How serendipity took this shy founder’s bootstrapped startup into the big league

Akshat Choudhary, founder of BlogVault.

Q&A site Stack Overflow is a popular watering hole among programmers. One of its creators is Jeff Atwood, who also writes the well-known blog Coding Horror. And among his legions of followers was a young coder in Bangalore, Akshat Choudhary.

One day – horror of horrors – the Coding Horror blog crashed. The hard disk had got corrupted. Luckily for Jeff, his blog was so popular that he was able to recover most of the content with help from Google. But it got Akshat thinking: “If this could happen to such an extremely technical guy like Jeff, there must be a need there.”

The crash of Jeff Atwood’s blog gave him the idea of BlogVault.

This was the genesis of BlogVault, a tool for backing up entire WordPress sites. And also the first act of serendipity in Akshat’s entrepreneurial journey, which would turn him into a bootstrapped startup hero with a roster of big global clients.

He took the road less travelled

Photo credit: ASG Strategies.

None of that was visible in early 2011 when he got the idea for BlogVault. Akshat was working then for NetScaler, a hardware startup making high-end devices to keep networks running efficiently. He had joined the company in 2005, right after college. It was headquartered in San Jose but had an Indian founder and the devices were made in Bangalore.

Akshat loved it. “As a fresher getting an opportunity to work where you are actually building a product instead of some outsourced service was great,” he recalls. That was a time when startups were rare in India, and CS grads would either go abroad or work for one of Bangalore’s big IT services companies.

Citrix acquired NetScaler soon after Akshat joined, but he continued to work there and started a new product division. At the back of his mind, however, he always knew he would start something of his own.

An idea before its time

Those are apples, before they became apples. Photo credit: Pixabay.

BlogVault wasn’t his first product. It was a group SMS service called ActivMobs, which he did on the side with his brother and a college mate while working at NetScaler.

Those were the days of feature phones and SMS. They were young kids straight out of college and text messaging was making a serious dent in their pay packets. “When we all wanted to get together, plan to go for a movie, we used to find it difficult to coordinate. Each SMS would cost money, which we didn’t have much of. I used to spend almost all my salary sending SMSes to friends,” says Akshat.

Second time lucky

A ‘WTF’ which turned into a blessing

Backup as a service

Third act of serendipity

Series of happy coincidences