaker. Early on in the childhood, he was exposed to a lot of options.

“My pre-high school was at Amrit Jyoti. I think that has contributed to help me get where I am today. They had 18 co-curricular activities apart from major subjects. Things that I didn’t know were taught at school.”

He entered NIT-Surat & picked up Mechanical engineering following the herd as a sheep. His average skills got him accolades and publishing papers. Mentioning Abhishek, his close friend since his school, he says,

“We participated in a lot of competitions together. This one competition at my college won us an internship at IIM Ahmedabad, under professor Anil Gupta.”

The moment he mentions the name of the professor, I know about his experience. They worked on different projects, including designing a platform for GTU students. The relationship with Prof. Anil Gupta went even after the internship. They got exposed to the disruptive ideas of the start-up environment. This wasn’t ‘Aaha!’ moment that got them to initiate a start-up of their own.

Yash and Abhishek used to participate in a lot of Business plan competitions as a hobby. They even have a patent filed in their name. Yash and Abhishek met Anupama at CIIE during a Hackathon where Anupama presented an idea and both of them joined up with her to work on the same. All of them graduated and moved on with their average work-a-day jobs.

“I got a job in a bank in Mumbai. But still all of us were working on projects together, but now instead we thought of working for clients providing them services as such. Over a period of 5-6 months we figured we were using multiple tools for communication.”

That is when they thought if three people since such a long time are facing this then probably, other established companies also face this. They did their basic research and collated the results.

“Instead of building a specific functionality for a generic user-base, we’re building generic functionality for a specific user-base.”

They have a 12,000 user base, but none of their customers asked them what is so different about them than other platforms. So, Yash out of curiosity went to one of his old customers as to why they weren’t questioning how they were better.

“One of my old customers told me that as a business person all they cared about, was saving their time and money. But there are a lot of competitors, and I look at it in this way, ‘It’s a fairly interesting problem to solve and I’m not going to get bored anytime soon’.”

The average boy from Amrit Jyoti has a come a long way. I asked him about his happiest memory with Gridle and he reminisces about the bitter-sweet moment that made him feel, “It was all worth it”.

“We were pretty small then, and one day our server went down for an hour and half on a Wednesday. I was sleeping after pulling an all-nighter and I started receiving calls from people and of course that shouldn’t have happened. I didn’t know whether to feel happy or sad, but our absence was noted.”

Gridle has received investment and is a profit making company now, but initially, when they started, Yash tells me they decided not to take money from their parents or put in their own individual money either.

“Previously we had participated in Bplan competitions as a hobby. So, again we participated in 13 Bplan competitions and stood in top 3 in nine of them. That itself gave us an initial corpus of 4.5 Lakhs.”

Nearing the end, I asked him if he wanted to leave Ahmedabad to which he says,

“Although I am a huge fan of being worst of the best, because there is a lot of space to learn. There are few SaaS companies here, but we’ve decided we won’t move out of Ahmedabad, because if we do, nothing will change. There are a lot of efforts by incubators and government to make the ecosystem feasible to work here. We’ll do our bit by staying.”

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Chaaipani

Chaaipani is a media platform to share, discover and act on positive, inspiring stories of people around us. Submit your story on contact@chaaipani.com

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Chaaipani

Chaaipani is a media platform to share, discover and act on positive, inspiring stories of people around us. Submit your story on contact@chaaipani.com

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