Karamveer’s Blog

[This is a post which I wrote in 2008 on one of my other blogs jimkarter.com. I am moving it here as it is about personal journey.] I received an email from one of my readers asking me how did I receive so much traffic web and how did I reach this level in web business. I thought why not write down my own journey of internet success (if I can call it that) and how did I do it. Let me give you some insight on how did I start. I am sure its gonna be a big post, so bare with me. Year 1997 I belong to a very small village in the state of Rajasthan in India. I did my schooling in a small city. In 1997, I was admitted to I.I.T. Bombay, one of the prestigious technology institutes of India for my engineering. This is when I first touched the computer. This is when I first learned FORTRAN, C and C++ through all official courses in IIT. Year 1999 In 1999, I was appointed as the Computer Secretary of my hostel. I got my first PC (Intel Pentium 133 Mhz with MMX) and managed to get the internet connection up-to my room. This was the time when there was a huge technology boom. All those “Get Paid to Surf” sites were making a lot of money by installing that small advertising bar at the bottom of the desktop. Myself with 3 other colleagues of mine, started a company to bring that get-paid-to-surf business to India. We registered two sites called earnindia.com and publixzone.com. These were our first sites. Venture failed, sites lost. Pockets burned. Moved on. Year 2001 Graduated from IIT Bombay and joined VERITAS Software (now its Symantec) in 2001 and worked there till February 2004. In 2001, when I joined VERITAS, I had access to quite good (read as fast) internet connection. That is when I registered my first website hindilyrix.com (this site gets around 5 million page views per month now). It was just a hobby site of mine. Site didn’t do well initially and there were hardly any resources to monetize it properly. But slowly the traffic started to grow and I started earning few pennies out of it. Then one day Google Adsense was launched. Year 2002 and 2003 This was the time when I was earning from my first site and I started investing it into building my other sites. At the end of 2003, I was having around 5+ sites making me around $300 per month. My day job was also pretty good, hence I was able to save some good money. On day, I decided to quit my day job and enter into internet business full fledged. Planning took a lot some time and it was not till Feb 2004, when I finally quit. Year 2004 - The Toughest Year of my life This was the year when I quit my day job (Feb, 2004). I started my company with the help of one of my friends [Mr. Amol Naresh]. The company was officially launched on 1st April 2004. In this year, my wife was pregnant, we were expecting a baby in the month of May. Company formation, salaries and initial investment were heavy on pockets. I was almost out of money at one point. Then the baby came and money became even more scarce. Many times I thought that I should ask my dad for some money, but could never do that. We started our company with only two people, myself and my friend. In two months, we were able to start making some websites and earn some pennies, that is when we hired the third person, then in two more months, the 4th person, and then two more months, the 5th person. In all these times, I was almost out of money with my banks showing nearly zero balances. It was till the end of year 2004, when we started getting good revenue from our new sites on which we all 5 were working day and night. Year 2005 - 2006 In year 2005, our company grew in size and revenue. This is the time when I slowly started making the company independent of myself. There are employees in the company who knows what to work on and how to work on. There are people to manage it. I am there to mentor them. So I slowly started working on my own sites (the ones I used to work before starting the company). I kept all those sites outside the company. These are my personal sites and company has nothing to do with them. Then slowly started outsourcing my personal work to our own company or some other companies and individual. Year 2007 This is about to end year 2007. My company has grown quite a bit. The company has more than 300 websites to manage. With time I registered many more sites. I personally manage few of them. So, it was not just one night business to start and running things. I had a lots of ups and downs in this business. There were times when I was almost out of money. Its the hard work. When I started there was not many places (like digitalpoint) to help people find information on making money online. All things needs to be tried and tested myself. Finally But, finally I am happy that I took that toughest step to quit my day job and started my own company. I thank god for all the success I have got in it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 30th, 2011 at 8:58 am and is filed under About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.