7 years ago, on 14th December 2013 Sangeeta and I looked at each other and said, “Let’s do it” before hitting the publish button.
10 seconds later, the first ever article on Storypick was live.
5 months later, the CEO of one of India’s largest media companies flew us to his office & offered to acquire Storypick. We passed.
We passed not because the offer was low (we weren’t making any money then, but we had millions of readers) but for the opportunity: the opportunity to grow Storypick on our own terms, while getting our hands dirty, learning entrepreneurship the hard way.
And boy, did we get our hands dirty! From hiring talent to buying sugar for employee’s coffee, from meeting clients to negotiating with real estate agents, from managing people to managing unit economics, from understanding each row of a balance sheet to editing articles, from realizing that rats were eating up our AC pipe to getting it fixed, from a dingy apartment to switching offices thrice, from shifting base from Pune to Mumbai, we wore hats of a CEO, COO, CFO, HR, Editor-in-Chief, product manager, housekeeping, office boy, and everything in between.
And somewhere between all these, we never realized that while Storypick was growing, we grew with it too. And that’s the craziest realization, in retrospect.
After working with 400+ top brands, publishing 25,000+ articles with millions of readers monthly, bootstrapping from zero to million dollars, there’s only one lesson I want to share: it’s super hard, but it’s worth it.
They say, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
They are right.
#Happy7th
About Tonmoy Goswami
Founder, Storypick.
Read • Travel • Create • Experience⚡
