I think I have been building things for as long as I can remember.
But if I had to trace this whole entrepreneurship thing back to one moment, it would probably be ninth grade, when one stupid question got stuck in my head:
How the fuck does OLX make money?
That was it.
That curiosity somehow sent me down this rabbit hole.
I still remember sitting next to the window at my desk in tenth grade, talking to my friend Rupesh and saying:
“बघ, एकदा स्वतःची खूप मोठी company बनवीन.”
(One day, I am going to build a really big company of my own.)
I don’t think it was even a dream back then.
I didn’t have some grand master plan.
I was just curious.
And somehow, I kept following that curiosity.
It started with content
I started consuming everything I could about entrepreneurship.
I still remember watching the first episode of Monk-E Chat, which later became The Ranveer Show by BeerBiceps.
I was insanely inspired by Ranveer.
The funny part?
Years later, this startup would actually get me the opportunity to work with him.
Life is weird like that.
Before startups, though, there was content.
I have always loved content.
YouTube was probably my first real obsession.
I made more than 300 videos.
I shot them, edited them, uploaded them, did everything myself.
Then COVID happened.
For most people, it stopped everything.
For me, it gave me unlimited time to go deeper into this obsession.
I didn’t even have a proper computer.
I borrowed a desktop from my friend Sid.
The deal was simple: I would keep the computer at my place, get Wi-Fi, and he could come over and play Valorant.
Eventually, I think my parents looked at me and thought:
Bichara itna mehnat kar raha hai. Computer leke dete hain.
And that’s how I got my first computer.
I even made a vlog about it.
It is probably still sitting somewhere on my YouTube channel.
I was hustling hard, man.
Like genuinely hard.
My first “company”
My first company was called Mick Entertainment.
Yes.
Inspired by Monk Entertainment, BeerBiceps Company.
Originality was clearly not my strongest skill at the time.
I started calling people, trying to get clients, trying to understand how businesses worked.
Somehow, I even got an Upstox deal.
Good old days.
Eventually, I realised Mick Entertainment wasn’t really going anywhere.
And at that age, I absolutely did not want to accept that I could fail.
So I jumped to the next thing.
Trading.
Trading introduced me to crypto.
Crypto introduced me to NFTs.
And because I already knew video editing and design, creating NFTs came naturally to me.
NFTs became my first real break.
I still remember this one day when I sold roughly ₹36,000 worth of NFTs.
Around 20 NFTs in a single day, if I remember correctly.
For a kid figuring things out on the internet, that felt crazy.
Slowly, I started making a name for myself in the NFT ecosystem.
I got a blue tick on one of India’s biggest NFT marketplaces.
I sold what was marketed as India’s first meme NFT for more than ₹4 lakh.
And eventually, people started approaching me to work as an artist on NFT projects.
That turned into Elite NFT.
My first real company
I don’t really count Mick Entertainment as my first company.
It was more like entrepreneurship school.
Elite NFT felt like the first real one.
At one point, we had around 15 to 17 people working together, including freelancers and full-time team members.
We worked on multiple NFT projects.
Some did really well.
At its peak, Elite NFT was doing around ₹10 lakh a month.
For someone who had basically figured everything out through YouTube, Google and trial and error, that felt insane.
But then 2023 happened, crypto market fell down.
And Elite NFT failed.
I cried for two months.
I genuinely didn’t know what to do.
I tried selling T-shirts.
I tried random ideas.
I tried almost anything that could get me moving again.
And eventually, the thing that pulled me out of that phase was the same thing that had started everything:
content.
I started another subscription-based agency, and built it in public.
Within around 45 to 60 days, I scaled it to roughly ₹3 lakh/month.
More than the money, that business taught me something important.
I could go down and come back up again.
That gave me confidence.
Then came products
While Elite NFT was starting to show some signs of failing, I had also taken a bet on building a product called Liqy.
The idea was simple.
Let people in India buy NFTs using UPI.
In my head, this was genius.
In reality, I had forgotten one minor detail:
Most Indians were not exactly waiting desperately to buy NFTs.
Humare paas vadapav khaneka paisa nahiye, hum NFTs kya Khaak kharidenge
I had built infrastructure for a problem that barely existed.
I lost a lot of money on Liqy.
But I learned a lot too.
And most importantly, I realised that I really wanted to build products.
Around the same time, another problem kept bothering me.
As an agency owner, I needed leads.
To get leads, I needed content.
But creating good content consistently was incredibly difficult.
AI video technology was still extremely early at the time.
And I started thinking:
What if we could build a system that automated the entire content creation process?
Script. Voice. Video. Editing. Everything.
That thought eventually became the startup that would change my life.
May 2024
I was already working with Jatan at the time.
Then we found a technical co-founder, Shuvam, from West Bengal.
Both of those relationships eventually ended in co-founder breakups.
But I am still grateful to both of them.
They trusted me enough to let me lead.
And whatever happened later doesn’t take that away.
The first six months were rough.
Really rough.
We weren’t able to build the product we had imagined.
I remember going to IIT Mandi for a pitch.
The pitch deck failed.
The product failed.
Nothing worked.
I wanted to cry. I did
That was probably one of the first times I understood what entrepreneurship actually feels like when nobody is watching.
By then, though, something incredible had already happened.
We had raised money.
We started in May 2024.
By June, I had raised around ₹20 lakh, largely from people who followed me on LinkedIn.
My fundraising literally happened through LinkedIn comments and conversations.
It sounds stupid when I say it today.
But that’s genuinely how it happened.
And later, when we started running out of money, few of those investors topped up their investments again.
I will always be grateful for that.
Building, failing, pivoting, repeating
Jatan left around November 2024.
After that, Shuvam and I continued trying to make the company work.
We pivoted.
Then pivoted again.
We tried building a Telegram bot.
Then we moved to a web app.
At times, I convinced myself that the web app was working.
But if I am being fair to myself now, it never really worked the way it needed to.
I managed to create viral moments.
BeerBiceps used our product.
Finance creators used our product.
People looked at what we had built and said:
“This is cool.”
And it was cool.
When it worked.
That was the problem.
It wasn’t reliable.
And honestly, one of my mistakes during this phase was holding on to certain decisions for longer than I should have.
I had made my bet on my co-founder and on the technical direction we had chosen, so I kept telling myself that we would make it work.
In hindsight, I probably should have made some difficult decisions earlier.
But that’s entrepreneurship too.
Sometimes you make a bet.
Sometimes the bet is wrong.
And sometimes you take too long to admit it.
The bigger problem was that the idea itself was ahead of where the underlying technology was.
When we started in 2024, the ecosystem we have today simply didn’t exist.
There was no OpenClaw.
AI video models were nowhere close to what they are today, there was no VEO, no Seedance.
We were literally experimenting with building parts of our own lip-syncing stack.
We were trying to build an agentic AI video editor before “agents” became the buzzword they are today.
We weren’t just early to a market.
In some cases, we were waiting for the underlying technology itself to catch up with the product we wanted to build.
Being early sounds cool in hindsight.
While you’re living through it, being early can fucking suck.
November 2025: We needed a backup plan
By November 2025, I knew something had to change.
We were running out of money.
The original vision was still alive, but I needed a business that could survive long enough for us to reach it.
So I decided to build an aggregator for AI video and image models.
We built the MVP in roughly a month.
And for the first time in a while:
It worked.
People actually used it.
I could see the product moving.
I was happy.
But the original agent product still existed.
And internally, we had started becoming emotionally attached to different versions of what the company should become.
Shuvam was still deeply attached to the original agent vision.
The new aggregator direction was increasingly being driven by me and Nachiket.
Over time, it almost started feeling like there were two different products and two different ideas of what the company should be.
That made working together much harder.
Then came another almost
In January, we got an opportunity with Accel Atoms.
We were almost there.
A partner had personally reached out to me regarding funding, we had a soft commitment from him.
Things looked incredibly positive.
Then came the final interview.
The program was being done in partnership with Google.
And Google said no.
Maybe they already had investments in similar companies.
Maybe there were other reasons.
I will probably never know.
What I did know was that our runway was disappearing.
And I had no fucking clue what I was going to do.
At that point, Pratyum kept topping up his investment.
And I want to say this properly because it’s important:
There were moments where it was only because of him putting in more money that we were able to continue running the company.
We had built something genuinely good.
I believed that with enough capital, we could improve reliability, market it properly and really go after the opportunity.
So I tried raising again.
I spoke to somewhere between 120 and 150 investors.
Nothing.
Nobody wanted to fund it.
Maybe people didn’t believe something like this could be built from India.
Maybe I wasn’t pitching it correctly.
Maybe the timing was wrong.
I don’t know.
All I know is that we kept building.
And that was probably the most frustrating part.
By December 2025, in agentic AI video editing, we had built something that I genuinely believed was beating products from companies like HeyGen and InVideo.
I still have those comparisons pinned on my LinkedIn while writing this. (https://lnkd.in/p/dafTmkmv)
We were this tiny team sitting in India, running out of money, struggling to convince investors that this could be built here, while simultaneously building technology that could go head-to-head with some of the biggest AI video companies in the world.
That’s what made the whole thing so fucking confusing.
The product was there.
The vision was there.
The technology was getting there.
But the money wasn’t.
The part people don’t see
By July, we were again running out of money.
I had started an AI video production agency alongside the product just to help keep everything afloat.
The product was growing.
But growth requires money too.
Infrastructure costs money.
People cost money.
Experiments cost money.
Everything costs money.
We received a few acquisition offers during this period.
But none of them felt right.
Most of them felt like Lala businessmen who had suddenly discovered AI and wanted to buy their way into the industry.
I never wanted that.
If I was going to sell the company I had spent more than two years fighting for, it had to be to someone who actually understood what we were trying to build.
Then Shuvam left.
And honestly, part of me was relieved.
Working together had become extremely difficult.
But at the same time, I think that was also the point where the entrepreneurial spirit inside me had almost died.
I started asking myself:
Is this even possible?
We had built such a good product.
Why couldn’t we sell it?
Why couldn’t we raise?
If I was sitting in San Francisco instead of Mumbai, would this story have gone differently?
I’m just a Mumbai kid.
A Maharashtrian kid.
No massive business family.
No Silicon Valley network.
No crazy connections.
Was that the reason?
Or was I simply not good enough?
Entrepreneurship does that to you.
You start doubting your company.
Then your decisions.
Then eventually yourself.
You start thinking maybe you’re stupid.
Maybe you have spent two years making one giant mistake.
And somehow, the next morning, you still open your laptop and continue working.
The person who changed the pivot
There is one person I haven’t talked enough about in this story.
Nachiket.
He has been with me since start but wasn’t a major part of the first 18 months of this journey.
But what he did during the last eight or nine months changed everything.
When I decided we needed to pivot, he built the new product almost from scratch.
He became a massive part of the entire transition.
And I don’t think this story ends the way it does without that.
Then Pawas reached out
And weirdly enough, this part of the story somehow begins with my girlfriend.
I had made a video with her.
That video went viral.
And somehow, that video reached the founder of WLDD, one of India’s biggest agencies.
They wanted to try our product.
Honestly?
They didn’t really like it.
Fair enough.
This was still before the pivot had properly matured.
But that one random viral video created a chain of events that eventually led me to Pawas.
Girlfriend. Viral video. WLDD. Product demo. Pawas. Acquisition.
You can’t make this shit up.
Pawas had recently started BCC Media Network.
And he specifically wanted an AI video product in-house.
Not as some tiny experiment.
He wanted to put serious money behind it.
Take it to market.
Build the distribution around it.
And make it big.
I, on the other hand, wanted almost exactly the opposite side of that equation.
I wanted access to people I could learn from.
I wanted distribution.
I wanted resources.
I wanted to do right by the investors who had backed a random young founder from LinkedIn.
I wanted to do right by my team.
And I wanted another shot at making BeHooked what I always believed it could become.
Then Pawas and I started talking.
And somehow, our visions matched on almost every fucking thing.
I don’t say that lightly.
The more we talked, the more obvious the opportunity became.
We closed the acquisition in 10 days
Yes.
Ten days.
Two funded companies.
Multiple shareholders.
Investors.
Team members.
Years of history.
And somehow, we closed the acquisition deal in roughly 10 days.
I don’t know how common it is for two funded companies to close something like this that quickly.
But we did.
And another thing that blew my mind was just how quickly Pawas had built BCC.
Within four or five months, BCC Media Network had already become significantly larger than us.
That told me a lot about the kind of founder I was talking to.
The money mattered, obviously.
It had to.
I had investors.
I had responsibilities.
I wanted everyone who trusted me to feel that I had done right by them.
And I wanted to do right by myself too.
But honestly, the money was secondary for me.
I wanted to work with people who understood my ambition.
People who understood why I wanted to build.
People who didn’t look at BeHooked as simply an “AI tool.”
The vision had to match.
With Pawas, it did.
My first exit
And that’s how my startup got acquired.
My first exit.
At 23.
It feels strange writing that sentence.
Because for most of this journey, nothing felt successful.
There were probably more days where I thought the company was dying than days where I thought we were winning.
Products failed.
Pitches failed.
Fundraising failed.
Co-founder relationships failed.
I ran out of money multiple times.
I questioned myself more times than I can count.
But somehow, we kept moving.
And now I am joining BCC Media Network as Chief Product Officer.
I have worked with a lot of founders by now.
And being a founder myself, I know how fucking hard founders work.
But Pawas is genuinely one of the most exceptional founders I have seen up close.
The speed at which he moves, the ambition he has and the way he thinks about building are a huge part of why I am so excited about this next phase.
At 23, being C-level at a company doing tens and potentially hundreds of crores in revenue feels surreal.
But somehow, that’s reality now.
And this isn’t the ending.
If anything, I think this is where the next phase begins.
I have a lot to learn.
A lot.
I want to get back to creating content consistently.
I want to keep hacking on products.
I want to keep experimenting.
I want to build weird things on weekends just because I think they should exist.
And most importantly, I want to see how far we can take BeHooked now that it finally has the ecosystem around it that I always wanted.
I don’t think I am going to get much time to take a break.
But when you’re doing what you genuinely love, maybe everything feels a little bit like a break anyway.
So yeah.
My startup just got acquired.
I did right by my investors.
I did right by my team.
And I think I did right by myself.
First exit done.
Now back to building.