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.