Do you know that this man who belongs to a small village in Uttar Pradesh is today the youngest self-made billionaire in the country? Faced with all the difficulties coming in the way, he took his money loan at an annual interest rate of 24% and set his business on a unique position of success. Every penny of this company tells the story of their struggle. The story of this man who started a small amount revolutionizing the country’s holiday market is very inspiring.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma is one of the most well-known faces in the Indian startup world today. Born into a middle-class family in a small village in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh district, Vijay was very fast from childhood. He completed his studies from the Hindi Medium School in the village itself. You will be surprised to know that he passed tenth at the age of 12 and inter in 14 years.
Vijay, who considers his sister as his ideal, enrolled in Delhi College of Engineering for further studies. Since Vijay did his studies with Hindi medium, he had to face difficulties due to English in college. But due to this weakness, he never let his confidence weaken. Vijay, coming from a middle-class family, knew the importance of money very closely, so he started a business in college with a friend.
In 1997, Vijay, along with a friend, opened a company called IndiaSite.com. However, he later signed the deal with an American company and started working in the same company. After working for almost a year, he realized to start his own business. Vijay also started seeing dreams by seeing big companies in Silicon Valley. To make his dream come true, he left his job and returned home.
In 2001, he started a company called One97 with his own savings. The company offers mobile-connected value-added services like exam results, ringtones, news, cricket scores, jokes. Gradually, the company grew bigger and Hutch was able to enter into agreements with big telecom companies like Airtel. But unfortunately in 2011, the company went into a loss due to a severe decline in the economic world. And as a result, Vijay went bankrupt in a way.
Motivational story of two sisters who quit jobs and have a turnover of Rs 3 lakh to Rs 13 crore
In this bad era, Vijay borrowed money from his friend and some relatives at an annual interest rate of 24 per cent. The company started again, but whatever income was generated from it, it would end up paying the interest of the people borrowed, paying office rent and paying the salary of 22 people. With great difficulty, Vijay was able to save money for his own pocket money. This phase was full of struggles for Vijay. He also had to sacrifice many facilities in his personal life. They left the car and started travelling by bus and auto and instead of food, they started working with tea-biscuits.
In the event of not being able to pay the house rent, Vijay would go home very late at night and leave early in the morning so that he could not meet the landlord. During this period of stress, he also started working as a consultant in one place. Under the circumstances, Vijay did not stop dreaming and started looking for new business opportunities.
Vijay, who considered Hotmail founder Sabir Bhatia and Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Philo as his business model, noticed in 2010 that smartphone usage in India was growing rapidly. Vijay saw a huge opportunity in this field and then started working on an idea related to it, which could solve the problems of the people. He opened a website called Paytm.com under his old company One97 and started online mobile recharge facility. Although there were many other websites in the market at that time that facilitated mobile recharge Paytm’s system was simple and easy compared to them.
Due to this special feature of Paytm, millions of people went on to become its customers. Vijay never looked back and expanded his business one after the other, adding online wallet, mobile recharge, bill payment, bus and aeroplane booking, money transfer and online shopping.
This startup makes friends meet place accessible, its business is growing rapidly
With 322 million active users and 130 million wallet users, Paytm has today become a $ 16 billion company ie $ 118400 crore. The hard work and determination that Vijay has given in bringing the company to this place is unique in itself.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma is India’s 44th richest capitalist with a total personal wealth of 23 thousand crores in the list of India’s billionaires recently released by ‘Hurun’.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s life is truly inspiring. He has done everything with his hard work and dedication in life. They did not inherit crores of company. Every penny of this company tells the story of their struggle.