IIT Kanpur graduate Ankush Sachdeva is a prime example of ‘patience is bitter but the fruit is sweet’. Ankush Sachdeva has built 17 startups from ground up only to see them fail one after the other. Yes, that is correct 17 times did Ankush a young engineering graduate from IIT Kanpur did launch app and startup’s but none of them did ever bring him success.
Who is Ankush Sachdeva?
The story of Ankush Sachdeva isn’t the usual IIT story we see in Bollywood movies. On the contrary it is about not giving up. Ankush Sachdeva is a graduate in computer science from the prestigious IIT Kanpur. Most students directly walk into a plush corporate office from there. Instead, he walked into a cycle of 17 consecutive failures.
For years, every idea he poured his heart into from e-commerce to utilities crashed. To outsiders, it looked like a stubborn man refusing to get a “real job.” But to Ankush, each failure was a vital data point. He wasn’t losing; he was learning. He was stripping away what didn’t work, inching closer to a problem so big, most of the tech world had overlooked it.
What ultimately brought Ankush success?
In 2015, he teamed up with his IIT Kanpur friends, Farid Ahsan and Bhanu Singh, and they saw the internet was becoming more accessible in small towns and villages, however there was no app in thier local language. Mainstream platforms looked unappealing. Even thier content didn’t resonate. This was their eureka moment.
They created ShareChat It started with Hindi, which expanded to 15 Indian languages Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali, Punjabi and more. It wasn’t just a translation of an English app rather it was a new app which had humour, the local news, and the everyday realities of non-metro India.
Was ShareChat successfull?
The valuation of the app soared to a staggering Rs 40,000 crore (about $5 billion) by 2022. became the digital nukkad (neighbourhood hangout) for millions who had been invisible to the global internet. By 2021, it had over 160 million active users. ShareChat’s main office is located in Bengaluru (Bangalore), India, specifically at Vaishnavi Tech Park; they are owned by Mohalla Tech, with global presence in India, the USA, and Europe, but the core tech hub remains in Bangalore, a major tech center in India.
