Tales of two Entrepreneurs


Archive for the ‘Success Stories’ Category

Om Solutions Four Years of Journey

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

I started doing freelancing five years back when I was in Houston, Texas. Later when I saw a great demand of our service as well as I had enough sites that I can handle alone with help of my wife, I moved back to India and incorporated Om Solutions. We incorporated the company on 1st October year 2003. Initially we focused upon providing programming support to our US clients. One of our clients Barry Tubwell eventually became my partner, owner of Om Solutions LLC and Managing Partner of our US operations.

During second year of our existence we relied too heavily on our content sites and cut down almost all the programming business that we used to do for our clients. Wrong move. One day we woke up to see our entire business collapsed to ground zero.

We restarted from scratch, started diversifying the company and currently we are more or less stable at least in terms of operations. Currently we have three major divisions in our company.
1)    Programming for client as well as for our own sites, products and tools (PHP, PERL, MYSQL, .NET etc)
2)    Call Center Services (Mostly used to generate Mortgage, Debt and other financial Leads)
3)    Low Tech Services for our clients as well as for our own products (e.g. Content writing, Link Building etc).

We started with just me and my wife and now we have employee strength of forty (including non technical staff e.g. security, clerks etc). Not too bad. The year 2008 is going to be a very crucial year for us. I actually have made a presentation ( Om Solutions plan for 5th year ) that I gave to all employees on our annual day. Attached is a copy of presentation for those of you keen enough to look into our future vision. We intend to cross 1 M revenue this fiscal year.

We had a wild party at a resort. I will upload a few pics and may be a video at youtube shortly (excuse me for my laziness).

Nitin Tripathi (http://blog.omsolutions.net)

Story of an Entrepreneur making 10 K a day

Saturday, September 1st, 2007

How to make 10,000$ a day

I want to share a Whitehat success story of a distant friend of mine. I don’t really fully appreciate some of the business tactics being used by this individual (I will call him Patel), however he is successful and making 10,000 USD a day.

Patel was from Brick and Mortar business and was managing a Motel in a small town of Midwest US. During the dot com boom of 1999, he decided to try his hands at Dot Com business. To make money you have to take risk and that’s what he exactly did. He sold off his Motel at a premium price and arrived in New Delhi India with cash in his pocket. He opened up a web development factory (he uses term factory and indeed he operates the business in the similar way a factory is operated). He got in a few designers, a few content writers and a few programmers. He was a man with the mission. All his focus in life was building as many number of web-sites with good content. He was truly obsessed with numbers. In his first year he came out with more than 100 sites, most of them not making any money at all (that time advertising options were really limited for content sites).

So came time for some fresh thinking. He recruited a few good managers (his factory is manager driven instead of people driven). The managers came out with the idea of diversifying portfolio. They opened up a new division targeted just for Indian community. There they started offering services and products direct. Since they had huge number of content sites, they had traffic. These services included Travel Agent Services (now they have more than 500 travel sites), selling Indian handy craft items, selling chocolates, flowers etc and delivering them everywhere in India. Indeed at that time India was not ready for his vision, still since he played with numbers, he was able to start making 1$ a day from each of his service provider sites. So with volume by end of year 2001, he was making 500$ a day from his venture.

He kept on increasing his portfolio, even went on to extent of combining brick and mortar business to web business. He purchased a hotel at tourist destination Goa. With huge number of sites specifically targeted on Goa, his Hotel was always 100% full. Eventually he stared a full fletched brick and mortar Travel Agency and that was instant hit. Then he started diversifying his portfolio. You cant compete in US market, because its 10 year ahead of rest of the world. He found out a niche of identifying 20 hot tourist destinations (small nations) and started building 20 sites for each destination. At all those places his brick and mortar Travel Agency cut deals with local travel agencies and Hotels to provide them reservations (Outside US, rarely small Hotels are web Savvy). he started making a few dollars (1$ a day each site). So by end of 2003, his total revenue was 1000 USD a day.

Then came the adsense. Now he was a man with another mission. He really started building content sites in bulk and started making good money from adsense. His funda was very simple. If you have greater than 1000 sites and you link them properly, for sure you will make 1$ a day for each newly launched site.

At this point of time, he has a complete assembly line. He got 20 managers. They build the sites in batches of 1000. The top level come out with idea of building 1000 sites. Then each manager picks up 50 sites and do the research. They come out with project plan for each and very site. Now that they got good experience it takes less than a day to come out with plan for any new site. Then these plans are forwarded to Project Leaders in Assembly Line. They got a division of content writers with 50 writers in India and a few in US and UK as well. Project Leaders divide the work in 3 parts. Content writing, design and programming. All these activities happen at different places and left hand doesn’t know about right hand. Once all 3 modules of a site are ready, the product is being shifted to the Launching Assembly Lines. Here the system admins combine all the pieces together and launch the site on the net. Once the site is launched, it is forwarded to maintenance in assembly line. Maintenance guys put ad code. They keep a track on stats. They have a few content writers, a few SEO guys, a few sys admin and some low tech operators in maintenance assembly line. Their task is to maintain each and every web-site being manufactured by the company. It fully automated process and it takes 2 months from the start to end. After delivering the product each department moves on to prepare a new product. They don’t have to worry about the next step in line.

At this time they own 10,000 sites and with conventional calculation of 1 $ a day, he is making 10K a day by minimum. Indeed he got nice overheads, but the cost of overhead is close to 100 K a month. Also not all sites make 1$ a day. He has at least 20 sites making > 5 K a month. Overall he makes a profit of 300 K a month without raising an eyebrow. He never blogs, never writes on forums and for most of the time he is unknown to all webmasters active on all forums / blogs.

Now like most of you already might have guessed, his success is largely dependant upon google for most of the traffic and he had his own share of failures. Google keeps on changing algo and sites will stop ranking at all. Being a shrewd business man, he had started a branch in factory which exclusively deals in selling the web-sites. Their task is to make sure that they find a buyer for the site within 2 years it got started. So they make good money on each site for 2 years and then they sell it off at premium. Once they sell if off, it become responsibility of buyer. If google decreases ranking of the site, it is buyer who suffers. Also most of the time buyers do not have appropriate resources to manage the site. So they in turn even outsource the maintenance of site to Patel’s company. So he makes money even out of that.

So that is the success story of Mr Patel. It gives me lot of inspiration and I hope that it will give some inspiration to all of you as well.

~Nitin

Patience and Hard Work always Pays

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

I have a friend Andy ( I won’t disclose his real name due to confidentiality reasons). Andy finished his degree from IITK (the most elite Institute of India). After passing out of IITK he had dozens of offers from mega companies, however being the adventurous spirit he was, he rejected all offers. Instead he headed to Bangalore (Silicon Valley of India) and started a Software company over there. He put his blood and sweats into the company. They had their shares of successes and failures. They started without any business experience; instead all they had was their intelligence and youth energy.


They started small, did a few local projects, eventually moved on to freelance sites to get projects from around the globes. Got ripped of multiple times but continued to innovate. Eventually they found their own market niche. They started focusing on healthcare and banking sectors of US market. Growth was steady. With time they started getting more clients and more projects. Some of their projects went into the ranges of > 100 K USD. They become a solid company with quarterly auditing and stuff. They opened a full time office in US and started doing full forced corporate marketing. Business started pouring in big time. The company started getting its name in the fastest growing companies in various magazines. Founders started getting various entrepreneurship awards. More name, more fame, more projects.


They started getting partnership and credentials. Got ISO 9001 certification got Microsoft Gold Certified Partners etc. More partnership, more credentials and more corporate clients. But there comes a time when you know you need greater amount of big money, people with better management skills and better support to continue the pace. They got a few financing offers, but nothing really materialized. Finally they got an offer to sell the company for 6 Million US Dollar all cash deal to a Europe based service provider, which my friend has gladly accepted. Heck now 6 million in pocket and credential of making a company from zero to 6 million in 4 years, probably 5 years down the road he will make hundred million from his next company. I am happy for him and examples like these keep every Entrepreneur moving and dreaming. That’s what it is all about. Dreaming big and achieving it.:) Once again congratulations Andy.


Nitin