/00 For people building something of their own
Aashish Pahwa
Ogilvy by day, Feedough by night, then Feedough full time. Build the thing on the side until the side is the job.
/01
How it started
Internships and early roles at Shubhpuja, Hindustan Times, Ogilvy & Mather and Microsoft. I interned at Ogilvy in my third year and stayed about a year and a half as a client executive, picking up copywriting and design along the way. A startup idea I worked on then failed, which taught me a lot. In 2016 I noticed there wasn't a one-stop resource for first-time entrepreneurs, built Feedough on the side, then left Ogilvy to run it full time.
- Built Feedough on the side of a full-time job, starting in 2016
- By 2019, first page of Google for advertising, marketing and business model
- 600,000 to 800,000 page views a month today, 99 percent from search
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What came after
Koso started as my solo practice and now runs as a distributed team with clients in the US, UK and Australia. Okom, a cold outreach platform, is next: built by Koso, in closed beta. The Indian AI Community grew alongside both of them.
- 120 plus AI products shipped through Koso
- Okom: outreach that builds itself, in closed beta at okom.ai
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The ones that didn't become companies
GeneratePoem.io, GenerateStory.io, and more than a dozen other web properties over the years that never turned into Feedough. Most side projects don't. You only hear about the one that did.
www.feedough.com/04
Where the hustle started
At PGDAV College I studied commerce and spent three years with Rudra, the street play society, as its vice-president, performing across Delhi and travelling to Mumbai, Kanpur and Goa to compete. My days then ran from seven in the morning to ten at night: classes, rehearsals and internships.
www.linkedin.com/in/aashishpahwa/05
Numbers
- 2016Started Feedough on the side
- 600K to 800KMonthly page views today
- A dozen+Side projects tried