My Story: 'I Started My Entrepreneurial Journey Aged 9 By Selling Milk'

I started my entrepreneurial journey at the age of 9 by selling milk. By 17, I was running a successful dairy farm & a brick factory. I belong to a remote village in Karnataka where we got electricity when I was in 7th Standard. My fascination with entrepreneurial activities always rewarded me with low marks. As a below-average student, I scored 40.32 per cent in the 10th Standard. Upon completing12th, I moved out of my village to Shimoga Town to pursue graduation, and that's when I started focusing on my studies.

During graduation, I developed two projects, 'Gram Vikas' to advocate the need for creating self-employment & seasonal employment opportunities in rural India and 'Vision for Indianisation of the Indian Soft Drink Industry' to promote domestic soft drink companies. I was the topper of Kuvempu University with an 84 per cent aggregate score across all semesters. In 2006, I moved to Bangalore to prepare for the MBA entrance exam and took up a job alongside.

Problem And Solution

I got into selling insurance by chance but became the top sales guy in the branch and was earning handsome money. Though I was happy with my income, the rampant misselling practices in the Insurance Industry were bothering me. In April 2008, I used to meet an auto driver who was cheated by an insurance agent in the name of an Investment Plan. That's when I decided to leave my corporate job to start a Financial Education Company, IndianMoney.com, at 22.

It was started as a Financial Education Company to provide on-call financial advice to people while purchasing financial products. IndianMoney.com was a financial education company with over 9 million customers & 600 employees. But my thirst for building a global enterprise made me explore building an app-based financial education platform.

That was when I decided to launch the 'Financial Freedom Workshop' to pilot the new business model. The workshop was conducted to train people on the four things they do with money - Save, Spend, Invest & Borrow. I conducted 28 seminars from the 3rd of November 2019 to the 6th of March 2020 and personally met 7000 people.

FFreedom Came To My Life

This was when I learned that people are keener to learn "how to make enough money for living" than "money management" and decided to upgrade the company from just a Financial Education Company to a Livelihood Education Company. ffreedom app, launched on the 20th of 2020, is a livelihood education app with over 780 courses on Farming, Small Businesses & Personal Finance.

If you, too, have an inspiring story to tell the world, send us your story at mystory@thelogicalindian.com