Because Shit Happened

by Harsh Snehanshu

  ‘Wow,’ I said, expressing my genuine delight. ‘At what time?’

  ‘5 pm, we are meeting at Saket.’

  ‘Great. Hope she doesn’t know that you are already in a relationship,’ I said.

  ‘Oh c’mon, obviously. Even I don’t know that I am in a relationship,’ he winked. I smirked.

  Shikha came at around quarter to four. She smelled of lavender and her hair was still wet from taking a bath. Her broad smile shrunk when she saw Mishra in the room with me.

  I was glad that Mishra was at home till five because that meant he could assist Shikha in finishing off her work. By the time Mishra got ready, we had completed the remaining designs of the webpages that otherwise would have taken two to three days had Shikha carried them out single handedly. I asked her to mail the designs to me which she readily did, despite no upfront payment, because she trusted me a great deal. When Mishra left after five, I went straight to the point.

  ‘Priya still loves me,’ I said plainly.

  ‘Why are you telling me this? Do you still love her?’ she said.

  That was not what I had expected. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Come on, answer me. Your silence is killing me, Amol,’ she shrieked. I expected a slap, but what followed was another story.

  ‘I knew it,’ she said. ‘I knew it all along.’ The shock that she knew it while I didn’t boggled me.

  ‘But I also knew that it won’t work out between you two, since we are destined to be together,’ she said with certainty.

  ‘Who the hell are you to decide?’ I screamed.

  ‘Don’t shout at me, Amol. I’m not Priya who will take shit from you without saying a word. Treat me with respect.’

  ‘What respect? Fuck respect. Don’t talk about respect to me. You screwed up my relationship despite knowing the fact that I was still in love with Priya,’ I yelled.

  ‘I didn’t screw it up,’ she screamed at the top of her voice. ‘It was you—you sucker—who initiated and told me that you had broken up with her. You cheated on me at the same time you were cheating on her. It was the day when you came to IIT and cried like a baby that I realized that you were still in love with Priya. What could I have done?’

  I was at a loss for words. She was right. It was all my doing.

  ‘Not only this—you have screwed up our beautiful friendship too,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck you. Had you been a true friend, you would have tried to solve things between Priya and me rather than getting me to sleep with you, you slut!’ I screamed.

  ‘Amol, don’t you dare use that word again. And I am going. I have had enough of you. Go and fuck Priya for all I care. I just wish that someday she cheats on you. I will never call you again,’ she said and got up to leave, expecting me to stop her.

  ‘Even if you call, I will never pick it up,’ I said and broke the relationship in a snap. I was beaming with happiness. She was gone, without even making an attempt to make things right.

  I opened my laptop, and checked my mailbox. There was just one unread mail titled ‘User Interface Designs ’ from Shikha. She had gone without even asking me to pay for the designs that she had just mailed. With her not-so-amiable relation with either of the co-founders, she couldn’t bother us about the money anymore. Moreover, since we hadn’t signed any agreement for she trusted me so much, YourQuote wasn’t liable to pay her for her services.

  I went to meet Priya with a red rose hidden in my bag, and left for Gurgaon where she had shifted from Vishwavidyalaya after having resumed her job.

  ‘Do you really love me?’ she asked me. We were meeting in one of Gurgaon’s many posh malls.

  I nodded and kissed her palm to ask for forgiveness. She placed her fingers on my lips and said, ‘One needs an apology only when one does not have a heart.’ As a reflex, I grabbed her hands and took her to the basement of the mall that was relatively deserted. There, in perfect silence, I knelt down and proposed to her, officially for the first time, with a poem that she had written long back for me.

  Through long years

  Laughter and tears

  I have loved you

  I have lost you

  And again I have found you

  And now, my heart

  And soul are bound to you

  I saw her crying tears of joy. I could not believe she was finally back in my life.

  No Time for Love

  It was late July. Priya was back in my life. Mishra and I had introduced several new engaging features based around the concept of wit on our social media pages where we were receiving immense participation, Rishabh had accelerated his marketing endeavours and we had stopped doing T-shirts altogether since there were already too many players in the market selling the same product.

  July saw us meeting many investors and mentors for attaining feedback and the more people we met, the more we realized the value of scale. Scale, in its real sense, is the ability of a business to keep growing in size in terms of revenue, customers, adding more value to the product as time passes, and sometimes being able to tweak the revenue model in later stage without adversely affecting the business.

  Good entrepreneurs are always ready to tweak their revenue model to make it more scalable, grow in size, and become more profitable. Size matters! If you are talking about dreams, then certainly it does. Size and scale was the chief reason why Myntra shifted from being a customized merchandize seller to branded merchandize retailer, and also why Flipkart expanded beyond just books.

  Upon realizing the evident limiting factor, we began brainstorming for another revenue model and shut down our cumbersome T-shirt business. We delved on our thoughts keeping in mind our two key strengths—creativity and technology. We had a creative pool of around 20,000 people attached on our social media pages and we knew that our new business model would revolve around the creativity of these people. After three hours of discussion, I had a brilliant idea. We could crowdsource creative content such as taglines, brand names, and advertising ideas for corporates, thus accomplishing our basic mission of awarding people for coming up with just one line, together with solving the corporate customer’s need at an inexpensive price. The revenue model seemed to be lucrative because it didn’t require us dealing with uneducated and unethical manufacturers but highly professional corporates. Moreover, we just needed users to scale up and this one-of-its-kind service where users got rewarded for writing just one line was bound to go viral.

  We froze the business model after getting a green signal from our mentors and began working on the contest page where we would hold such a crowdsourcing contest. We scheduled the beta version launch of our website on August 4 and shifted gears.

  In mid-July, Rishabh joined the company full-time and shifted from IIT after finishing his project. It was then that he came face to face with the money crisis that was brewing at our office-cum-home. It is only after coming out of college that one truly becomes an entrepreneur, when one has to pay huge bills, which otherwise were out of picture in dorms with cheap food and stay.

  Thankfully, Priya had started earning and was kind enough to sponsor all our dates, but even our dates were so irregular—once in two weeks or so. Maggi was replaced with bread, hotel and movie outings were replaced with occasional sitcoms on laptop, and Rishabh’s petrol bill and phone bill for marketing was split into two. Mishra witnessed it all but never offered any financial help, which strengthened our belief that he wanted us to consider him as an employee, rather than a partner. We still hadn’t been able to figure out his incentive. Was it exposure? Or experience? Or the challenge of building a social networking website? We didn’t know. Mishra went back home on July 17 to spend two weeks with his family.

  Not borrowing any money from our parents, we started living life on the edge. We worked our asses off at night and intentionally slept late and woke up to brunch, thus skipping our breakfast, saving around a hundred rupees each morning i.e. 3,000 rupees each month.

  In the last week of July, my si
ster Saumya, who was four years younger to me, took admission in DU. Though our parents wanted the two of us to stay together, as it would minimize the costs as well as ensure security, I put their wishes on hold saying that the company was my priority.

  On the night of July 29, I had gone to meet my sister after setting her up in a PG in South Extension. After settling her into the new hostel, I took her for dinner outside. It was while we were having dinner in a restaurant in South Ex, I received a message from Rishabh asking me to come as late as possible saying that he had called his friend over and she would feel awkward in my company. It was the first personal request from him in days. I agreed to do as he said but was curious to know what was cooking. So I left for home without informing him.

  As soon as I reached home, I noticed Rishabh standing at the door talking to someone. It was none other than Shikha!

  There could not have been a bigger shock than that. Shikha, the slut who could not wait to pounce on another man after a less-than-a-month old break up. I could just cringe in absolute misery and self pity for having fallen for that bitch.

  August is the month when most colleges reopen in Delhi.

  August was also the month when Mishra went back to college after two months with us, the month of Rishabh’s unofficial girlfriend Anjali’s return from Toronto, and the month when the co-founders of YourQuote scheduled their product launch.

  It was our third launch and we planned to make it grand. The first launch had failed because we could not include as much functionality as that available on Facebook. The second failed because we didn’t have a sticky UI and users who were addicted to Facebook were not willing to shift. We were hopeful about the third one because of a variety of reasons—we had a sticky UI as promised by Shikha and gamified network and contests that would reward people for coming up with just one line for the first time in the history of internet.

  For the contest, Click2Closet—the fashion e-commerce company where Mishra interned—agreed to gift a Fossil watch worth 22,000 rupees to the winner. What more could we have asked for? That was enough to create a buzz.

  The launch on 4th was grander than what we had expected and we created a furore in our IIT network. We received floods of congratulatory wishes from juniors, friends, and batchmates who appreciated the concept, the engagement built around our brand, and the UI.

  At night, we planned a grand party for all our team members, even the useless ones, at Yo! China in Vasant Vihar followed by a dance-cum-drinks gig at a nearby nightclub. Rishabh was insistent on inviting Shikha as well, saying that she had been instrumental in making the launch a success.

  I had invited Priya for the party and bringing the two together didn’t seem like the right thing to do. But I couldn’t say a word. Rishabh called up Shikha to purposefully invite her in front of me. I stood there helpless, praying to God to either destroy all the mobile phones in the world or take me away from the inevitable. Thankfully, Shikha declined to come.

  The party ended with great gusto. Seeing Priya laugh after so long made me cry. How could I have cheated on her? Bleary-eyed, with utmost sincerity and conviction, I resolved that I would never hurt her again. Never.

  The next few days were pretty hectic. There was a great difference between the first day traffic that had registered on the site 5000 unique hits to the second day traffic which was merely 700. The statistics deteriorated with every passing day and on the fifth day we received only about 100 unique hits. When we announced on our social media pages that we would not be entertaining quotes on our Facebook page but on the website instead, there was great discord among our users who complained that our website sucked.

  I took control of the situation and resolved to make our users see the problems that we were facing. I wrote a very moving letter and posted it on our fan page:

  A Note from YourQuote founders

  It’s always very difficult to accept change—good or bad.

  It was around one year four months ago that we started this webpage with a determination to convert our creative idea into a full-fledged business venture. We didn’t sit for placements, left the lucrative job offers that our alma mater had to offer us to pursue YQ. Let me tell you that at that point of time, we didn’t have a technical team, we didn’t have great traction to keep us motivated, and neither did we have any quick way to make money to sustain the venture. We were bootstrapped. We were strugglers.

  We lacked a good technical team and we struggled for more than ten months to find out the right guy who had interest and expertize in web development. But our persistence triumphed and we found the right guy. A technical maven who was passionate about our idea. We shared the same dream and we started working on the website. It took us almost four months to build the website from scratch. We revamped the UI, introduced many networking features, and relaunched in August. This time it was different. Traction was on its high. We had about 10,000 page views within just four days.

  But we are now facing a grave problem. We are trying to compete with our Facebook page. And everyone knows that comparing the usability of FB with YQ, it would take us another month or so to actually bring adequate features to keep you hooked to us.

  We, the founders of YQ, appeal to all our users to kindly embrace us and try to help us grow and prosper with your detailed feedback to perfect the website architecture. We could see many people complain that they preferred the fan page over the website, and understandably so. But do know this that we have been working full time tirelessly for the last one year and have made no money at all—neither for you, nor for us—from the amazing surges of creativity that you people displayed on our fan page. Our FB page didn’t allow us a compilation of our individual quotes, a way to compare them with each other, a copyright to be able to market them, an effective way to handle plagiarism, and so on.

  We urge you to be a little more patient with us and constantly help us improve.

  Sincerely,

  Amol Sabharwal

  Rishabh Dev

  Co-founders, yourquote.in

  The letter worked. Around 500 of our active fan page users became our benefactors and started using the website on a daily basis, curating good content and bringing in more people from their network.

  Starting off is easy. The difficult part is to sustain growth after establishment. Thanks to Mishra, we had got our first client. The real difficulty appeared a week after we launched our first contest. The submission phase was going to be over and we needed to find another client. Rishabh’s marketing mettle was to be tested as we eyed a big player. He hit numerous offices, from a prominent automobile company to one of the most popular beer brands, but without any success. All of them rejected us saying that we were too small a venture to add any value to them.

  Frustrated, he asked me to accompany him to IIT to meet some of our team members. After the meeting, we dashed into the Diptea kiosk at the institute and observed its vague tagline ‘Diptea can do that!’ which neither had any appeal for students nor made any sense to us. The next day, Rishabh went early, determined to find a paying client.

  ‘We would have to do a contest for free again. The famous coffee chain Coffee Every Day is ready, provided we do it for free. They would sponsor the prize though,’ Rishabh informed me as soon he returned back home.

  ‘Go for it. Coffee Every Day is the biggest coffee lounge chain in North India. So adding them to our client list would enhance our portfolio and help us in fetching future deals.’

  ‘Right, I have already said a yes to them,’ he said, thinking. ‘Wait, I have got an idea.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why should we wait for future deals? Let’s do it now!’

  Rishabh contacted all the people whom he had met during his marketing stint and returned with a jubilous smile on his face.

  ‘We have a paying client now: Diptea—10,000 rupees,’ he said.

  ‘Wow! How did you manage that?’

  ‘Simple. I told them that Coffee Every Day is doing a c
ampaign to engage the youth of all premium colleges in India on our website at 20,000 rupees, but since Diptea is our home brand at IIT, we were willing to give them a twenty- five percent discount.’

  ‘But a twenty-five percent discount makes it 15,000 rupees,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, and the 5,000 went down in bargaining.’

  ‘Wow.’ I was proud of Rishabh; his talent was not just limited to negotiating with rowdy manufacturers but also corporate professionals.

  But he wasn’t finished at that. Over the course of the next few minutes, I just remained a mute spectator to his genius. He convinced Coffee Every Day to give us 20,000 rupees for the contest with just one simple argument that its competitor Cafe House had agreed to do a contest with us for 18,000 rupees. With brands like Diptea already finalized and having a fan page boasting 20000+ fans, Rishabh’s lie about the Cafe House deal had so much conviction and confidence that Coffee Every Day didn’t doubt our claim and instead, offered a higher quote than the fictitious 18,000 rupees for the contest, with the contract that we would not do Cafe House’s contest for the next one year. Rishabh was more than happy to agree, for there was no Cafe House contest in the first place and said to me, ‘Marketing is all about using one client to get other clients, by hook or crook.’

  I was so thrilled by whatever I had witnessed that I jumped and hugged Rishabh.

  The coming week was absolutely brilliant. When people saw recognized brands like Diptea and Coffee Every Day on our fledgling portal, they were stunned. Thanks to the big brands and their catchy prizes, even our website started boasting of decent traffic.

  During that time, a journalist from News Today approached us. She wanted to take our interview. We didn’t know whether we were ready or not and decided to discuss the issue with our mentors. One of our mentors advised us not to get carried away with media coverage as they were mere distractions during the growth stage of the company and would take our minds off the imminent task. But when we told him that the interview might help us get investors, he told us to go ahead with it.