Relentless Desire to Create

When I was studying at the University of Pennsylvania as an exchange student, I bounced off ideas with a friend who was studying at the Columbia University at the time about creating a website that allowed students in the campus to advertise their belongings that they would otherwise just throw away. This would have two core benefits — first of allowing students to repurpose discarded items & second of allowing connections to be created since students would have to meet each other for the exchange to happen and that would naturally lead to an introduction. This never took off but this idea would manifest in various iterations after.

When I was in my early twenties, I created an app called “Amigos” by hiring a developer in India. I created the UI for the application and passed it over for development. The idea was to help people outsource errands of the day eg: groceries, office jobs, pick up jobs, reserve car park, etc. While I was aiming to help young professionals get more efficient by outsourcing time-consuming errands, at the core of Amigos was the desire to connect people. I would cook up examples in my head where a young student would run an errand for a professional and they would hit it off on this simple transactional relationship. One thing would lead to another, before you knew it, a community would blossom from these simple transactional relationships. From this experience, I learned how to design an application, understand tech stacks that went behind development and lead a technical team. However, I realized only after a few failed attempts at marketing the application, just how important it is to think through a marketing strategy.

I remember standing in the corridor of various apartments, distributing pamphlets of my application which I designed on Canva. I put an ad out on GumTree to recruit people who could run errands and to run a few experiments, paid my friends to request errands through Amigos. We ran these experiments over the course of two days just to realize that creating a network effect is not a natural consequence but requires deliberate effort so after coordinating the efforts for a couple of months, I decided to close the operations.

In hindsight, it gave me a lot of learnings that I would build on later in life. I went on recruit people from my network to create a website called Mentor Community, that would allow job seekers & students to connect with mentors. I was able to recruit a few mentors and build a team which I didn’t have before, however, failed to maintain the momentum of the team through COVID.

With these learnings in mind, I saw another problem I was very passionate about solving — inability to forge meaningful connections within student-housing communities. I pitched the idea to a very talented friend of mine who works in Singapore and we both went on to create Amigos 2.0 which is a community engagement application for students living in student communities, allowing students to connect with others in the community. It is like Facebook created only for one community. It empowers the property managers to intentionally engage with their residents & centralize communication while helping the residents get to know each other. Together, we built a team of four and among us, we built the app from scratch and pitched it to investors & prospects. We eventually brought on a great accommodation based out of Perth to Amigos. They were extremely passionate about the wellbeing of their students and Amigos resonated well with their personal & professional objectives and fast forward to now, Amigos has been running successfully within that community for the past 2 years. Here, we ran into the challenge of scaling. While we found the product-solution fit, we couldn’t pin down the product-market fit. We tried repurposing the application to open it up to students within a University to help them engage and network, however, couldn’t solve the mystery of “How to get them talking after they’ve joined?” because we saw just how many of them failed to engage after downloading Amigos. Given our entire team was getting opportunities individually in their careers, we decided to make our roles dormant and now, we only maintain the one community of 700+ students on Amigos.

Then I met Tomas, one of my best friends, who had a vision of curating performances in the comfort of his residence (he said the inspiration was Studio 54). Abhay wanted to create music and I wanted to……shockingly…..connect people so we all came together to create AGSC “Always Grounded Sometimes Cooked” which is an underground apartment rave bringing together niche artists and music lovers.

I realized while reflecting on my experiences that entrepreneurship has always been in me. Why? Purely because it’s challenging the status quo — the way we do things and have always done them. Growing up in a conservative household, I never adhered to traditional norms & expectations, primarily because I never understood their role in shaping me for the good. Most of social norms and rules seemed arbitrary and perpetuated the gender roles we assumed — like girls don’t go out late or don’t talk to boys. I challenged these rules since I was a young kid and admittedly that got me into a lot of trouble. When I was told not to talk to senior boys, I asked “Why?” and I received no good answer, ever. When I was told to put a certain number in the balance sheet in my accounting class, I asked “Why?” and I received “Because that’s how it is”. This irritated me to the core. I never got answers to my “WHY?”

So I naturally had a streak of rebelling the established norms, until the “WHY” was answered sufficiently well. This unrelenting fire of questioning was channeled into solving problems I was passionate about. The problems I have so far been passionate about have always had a way of connecting people in some shape or form. When I set out on the path of self-discovery, I realized the truth behind why this is. My previous blog on “What’s my Story?” encompasses my upbringing and why I valued connections I could freely make so much.

This led me to manifest one of the greatest joys of my life which is my friends and they also inadvertently became one of my top values in life. Once my story started weaving together, I understood that I was deeply passionate about bringing people together. Connecting them in a meaningful way so they knew they were not bound by the conditions of their birth but could create the very conditions they could thrive in.

Here’s to many more learnings that come from asking the WHY!