How these college students built a job portal and raised $350,000

The following is an excerpt from Pyjama Profit: The Millennial’s Guide to a Sustainable Freelance Career, a book authored by Varun Mayya and Abhinav Chhikara. The excerpt is courtesy of Bloomsbury India. You can buy the book here.

At some point in my career, I decided I was done with freelancing.

I was hitting my targets so fast that I was making enough in one week to last me months. We chose to completely stop freelancing and work on something more meaningful—a full-blown start-up. We were still in college at that point, but started working on Jobspire, a recruitment platform.

Part One: Manipal

A year ago—I recollect the incident that started this madness. “We’re making quite a bit of money as students, dude,” mused Kartik.

“Yeah, let’s do something even more challenging. Let’s do something big.”

“What problem hasn’t been solved yet?” asked Kartik.

“Let’s do hiring, man. The biggest competitor in the market is living on borrowed time anyway; let’s dethrone them.”

“Sounds good.”

Kartik and I had been working since the first year of college. We were really good product developers, but that wasn’t enough—we needed to hire some more people.

I looked through my contact list and found Sandesh Kini—a quiet person who used to sit on my bench at the back of class. College had closed for the mid-semester holidays and he lived in Bahrain. I asked him if we could Skype. “What’s up?” he said, in his usual nonchalant tone. “Dude! Forget placements and come work with me. I have this start-up idea and we think we can revolutionize how work happens across the country. It’s ambitious, but it could work.”

“I’m in.”

“What? Don’t you want to ask your parents or take a while to think?”

“Nope! I’m in.”

Part Two: Delhi

Part Three: Bengaluru