Having worked with multiple startups. Having listened to the goals and dreams of founders. And most importantly, having tried starting up several times and finally getting something to work to a point where it can sustain me, I have realized one thing. You have to be crazy, stupid, brave, and
Anything that you do, if you do not do it with full involvement, will feel like hard work. During the initial days of your career, you might have to chop wood and carry water, even if that's not something that you love. But once you have enough money to sustain
Whenever you are trying to learn a new skill, there are three stages to it. Learning new skills is something that most people do not take seriously because they think that they are done with learning once they have finished school and college. 💡This article is available as an ebook
Yesterday, I published a post on LinkedIn about my story of how I got started as a freelancer and then converted my freelance practice into an agency. I got a lot of replies from my students asking me, "Deepak, but what services to provide as a freelancer? What should I
As we grow up, we have our hobbies, interests, and inclinations. There are certain things we find interesting. When we involve ourselves in those things, time seems to pass by faster. We forget the ticking and movement of time because we are so involved with the task at hand. The
It has been a while since I published a post on this blog. If you have been a regular reader, you would know. The break might be evident if you are going through what I am going through. Burn out. As entrepreneurs and high-performing professionals, we often get pulled into
If you want people to buy from you, you need authority. Authority is built over a period of time through the repetition of messages and authority indicators. Authority indicators are something that you cannot directly control. People mention you. People's recommendations. Word-of-mouth referrals. They happen as a side effect of
A lot of people are attracted to building SaaS products (software as a service) because it needs to be built once and it can keep getting recurring revenue. FreshDesk which later became FreshWorks with a suite of software products became a unicorn startup (with a value of more than a
One day I am pulled to the past, One day I am pulled to the future. Some days I am in the present, And I wish the presents lasted longer. The only thing you can ever have, Is in the here and the now. The present is waiting to be
Macroeconomics is something that most people ignore when building a business. But having a clear idea about macroeconomics can play a huge role in helping you navigate uncertainties as you build and grow your business. One of the biggest factors in business is the economic climate of the country. India
Persuasion is usually aggressive. Salesmen are trying to persuade prospects to buy, following up to close a deal, borderline pestering people to watch a sales presentation and the list goes on. The way sales are done today is still an effect of the old sales methods before the digital era.
A lot has been said about SaaS companies. SaaS is usually Software as a Service. One of the first SaaS companies is SalesForce.com. They literally invented this model as far as I know. They even ran campaigns called "No Software". Long back, software was a product. You pay upfront
Entrepreneurs and professionals need to keep their health at their peak. The entrepreneur is the business and the energy levels of the entrepreneur have a direct correlation with the success of his venture. Having a lot of things to do in the day, it is not practical to spend 3
High-performing entrepreneurs, founders, freelancers, and mentors have one thing in common. They keep their personal life free of conflict. A lot is said about techniques to grow the business on the web, but a few talk about personal life. Until your business reaches at least $10m a year in revenue,
If you are planning to build a startup, the usual financial advice that you get from the media and from popular books is not going to help you. Books generally preach investing in stocks, real estate, and other channels that will help protect your "savings" against inflation so that one
A lot of people ask me how I manage my time. How do I manage to get things done? Do I have a calendar that is always full? Do I sleep only 5 hours a day? Do I wake up at 5 am every day? Do I have all A-team
Generating demand is easy. Sustaining it is difficult. Many businesses want to grow, so they reinvest the profits into marketing and advertising. But marketing a product or service generates demand, and the business scales up to meet that demand. However, when a business is scaling up to meet the demand,
Businesses for some reason think that more products mean more revenue. So they invest in making more products. These are some of the phones from Nokia... They had one for everyone. This is Steve Jobs, presenting the Apple iPhone The iPhone also has a lineup, but not a lineup of
Many times in your career, you will feel stuck. You are unable to move forward and a dreaded sense of stagnation creeps upon you. First, we need to learn that it is completely ok to feel like that and it happens to the best of us. It happens to me
Thinking helps in creating chaos. Actions help in building order. As an entrepreneur/founder, if you want to grow your business, you need a balance of both. A lot of CEOs are great thinkers. They think of wonderful business models and many of them implement them. However, the results can
Competitors are essential for any business. They motivate you to capture market share, expand the market size and give you hope. You start thinking: if they can do it, I can do it as well. However, competition can also take away your market share. People try to kill their competition
If you want to grow in your life, and want to achieve even a moderate level of success, the usual advice that is being peddled in self-help books and social media is that "you need to set goals". From creating vision boards to achieving something, having revenue goals and life
Digital marketing has a lot of components. Some think that you can just use digital marketing to build a brand. Some think that content marketing and social media will get the job done. A few close the loop with the final component in the funnel: Conversion. Here are the 5
Writing online can be the best way to Kickstart or accelerate your career. In 2013, I got an invitation to join Exotel, my first startup job, because I was writing about digital marketing at DigitalDeepak.com. My blog was not getting 1000s of visitors at that time. However, it was
Whenever humans have dematerialized certain things through history, their usage and adoption have gone up. As a result, it created huge economic growth and wealth for a lot of people in the system. When stocks were dematerialized and made into online tradable financial instruments; instead of denominating them in stock
One of the biggest challenges that new entrepreneurs face during the early stages of their startup is how to build a strong brand. The natural inclination is towards running branding campaigns. Sponsor sports, advertise, and just put the logo all over the place so that people can see it. But
I started launching courses in 2016. I started with small courses which had a set of 5-10 recorded video tutorials. I added them to a simple learning management system and started collecting payments for it using online payment gateways like Instamojo. I generated leads via Facebook and Google Ads, nurtured
Certain products reach a saturation point on how good they can be. In this day and age, a lot of products and services needed to build your product or service are readily available. For example, if you want to build a SaaS app, there are plenty of platforms that can
Humans are symbiotic. No one can live on an island all alone and expect to stay alive, let alone thrive. We give, and we take. We create and share others' creations. The ability to communicate our thoughts with other human beings helps us divide our labor and specialize in what
Most businesses expect that once people find them, they should immediately convert into paying customers. They spend money on marketing, generate leads, and have a sales team to convert them. They often forget that most of the people who discover them are not ready to trust them enough to convert
What makes for a good experience? How would you know that something is so good that you can't define it? How would you rate it? In my opinion, when something is so good, it usually vanishes from our conscious attention. If something is not so good, you are reminded of
When I was a young entrepreneur, I used to think that all you needed to build a successful startup (and become a multi-millionaire) was to raise a lot of money, at a huge valuation, and life is set. There are many people today who think the same and only the
I just came back from Mumbai after attending Finclave 2022 by Classplus. It was a wonderful event and a much-needed one after two years of lockdown. The event was hosted by Classplus for all the financial influencers. YouTubers, course creators, and personal brands who talk about personal finance, stock market
Are you afraid you will fail? Yes, all of us are. All of us are afraid that we will fail... someday. We spend a lot of time worrying. We think about what we should do to avoid that failure. So we look for safety. In relationships, in careers, in investments,
You work more, earn more, buy more. You want to expand. You want more. Takes time, to know you've been misled. False propaganda, you've been fed. You realize, the more keeps fading, And you never stop trying. Years pass, the boredom sets in. It's not enough, all that you've been.
Many entrepreneurs set big goals. They want to become millionaires or billionaires. But in my experience, such goal setting is naive and most of them doing it for the sake of money never get there anyway. When an entrepreneur wants to set a goal, the goal is less likely to
According to Britannica, Chemistry is defined as... "Chemistry is the branch of science that deals with the properties, composition, and structure of elements and compounds, how they can change, and the energy that is released or absorbed when they change." Why would I call Digital Marketing chemistry then? According to
There was a boy who was strolling in the forest. He found a small dragon. The dragon was cute. It ran around him and the boy felt that they were made for each other. The dragon was hungry. The boy got something from his pocket to feed the dragon. As
Imagine you are given an infinite time to live. What would you do? Would you do anything at all? Because anything that could be done, can be done, tomorrow, later, when there is more time. If that's the case, what would you do today? Life is meaningful because it is
Innovation in business is possible only when you stay small. When you scale things, every variable that you add to your product, service, marketing, delivery, and so on, will have a huge impact. Experimentation with new ideas becomes difficult. When something is done in a certain way, you need to
Capitalism has got a bad rap in the past decade because of the media, but what is really capitalism? When you have resources that are more than what you need today, that extra resource is capital. If intelligently managed, the capital can produce compounded returns with time and take a
The best way to totally dominate a market is to create the market that you want to dominate. You don't want to compete in it, you want to dominate it. Else what's the point of building a business in this capitalistic world? There is no middle ground, and mediocrity is
UX Content Writing and Strategy is something I have been reading about recently. I have read a few books about UI/UX like Don't Make Me Think and Microcopy. But this book has been an absolute delight as it gives a complete step-by-step approach to writing the perfect copy for
What's the best (legal) way to get into altered states of consciousness? Meditation. But what's meditation really? Is it chanting mantras? Is it praying to your God? Is it just keeping the mind blank? Different people have different definitions, but the foundation of any meditation practice is a focus on
When we are starting something new, the natural inclination is to plan it well and start it well. But the tendency to delay the start is also fuelled by the fear of starting and having new things being thrown at us. Our lizard brain always wants to maintain the status
For the first four years after my graduation, I was a hustler. I wouldn't say that I was a business owner because I just had a blog (though we had 5 writers for it). For the next 5 years, I was working at different startups. Only in the last 5
What can I do as a mentor to make you successful and win in life? * I can share the mistakes I did. * I can motivate you. * I can inspire you. * I can guide you on the right path. * I can connect you with the right people. However, I cannot make
Who said hire fast, fire faster? Of course, you cannot have someone that doesn't fit inside your organization, but that doesn't mean you can hire fast. The advice is as stupid as "Marry fast, divorce faster". There are huge intangible costs involved in having a high employee turnover. According to
There are many things to take care of while building a startup. All entrepreneurs like to think that all the components of the business will get equal attention and hence it will lead to growth. But the reality is: a few things will always take precedence over others, whether you
Entrepreneurs always have a lingering question in their minds about everything that they do. "What if it doesn't work?" Entrepreneurship is a lottery of efforts. A gambler buys lottery tickets in the hopes of winning someday. But he doesn't understand that the house mostly wins. The odds are stacked against
I have always believed in the power of communities. When you put a bunch of passionate people in one space, some magic ends up happening. It is the easiest way to create value out of nothing. Just by connecting people. It is difficult to predict what will happen when you
You have seen product reviews. You have seen company reviews on GlassDoor. Have you seen a review for a boss? That too a video review? Being in the marketing education space, one of the primary things that I teach my students is to be more expressive. That doesn't mean one
Entrepreneurs have a challenging life. We need to switch contexts throughout the day. Context switching drains a lot of energy. A lot of people do it even without having a lot of responsibilities - like browsing social media and taking care of life tasks. People even text while driving nowadays.
Competition. This word brings up mixed emotions for most entrepreneurs. Some say it is good for the customers. Because competition reduces prices. When companies and brands compete for customers' business, they reduce prices and provide more quality. A level playing field where no one can monopolize the market and fix
