I thought to write a short story as many people are interested in us. I would be glad if I am able to motivate atleast one person who can create opportunities for others.
December 2004, I just wanted to do something different and that’s why XtremeHeights was born. Initially, with 1 PC gifted by my father, I struggled for many days and our bad debt ratio was 90%. It was hard to survive in such conditions as people were not serious about investment into software. Clients who were interested initially did not bother to implement the software and many times did not even pay for our hard work.
I always got support from my family and friends. One of my very close friends even fetched us a good project and client paid it on time and this made my belief stronger to continue as an entrepreneur. Things started moving somewhat but not exactly how I wanted too until one day I saw an advertisement in paper from a company who wanted people to work on projects. I contacted them and to my surprise it was handled by a person of my age. He instantly paid us advance and I was surprised. I asked him about his business. Like every businessman he was a bit hesitant but his talks gave me an idea and I started researching on the concept. He was basically working on Search Engine Optimization techniques. After few days I got a client who was interested in SEO and I did whole research for him and brought his website on first page for a very competitive keyword. The client was happy and asked us to handle his IT area. He asked me to replicate the server scenario in-house which he had rented from a Bangalore based company. He gave me 3 days but I did it in 1 day. Not only I saved my entrepreneurship but also his as the server cost was killing him and he was about to shutdown his business.
He started paying me 6000Rs/month for server maintenance and this is how it all started. I started researching for our client but actually we were working for ourselves. I found my first client Gaby, from USA. She is one of the most beautiful ladies I have come across. She is very soft spoken and true business woman. We both helped each other to climb the ladder of our success.
It was time now to add more team members. I wanted someone who can match my skills. Khushal, came to my mind who worked with me in a project in 2002. I told him the idea and it took me 2 months to convince him to join us. At last he joined and we moved ahead. We got 2 new clients from Germany & UK and within a year we started earning respectable amount.
It was time to increase our team. Gautam, Rajesh, Puneet, Lokesh and many more joined our team. We did lots of projects for our clients. We started providing turnkey solutions to our clients and instead of developing projects we even helped them with their product development and marketing. By working on our client’s product we learned lot of things. After so much of experience we started our own product called “Appointy.com” which is an appointment management system for businesses and a service search engine for users. The idea was simply to link business with internet users by utilizing the power of social networking.
We were not having environment like Silicon Valley and so only thing left was to imitate it as we were in Silicon Valley. I once read somewhere “Fake it until you make it”. I used to read blogs daily and used to motivate team daily during tea time sessions. It was the best part of my life. Even I started thinking like that we are next Google. I don’t know if I was too much ambitious but I just know that it helped me and my team to stay together and execute a million dollar concept.
We even managed to get the Angel funding for the project. After launch, Appointy was covered in nearly every web2.0 blog including mashable which included appointy in 270+ best business tools of 2008. On the first day of launch we got 2000 unique visitors which was an achievement for us.
In parallel, we were developing social applications for facebook, Orkut, myspace, hi5 etc. Our first 2 applications were “Chess 2.0 league” and “Its my life” which has more than 1 lakh users in 2 months. We are learning quickly and trying to grow very fast.
We even got nominated for India’s hottest startup award 2008. Even economic times covered us because we are trying to execute our idea from a non-metro city and till date are successful. (Even in recession too.)
We are still working on our client’s project for monthly expenses and trying to execute our ideas. We are looking for next round of funding for our project “Appointy.com” and our fingers are crossed.
Nemesh
