I didn't have it figured out. I just refused to stop trying.
This is the real story. The version with the shame, the failure, the loneliness, and everything in between.
Where It Began
I was born into a lower middle class family in Delhi. My dad's roots are from Bawana, a small town on the Delhi-Haryana border. Haryanvi blood, simple values, hard work. My mom's side is Punjabi, Delhi-based, warm, expressive. Between the two of them, they built a life for our family from nothing.
The early years of my life, I spent with my grandparents in Bawana while my parents commuted to work in Southern Delhi. Eventually my mom quit her job so I could get a proper education. They shifted to Delhi. No financial backing. No safety net.
My dad started his business around the time I was born and spent years building it from the ground up. We never owned a home. Until I was 23, every place we lived in was rented. The factory was rented. The houses were rented.
Every 6 months to 3 years, we were moving. New locality. New neighbors. New school. We changed houses so many times that we lost count. I never really settled. I never really belonged anywhere.
The Boy Who Pretended
I was a quiet kid. Curious. Introvert. Naughty in my own way. But in social situations, especially new ones, I was terrified.
The financial pressure started showing up in my early teens. Fees not being paid. Being called to the accounts department while friends watched. I started doing what a lot of kids in that situation do, I started lying. “My dad just forgets to pay. He's always traveling. We actually have a lot of money.” I invented stories. I faked a richer identity. Because I couldn't bear to be the kid whose family couldn't pay the fees.
Then one day, I think I was in class 5 or 6, our Hindi teacher, Mrs. Shukla, asked me to come to the front and recite a poem. I was new. I was terrified. My heart was pounding. I recited. There was silence. And then the entire class started clapping. A standing ovation.
I stood there thinking, what just happened? That was the first time I realized I could speak. That people would listen.
Mrs. Shukla took me under her wing after that. Competitions, morning assemblies, school plays, she kept putting me in front of people. And something started to change inside me. But then the school changed. And Mrs. Shukla was gone. And I was back to being the new kid again.
The Weight Of It
Class 8. New school. Bigger school. Richer kids. I was about to fail. Not because I was dumb, because I had checked out. The fees weren't paid. My report card was being held.
Then one evening, two loan sharks came to our home. They misbehaved with my family. With my mom. My brother and I sat in the room listening. My dad, the man who had been working his entire life to give us something better, broke down. He apologized to us. He said he was sorry for us having to see that.
That moment changed something in me permanently. I realized I had a responsibility. Not just to myself, to my family.
From a family recommendation, I joined a coaching center called AVTE. And there I met my first real mentor, Mr. Vipin Setia. He was teaching maths. But what he actually gave me was belief. “I see something in you,” he said. “You could do so much more than you think.” I became obsessed. From nearly failing in class 8 and 9, I turned it around by being one of the top 3s in class 12. 95.5% to be precise. I was on the top of the moon. Got into a decent engineering college in Delhi.
College And The First Taste Of Possibility
First semester of engineering. I got a back. Because I realized immediately, this is not for me. I don't want to code. These teachers don't care. This system doesn't care.
But then something happened. Some seniors announced that a company was looking for campus ambassadors. I interviewed. I got selected. And that one decision opened a door I didn't even know existed.
Internships. Real work. Real exposure. Over the next few years I did internships with OLX, WeChat, Viber, Star Sports, FreeCharge and more. I became the number one OLX intern in India and was about to be sent to Argentina to work with them for a month. All paid. I was taking interviews, giving interviews, learning how to sell, how to hire, how to build teams.
I started giving home tuitions. I built blogs, teaching myself SEO and affiliate marketing at 2 AM while no one was watching. Nothing was making big money yet. But I was learning something more valuable than money. I was learning that I could figure things out.
The First Real Business
In my final year of college, a friend connected me with someone publishing books on Amazon Kindle and making money. I wrote a book. Career Success Blueprint. Everything I had learned about internships, communication, building skills. I self-published it. And I made my first dollar on the internet before I had even graduated.
I still remember that feeling. It was small money. But it meant everything. Because it was proof.
In 2015, my partners and I started a company. We were 22, on top of the world, and completely delusional in the best possible way. Then I discovered Fiverr. I launched an animation video service. We were charging $500, $1,000, even $2,500 per project on a platform known for $5 gigs. I was doing sales, closing clients, managing delivery, building systems. In dollars. From my laptop. From Delhi.
The Collapse
October 2016. Everything fell apart at once. I found out my girlfriend from back then was cheating on me. My business partners and I had irreconcilable differences. The company broke down.
I kept going. But inside, I was burnt out in a way I didn't have language for yet. Handling clients. Managing a team. Meeting deadlines. It had become a job, just without the stability of one. I needed something different.
I found dropshipping. Found a mentor, paid him $10,000. The first month, nothing happened. Then he introduced me to print on demand.
May 2017. We crossed $130,000 in revenue in a single month. I remember looking at the numbers and thinking, what is happening right now? Within the first year, we crossed $1,000,000 in revenue. I had never seen that kind of money in my life. I grew up in rented houses with fees unpaid and loan sharks at the door, and now I was crossing a million dollars in sales.
The Teacher Inside
Money came. But something else came with it. That same instinct I had as a child, standing in front of class, reciting poems, teaching home tuitions, it came back.
I had learned something real. I had proved it worked. And I wanted to teach it.
In 2019, we launched Digital Dukaandar. Webinars, sales calls, high ticket coaching. We were the first people in India teaching international print on demand and dropshipping. Students started winning. Big wins. Real businesses.
But I was doing too many things again. So I started subtracting. Handed the animation business to our manager and stepped away. Stopped the digital products. Focused on ecommerce education in India. But my why wasn't clear anymore. I had made the money. And once you get what you wanted, if your why doesn't evolve, you can't keep going. I was running on empty.
Building Something Real
2020. COVID hit the world. But for us, we were selling T-shirts online, doing tens of lakhs in profit every month.
My dad's factory was struggling. I had a conversation with him on the balcony one evening, what if we took his business online? That conversation became Kalmin Ross, a clothing brand we built together. Real fabric. Real sourcing. Something physical. Something real.
2021. I got married. 2022. My business partnership ended. Different visions. January 2023. I took a break. For a few weeks, I did nothing. Just read. Walked. Spent time thinking. I had no idea what was next. And slowly, one idea kept coming back: what is your specific knowledge? What can only you teach?
The Content Era
January 2023. I picked up my phone and started creating content seriously for the first time. Instagram was at 40K. YouTube was at 10K. I started with print on demand, because that's what I knew deeply.
Slowly, people started watching. Then more people. Then a lot of people. I partnered with Mukul Mishra, my biggest student case study, and launched POD Powerhouse. Then partnered with Ishan Suri and launched Ecom Edge Accelerator.
Then something else started happening. I started talking about addiction. Pornography. Masturbation. Dopamine. Desexualization. Because I had lived it. Because nobody was talking about it honestly in India.
The response was unlike anything I had seen. Young men, hundreds of thousands of them, were struggling with the exact thing I had struggled with in silence for years. That became MIRROR. Today I'm at 919K on Instagram. 904K on YouTube. A WhatsApp community of 12,000+. Multiple income streams. Student results I'm proud of. And I'm still figuring things out.
Where I Am Now
October 2024. My daughter was born. Everything changed. When a baby looks at you and completely depends on you, the restlessness that drove you, the hunger to prove something, it all recalibrates.
I take therapy. I talk to psychologists. I've gone deep into spirituality, looking for answers the way I always have. Still curious. Still searching. I was 95 KGs at my heaviest. I've rebuilt my body. I'm in the best physical shape of my life right now.
I've had loneliness I didn't know how to talk about. Depression I pushed through by working. Relationships that broke me. Business partnerships that cost me money and peace.
But here's what I know now: every program I've built is something I wish existed when I was struggling.
MIRROR, I wish someone had shown me why I was escaping, and how to stop. POD Powerhouse, I wish someone had shown me a real path to income. Ecom Edge, I wish someone had shown me how to build something that generates money without trading time hour by hour.
The content I create, the life lessons, the honesty about marriage and fatherhood, I wish someone had talked to me this way when I was 20 and completely lost.
I'm not ahead of you. I'm just further down the same road. And if there's one thing I want you to feel when you're here, you're not alone. There is a way forward. And you don't have to figure it all out by yourself.
Moments Along the Way
A collection of snapshots from the journey. The stages, the teams, the early days, and everything in between.
First TEDx Talk
My Second TEDx Talk
eCommerce Mastermind with Steve Tan in Thailand
An Event We Organised in Gurgaon, 2025
Speaking at SRCC
One With the Team
Network Marketing Days
Teaching While Interning With Flow India
An Internship With OYO Rooms
First Year of Engineering
Storytelling for Students
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