1. Describe about your founder.
Rohit
Gatla, Founder & CEO of Botup Technologies Pvt. Ltd, grown up in Jagtial,
Telangana. Coming from different fields, I have started from Civil Engineering,
Disk Jockey, EDM Producer, Blogger, Digital Marketer and Rural Entrepreneur to
Serial Entrepreneur. To become stronger, I always challenge myself by creating
multiple paths in combination with passion. Academically I was a below-average
student. Being short, I used to stand first in my school assembly line, which
made me feel like I’m the path maker. I have learned how to grow without
depending on others since my childhood. From then, I have started to think
about creating multiple paths and wanted to be unique from others. When I was
in my under graduation I used to play DJ, produce music and also write blogs.
After completion of my graduation, things have turned upside down. My father,
who worked as a Tailor in Saudi Arabia, came back to India and got diagnosed
with a terminal illness. Having all my paths closed, I had leftover with one
option that was to build myself. At the age of 21, I have experienced tough
circumstances and many unforeseen situations. I have started as a Rural
Entrepreneur at such a young age with the idea to reduce migration and to
create a new ecosystem for employment. Accomplished with many compliments and
also awarded as Social Media Influencer.
In late
2018, I thought about getting an MBA from Tier1 Colleges but, living in rural
areas it was tough to find an Institute to prepare for the CAT Examination.
However, I have picked up some courses from e-learning platforms. But, I was
not satisfied with the way of teaching, quality of education and felt it difficult
to pick the right tutor who has merged with my capability. At that moment I
realized we are living in the era of internet and technology. There are many
other students who are also suffering like me to get access to quality
education. As an entrepreneur, this problem got stucked into my mind and I
tried to solve this and came up with an idea called Exams9.com. Later me and my
friend Bharadwaj Badri (Co-Founder & CTO) who collabed with me to build a
great technology.
Exams9.com: An e-Learning & Marketplace for all the competitive exams. An open platform where the educators create the content. Our Technology has been designed to help the students to select the right course from the tutors which suits their capability. Exams9 is an incubated startup from T-hub backed by the Government of Telangana.
3. What is the biggest challenge of
being a CEO and how do you overcome it?
Being the
CEO of a company is the biggest challenge, every decision is like a gameplay
and you have to be ready for taking any unforeseen risk to initiate. If there
is no innovation in a business it gets you nowhere. Managing things won’t make
you a perfect leader; it either doesn’t work for your company’s growth.
Sometimes it is necessary to analyze the current data and to come up with new
strategies. The biggest challenge is to choose the right path whether it is
technology, marketing, or any other. Empathy is the most important leadership
quality. Forget that you are a leader and work as an employee. Get yourself
involved and engaged in every situation. Everything needs to be started from
scratch. Also, it needs idea validation, marketing research and we must focus
on the competition. Sometimes it might be difficult to handle as a single
person and we need a team with different mindset. We have to empathize with the
team and make some potential collaborations and plan for the next move. This
makes it easy for the growth and success of the company. How well you treat
your employees, determines the fate of your company.
4. Where
do you see the company in the next five years and how will you bring about the
change?
We are
working on many platforms and to be successful in all industries related to
Healthcare, Social Networking, and Education. Exams9 is revolutionizing Ed-tech
by enabling students to find the best educators, video courses, materials, and
mock tests. Our Vision is to provide Quality Education that is affordable for
students to achieve their goals and to generate more revenue for educators. It
is a phenomenal platform in the Ed-Tech industry providing a huge amount of
content in each subject. Our aim is to connect the right educator to millions
of students in accordance with their capability. Also, we make it more
user-friendly by understanding their strengths and weaknesses using proper
Artificial Intelligence and providing a customized and structured revision
solution to all users. Collecting the data of each educator and make the best
aggregate portal for the students to access easily. Our goal is to make this
platform successful with millions of active learners across India and to take
the initiative for learning and fulfilling their dreams.
5. Did you ever feel like giving up
on being a CEO and what motivated you to pull this off?
You must
evaluate every small risk before stepping. Sometimes I feel hard, working for long days 24/7,
leaving my family and also for not having recess. But this is not for a
lifetime; we may work for a period of time just to create the process. When the
process begins everything goes on the flow. We just need to focus on the things
that, how they are performing. I’m just working on my passion, every moment
which gives me joy and happiness.
6. Tell us some of your failures
There
is no failure unless you give up. Everyone faces unforeseen situations, but we
have to be strong and sometimes it might test us how passionate we are. Always
feel blessed and accept the failures because it makes you strong enough. Right
knowledge is the ultimate solution to all our problems. Every time we have to
read the data and user behavior, according to it we have to change the strategy
but not your idea. Entrepreneurship means having an idea and intends to execute on that idea. I have seen many in my industry when the idea doesn’t
fall in place, they try to change their idea and start following others. When
you are trying to solve the problem, you have to show some uniqueness to the
consumers to adapt your services. Sometimes there will be a lack of trust and
it may take a lot of time and research to build within the consumer. Most of
the people give up due to lack of patience and understanding of their needs.
While starting Exams9, we have connected and pitched our idea to more than 300+
educators. Many of them said it’s a great idea, but no one came forward to
create content to start the journey with us. We have changed the entire
strategy and started recruiting them to create the content. After getting the
content it took a week to generate sales. Then again, we started pitching to
educators by showing some numbers and user data. Then educators started
creating content with a great interest to enter the world of competition.
Everyone showed interest and started uploading content without approaching us.
Now we are on track of what exactly we are looking to build.
7. Describe your biggest
achievement.
Success is
a journey. I feel proud, being brought up from a different background and
become a successful entrepreneur. Our startup has been selected for the
Accelerator Program in T-hub, Hyderabad. Also got many accomplishments from
Civil Services Officers, Unicorn firms, and mentors. However, getting
accomplishment is not to be defined as Success. Success can be very difficult
to deal with. It's all about consistency. Challenges may get from any direction
might be from Competitors, Technology, or any other. For us, the biggest
achievement is that the consumers have to benefit more than they expect. Then
only our Ideas and Technology have meaning for it and we feel proud that we had
the biggest achievement.
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