While pursuing his education at Spring Dales School in Dhaula Kuan, Rohan realized his interest for football. I was 14 then. He aspired to become a football player every day from then, until one day.
I suffered a major fracture in my forearm. The injury was definitely a set back to my passion for football. But the injury and its acceptance made me search my alternate career options
To kill the time while he was advised for rest, Rohan began fiddling with his dad’s iPhone. In case, that still left him sometime, young Rohan tried figuring out alternate career option.
Soon, he was making videos about tips and tricks related to iOS and began his YouTube channel. In no time, his videos started receiving views in few lakhs and his subscribers list boomed. Unfortunately, YouTube hadn’t yet began providing partner service to users in India, hence Rohan began finding different ways to earn.
I ended up discovering Objective-C and iOS development, which was trending everywhere. I watched several videos on YouTube and taught myself how to develop iPhone applications. After a year of learning, I launched 2-3 apps and uploaded them publicly for people to download for free. I had integrated AdMob (mobile advertisement platform) that allowed me to earn Rs 3000-4000 monthly. It was an achievement to earn this amount of money at such a young age, however, like they rightly say, everything has its consequence
Traditional Indian family. Nearing boards. Mobile phone. Internet. The four never go together, or do they? Rohan’s family soon sensed his idée fixe with iOS development and YouTube as his grades suffered. Naturally, Rohan’s internet connection was taken off and he was forced to delete all his YouTube videos.
It was devastating. I saw my years of efforts go down the drain by one click
Rohan couldn’t yet stop himself from earning. He organized the continuation party of his school in his final year which fetched him Rs. 1 Lakh. Quiet good for a 12th grader!
It seemed like all Rohan was ever waiting was to get done with his 12th grade. He didn’t just get done, he excelled board with 81.5%.
I grabbed back the internet and taught myself web development. This time, I began with Buzzepedia.
The concept of ‘viral content’ became popular in the 1990’s. Viral mills like Business Insider, Buzzfeed, and Upworthy used this business model and showed impressive traffic numbers. The idea of affecting millions overnight seemed to be appealing. ‘Virality’ was a new phenomenon and that caught Rohan’s eye, which eventually led to the birth of ‘Buzzepedia’ in June 2014.
I contacted my friend Adit, now co-founder, who was already into making content on that went viral on YouTube. With started Buzzepedia in June 2014 with no niche or business objectives.
Buzzepedia, which is now one of the leading entertainment website for college students in India, was initially launched by Rohan Dhawan and Adit Maniktala as a fun venture with a $1 investment and a few posts, literally.
It was a free WordPress Blog with some 5-6 posts. Within a month, we had traffic of 3,000-4,000. However it wasn’t enough. The task at hand was to understand the audience and their characteristics in order to conjure an emotional response.
Rohan Dhawan and Adit Maniktala (left to right)
Eventually, Rohan and Adit came up with the idea of ‘College Entertainment that doesn’t suck’ and started creating articles that influenced and humored Indian college students.
I am of the belief that one shouldn’t waste a lot of time on simply thinking if their idea makes sense and if how they can make it better. One simply cannot judge if the idea will work or not until you put it right there in the market and test it.
The duo continued posting more articles without much traction.
Sometime around November, 2014 I saw a post on my news feed by an American blog, listing all the college parties ranked according to how famous and promising they were. I searched for a similar post for Indian colleges. There wasn’t any. So I worked up a listicle ‘Top 10 College Parties in India’. It did take a lot of researching. I followed my usual routine of attending college after posting article. I returned home to see 4 notifications from Buzzepedia’s page along with 12 messages from Adit on Facebook. Our post had reached 10,000 people in 5 hours and the number of shares kept on increasing. Adsense earnings rose to Rs 4500 within few hours. This pumped us up and we figured how college-focused articles caught a lot of young eyeballs. Within no time we had reach in almost 50 different colleges of India.
A recent research found that Younger millennial (ages 18-24) reported less positive and surprise based emotions than any other age group, which make them a more challenging demographic to engage. Therefore, it becomes necessary to use survey tools, public API’s or internal databases to source information that would tantalize the audience.
Taking this into consideration, Buzzepedia began disseminating information that students of different institutions could relate to. Technology, sports, lifestyle, fashion, popular culture, current events and entertainment to name a few. Adit and Rohan cannot stress enough on importance of relevant content and timing.
If the content/product is not something that people would want to read/buy then there is not point of starting at the first place. Timing and positioning is just as important.
How difficult is it for an undergraduate student to manage personal and professional life?
It is really hard to say no to your friends for an evening conversation just because there is an issue with the website and you need to communicate with a website developer in Russia throughout the night. As long as I am doing what I like, I don’t mind.
Rohan and Adit plan to raise funds in near future and are working on ‘Buzzepedia Store’.
Chaaipani 