“I was always passionate about how businesses worked since my school days. I was influenced by the movie, "The Social Network" and built a Facebook clone while I was in school and tried to get my friends to register for it."
It is said that engineers have a disease called AWESOMENESS. They are multitaskers and creative thinkers, so the list is never-ending. Meet Aditya Kamat, a 26-year-old computer science engineer and co-founder of HeyCoach - A professional tech coaching platform that assists its users in cracking difficult interviews. The idea was to give the guidance of an industry expert to the user who gets personalized tech interview coaching and increases their chances of landing a job.
What a beautiful concept, isn't it?
Aditya's sense of enthusiasm and motivation all lined up with his past experiences and the exposure he could get. But his passion was not something he found on a one-way street. After getting his computer science engineering degree from BMS College of Engineering in Bangalore, Aditya got a placement in Directi, a tech-based web service provider.
If your passion becomes your purpose, one day it will become your profession.
Aditya has always been passionate about how businesses work since he was a child. A curious soul from childhood, Aditya wanted to challenge himself at every opportunity. He drew inspiration from the movie, "The Social Network." When he was in school, he built a Facebook clone and tried to get all his friends to register for it.
While working with Directi, a tech-based company, he started two new ventures based on hybrid cloud. To make cloud computing easy for developers, Untangled cloud was invented. Aditya and his team created a layer in front of every significant cloud provider to enable simple orchestration and deployment of any developer's code to the cloud of their choice. This was a POC that was both fascinating and had a lot of technical depth. But as we know success doesn’t come so easily, and Aditya too had to face failure with his venture. They realised they were too early to the market and had created something which was still not simply usable by the software developer, their target audience.
His fear of being in his comfort zone boosted him to lay foundations for a new start-up while he continued his professional journey from Directi to Linkedin. This was when he launched SapioHunt. An online community that paired individuals who registered on their platform.
He realised that time waits for no one, so he had to start taking bold steps. Firstly, by quitting his job at LinkedIn and secondly by calling his passionate soul mate, Pratik back into action, to the world of start-ups, where they co-founded HeyCoach!
The biggest challenge that every founder has to go through is building the right initial team. It is difficult for founders to accept that the team will never be as passionate about the start-up as compared to the founders. The amount of pressure that indulges him to foresee the future and to wake up every day to sharpen his skills and mindsets to implement his work throughout the software industry scents a great approach towards his goal and over time his growth. Ask Aditya about this and he says, "The pleasure of waking up to the fact that HeyCoach is a cash-flow positive, bootstrapped start-up. Very few start-ups in the ed-tech space operate in a bootstrapped manner and are profitable with decent organic growth. And we are that."
Over 150 software engineers have benefited from their programs.
“Bade se bada business, paise se nahi, ek bade idea se bada hota hain.” With his entrepreneurial endeavours, this amazing engineer learned a crucial lesson that transformed his perspective. Aditya began to realise that unit economics is what counts. The best method is to raise money from customers rather than artificially infusing it into the business. According to him, education should be enjoyable so that everyone finds learning to be simple.
When we asked how he was able to culminate and garner his mindset whilst the pressure he had to take building up a start-up, his reply was, “At every point, we keep taking feedback and ensure that they are liking the process. I have become a believer in the fact that the entire education space is going to change in the next few years. People are going to start giving a lot less importance to degrees and other modes of formal education and are going to find alternative, crazy ways to make learning fun.”
He places a strong emphasis on client feedback. But, the most important thing that he upholds is the immense amount of support from his friends and family, as he adds about how believing in himself and a supportive family had him reach the level he intended to garner.
Not every day is the same. Every day, Aditya battles some doubts and insecurities. Maybe motivations could draw from a single sentence or a single video. And even Aditya had a sole motivator - A video that he believes in as a guiding light in his life.
“All the experience I have watched this one video of Kunal shah more than 20 times - Find your pot of gold. I would recommend all new founders watch this video thoroughly. If you want to build a business that has exponential growth, you need to understand the customers' mindset in the best possible way. Always go about building delta 4 products. This is hard to find and build, but this is what differentiates amazing companies from good companies”.
Be the best version of yourself while you can. Don't stop.
Aditya Kamat, Founder, HeyCoach
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