Bootstrapping Using Services from Pune: Mindbowser CEO Ayush Jain (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What was the startup that you were working on?

Ayush Jain: At that time, I was working on launching a website focused on exchanging old and new books. The idea was for people to list their books online, similar to eBay, but specifically for books. Other people could then buy them. As a book reader, I noticed that many people have lots of books, and I wanted to create a solution for that.

Sramana Mitra: Amazon marketplace was not sufficient?

Ayush Jain: Amazon was there, but there were no old books available at that time. In India, at least, only new books were available. So, we were targeting the category of old books.

Sramana Mitra: Okay, so like eBay. So exchange and barter, not sale.

Ayush Jain: Both actually. You could put a price basically. You could put a zero price also.

Sramana Mitra: How did that work? Did you launch it?

Ayush Jain: I launched it and had partners as well, but we did not get many sales. Eventually, my partners got busy. To be honest, they were more tech-savvy than I was and had great jobs. They weren’t ready to leave those high-paying positions, which is something I’ve noticed— the better the job, the harder it is to step away from it.

Sramana Mitra: I’ll push back a little bit on that. We have developed a track in One Million by One Million called Bootstrapping with a Paycheck.

All over the world right now, people want to do startups. Just like your idea. Given Amazon and eBay, it was not a great startup idea. However, you were a first-time entrepreneur; you didn’t know better, you wanted to tinker with it. This kind of tinkering is best done in a Bootstrapping with a Paycheck mode.

Unless you validate the project and see that it has real legs, it’s not okay to quit your job. So, you’re part of the right thing. We have institutionalized this mode of entrepreneurship and developed curriculum around it. We reinforce how to do that.

Ayush Jain: After that, I pursued another idea, which I would call a ‘learning experience.’ It was called Cool B School. I still have the slides on my computer, and sometimes I feel good when I see them. The idea behind Cool B School was to help recent college graduates develop skills that I felt were lacking in people coming out of colleges and what the industry really wants.

We built a website called Cool B School with the goal of partnering with colleges to offer practical workshops on things like Excel, Google Ads, and other useful skills. At that time, we weren’t thinking much about tech compared to how things are now. We thought we could provide this curriculum to colleges, and our trainers would go teach these workshops.

I even visited a few colleges, including my own university, to pitch the idea. However, I quickly learned that being just a couple of years out of college ourselves, we weren’t really taken seriously. My university director gave me honest feedback, saying that while they could offer some opportunities for us to run workshops, people back then—this was around 2010 or 2011—valued experience over innovation. We didn’t fully anticipate how important tech would become.

Sramana Mitra: I started One Million by One Million in 2010 and I started working on India’s entrepreneurship development in 2005. I started writing my blog and really started driving the message of entrepreneurship in India. In 2007, I started my Forbes column, but in the timeframe that you’re describing, India’s entrepreneurship was still at a nascent stage. It didn’t quite take off until 2014-16.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services from Pune: Mindbowser CEO Ayush Jain
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