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I had the pleasure of sitting down with the founders of Pollination, Art Studios, Take Moments, and Life Of A Rider, Jagrit Pratap Singh, Pranav Rastogi and Muhammad Ali to discuss their upbringing.
Here is what they had to say;
Can you tell me the story of your prior successes, challenges, and major responsibilities?
We started out with viral marketing during the digg.com days, pre-2012. Our stories hitting their front-page was a habit almost every week, sometimes multiple times in a week, until they incinerated their own site to dust. That wasn’t such a big shock on our numbers, yet it was a valuable learning experience. We had viral organic traffic from Facebook and other platforms, and so we scaled that up. A result of that was, Hiptoro.com, which quickly reached to 191 USA ranking on Alexa.com, netting at least 20m users every day. However, Facebook had other plans. After almost a year of consistent results, Facebook decided to make viral sites on their platform humble and made a monumental shift in their content distribution strategies resulting in the traffic dropping by almost 70%.
This humbling experience gave us the time to introspect our business strategies and come up with mature business strategies, focusing on the consumer or the end-user. We had always viewed retail e-commerce as an industry we wanted to be in one day, and so began our journey into 1336 USD billion dollars industry.
E-Commerce forced us to gain expertise in online ad distribution. Multiple failures, delivering sales under time constraints, understanding our customers and regular improvisation, allowed us to reach $2 million dollars in sales within just 40 days on NoahsCave.com through various ad networks. Now, we run 2 e-commerce companies in Dubai and USA, with over 20 employees, and have business expansion plans of developing valuable product brands not only for our own e-commerce companies but also to give the same expertise to our clients who approach us for brand transformation.
In addition to all this, over the years, we have also managed to create our own network of Facebook pages from scratch. Currently totaling over at 15M likes, some of the more famous pages in the network include ‘Art Studios’, ‘Take Moments’ and ‘Life of a Rider’. Now we realize this may sound like blowing one’s own horn (and to be honest, it is), but every day our list of web assets grow bigger and stronger, so there’s no telling what potential new business opportunity can we unlock in the future!
Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?
Just like any other business, we’ve had our fair share of successes and failures. While each failure was often humbling, and only solidified our resolve to achieve success even more, Hiptoro’s sudden downfall from 20M users daily to barely a few thousand is what truly tested us.
It’s wasn’t just the fact that our own personal finances took a colossal hit out of nowhere, Hiptoro’s traffic taking such a huge toll overnight meant bad news for all our employees. All of them hardworking, some even with kids to feed, and all of them were looking at potential joblessness for no fault of their own.
Honestly, that was the only thing that kept us going. For the sake of our employees, giving up was simply not an option for us. So we went back to the drawing board, started from scratch, came up with a new business plan, and were back in business with NoahsCave.com within a couple of weeks. The rest is history.
Oh, and if you were wondering, the answer is no. We didn’t have to let go of any of our employees. Every member of the original team is still with us, to date.
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