I've been writing for 14 days now & here's what i can share with you.

My first entrepreneurial venture dates back to 13 years ago. It was hugely successful in Hyderabad, India until i decided to leave home to go the US to study my Masters degree. I was in the expectation of running this customized gifting company in the US too. I was just 21. I still remember the immature thoughts that made me feel i could do anything that i wished for.

Thats probably the first time in life I got a reality check. First being that my VISA to the US was strictly to study & nothing else to which i respectfully obliged. Second, even painful that almost all the unique collection of gifts we sold were handmade & the artists were all back in my hometown, Hyderabad. The logistics weren't possible. At least, not for the fragile items we made back in 2014.

I moved on. The startup had its slow death after my brothers founded other ventures a year later after i was gone. It gave them good pocket money until then. I went on to finish my degree & end up working for a couple of companies in the US. I upgraded my VISA to allow for that but my soul was still craving for Entrepreneurship. I couldn't see a way that was possible in the US. My friends & cousins who were waiting for their Green Cards for 10-15 years even back then wasn't something i was looking forward to.

I decided to move back to India to start a Custom App Development company with my best friend in 2018. He was the core Tech brain while i was everything around it. It involved finding people, finding opportunities, project management & delivery. We were doing great. I was in India running the show with our team while my co-founder friend was in the US bringing in more work through his connections & architecting solutions. Life was Good. I took my family to Malaysia on my own expense. It was the first time they left the country. Their first reactions of Kuala Lumpur are still clearly flashing in my mind as i write this.

Also, Canada was welcoming talent at that point. Coming from a struggling middle class family, i needed a safety net. If the startup journey did't work out, i knew i could find a good job. I wrote my qualification tests & came out on top. In a year from then, i landed in Canada. I could only see opportunities all around. A Permanent Resident meant i could do anything i wished for a living. A Business, A job, A consultant...anything i wanted to. No restrictions like in the south. I was constantly travelling between Canada & India running business & building great software. I was managing about 40 employees at once. And then, COVID hit.

Everything came to a standstill. All our customers took a hit. Our Revenues crashed. Not in the first wave, but second. Nothing new in the pipeline. Since then, until today, we've struggled. The company is still running & doing a few projects, but nothing really great by finances. Saving the details of all these years for another day, you may already be wondering at this point on HOW IS ALL THIS RELATED TO THE TITLE OF THIS POST?

Well, the real reason we struggled wasn't COVID or the market after that. It was that we never marketed ourselves. Not even my friends knew what I was really doing. Not just this business, but anything else i touched upon. Never marketed properly beyond an odd post or two. I had different reasons not to showcase, but thats the realization that we never built good audience. No one were talking about us, not even thinking about us. Just because they didn't know we existed. That's because we never told them our story. And thats what i've been doing here for 14 days. And the results?

This is the reach i never had before. I thank each & everyone of you who read my posts. I thank @publish for inviting me here. I strongly advise everyone to tell their stories too. Thats where our identity lies. Hopefully our success too.

All the best. Thank you for reading.
Sai Mutyala
the cognitive founder