1999 – I was 9 years old when i first saw the computer in my dad’s office (in nagaland – north-east india). My father was a professor in applied statistics and i was really fascinated with the PC. My dad had a few books at home on FORTRAN and GW-BASIC which i read thoroughly and grasped some basic concepts of coding. I started practicing programming in GW-BASIC on my dad’s office computer on sundays and soon within a year i was a master of DOS based applications.
My interest on computer programming was so high that i soon started learning Visual Basic and Java. Apart from school, little bit of studies and sleep, all i did was coding. I had made browsers, media players and word processors while i was in school. In 2002, i urged my dad to let me join NIIT’s GNIIT program. They allowed me to do the 6 months course as i was not eligible which formed the first sem of GNIIT that taught me Java and SQL server. I was in class 8 and it was of no use to me. But my dad allowed me anyways to do it and payed the high fees they charged. My dad was very co-operative at that time. In the same year i was introduced to the internet which came very late in nagaland as it was a remote place. We had a dial-up connection at home which costed 60 rupees per hour.
When i passed class 10 in 2005, i joined IIT-Coaching classes in Kota and went there. But, my mind was somewhere else day and night. I used to sit in a cyber-cafe 12 hrs a day bunking classes. 6 months went by – like this and during those 6 months, i learnt a lot about websites business. I developed a lot of blogspot.com blogs, SEO-ed them and then sold links and earned through adsense on them. I had 12 such blogs. My dad found out all this shit and asked me. I confessed the truth. He then called me back home and asked me to prepare there. Soon, i brought my own domains and developed many content sites, did SEO. I started selling link building services which continued till 2006. I had developed a large web directory site till then and sold it for 7000$.
By then i had some capital to invest into affiliate marketing through PPC which i did. Learnt a lot of adwords and lost a lot of money on PPC arbitration. Had tried FlyCell and JamSter affiliate program through an aff network (https://209.172.35.112/~canadian/). When it didnt work as the margins were tight, i used linkedin to find out the marketing guys at flycell and called them up. Was one of the first cold call i made. I tried to use a lot of adwords coupons combined with Virtual credit cards. Arbitration was a difficult game as when the advertiser paid 25$ commission for a sale, you have the pressure to get the sale under 20$. Improve conversion rates, split test 10 ad copies and 10 landing pages, distribute keyword groups widely and a hell lot of work. One example is still live – https://209.172.35.112/~fatlossw/
By 2007, PPC was getting more and more difficult as verticals were getting saturated in the US. For any given advertiser there were 20 affiliates bidding for the same keywords. I knew that if i want to be in this game, i have to be a level higher. These affiliates have to work for me and i got to be the advertiser. Pretty quickly, the debt settlement market in US and UK was heating up. I contacted a lawyer in UK who can buy Debt Settlement leads generated by me. He was ready to pay me 20GBP for every lead. As a result, came up this campaign – https://209.172.35.112/~debtlife/. I developed the LMS for him quickly as i knew coding. I started doing PPC, media buying and had listed this affiliate program on almost 10 affiliate networks. It went pretty good and i made a few thousand pounds out of it in a few months out of a few thousand leads generated. Same went for the USA market – https://209.172.35.112/~dflus/.
Same stuff went on for Auto leads which i sold to a large Auto Retail chain in the USA. I generated almost 10,000 leads in 2 months – https://209.172.35.112/~expertau/
Credit Reports –https://209.172.35.112/~crecit/
The good thing was that, i had NEVER visited any of my clients. Sitting in my bedroom in Nagaland, i was doing business with the biggest lawyers and Auto retailers in the USA and UK. I had realized the power of the internet. It was a gold mine and i have to be in this game till i die. The game went on very well. I had many many working relationships.
The bad part of the whole thing was that my finances were weak and i never had any savings. All the moolah which came in went in experimenting with the campaigns and i used to loose a hell lot of money.
The good part was that i knew very well was how to trace contacts. I was really good at it. I would just see an affiliate program on some network and within a few days i would easily trace the marketing contacts of that company, call them and negotiate really good deals.
By 2008, i had started to test the indian waters. It was way too bad experience initially but later on i started giving some more time understanding the indian ecosystem. I had passed class 12th and got into the graduation first year. By the beginning of 2009, i dropped out and most of my focus was on the Indian market + browser gaming vertical in the international market.
Travian – a browser gaming product was a very good client of mine for whom i delivered almost 80000 players across the whole denmark, finland, norway, sweden and other group countries.
By 2009, i knew that what i was doing was not going to create value though i got a lot of experience. I wanted to apply all that knowledge to create a big company. So i started working on a business model around ad network / affiliate network for the indian advertisers – thats when Impulse was born. By 2010, the indian markets showed real signs of scalability. I can now see advertisers and highly scalable campaigns with budgets coming up. I believe in the next few years, CPA market will be huge in India.
Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal
Wow…this is such an inspiring story…
Abey John
No guts no glory!
aidnani
Do connect with me and we can help you with your campaign.
aidnani
What platform is Impulse built on?