Successful entrepreneurs are those who take cognizance of a complex issue facing them and come up with a seamless solution. Manmeet and Divij are from the same crop of entrepreneurs who addressed the issue faced by MBA students and went on to launch an online portal for MBA graduates and business professionals. MBASkool.com is the complete knowledge base for any MBA student, who is looking for that extra spark to set the ball rolling.
After completing their MBA in marketing, both Divij and Manmeet went on to pursue their own career. While Manmeet worked at several companies like Cognizant and Infosys, Divij went on to become Assistant Marketing Manager at Idea. Both of them did a lot of brainstorming while working on MBASkool, but after getting over the initial hiccups, they put their focus on delivering a quality product to the audience.
Please provide a brief overview of your product/ service.
MBASkool.com aims to be “The Ultimate Destination for Business & Management”. MBASkool offers business content to working professionals, management students and aspiring managers so that they can easily acquire structured & comprehensive business knowledge at one place free of cost. MBASkool offers customized business content like articles, brand guide, business concepts, trends, quizzes, skill tools etc. We have traffic from over 100 countries. We have partnered with all the reputed B-schools in India like the IIMs, XLRI, FMS, IIFT, NMIMS etc.
What inspired you to build the above product/ service?
The concept of MBASkool originated during our MBA at NMIMS. We realized that there was no dedicated website, which can address the needs of MBA Students, professionals, and aspirants as the other websites were focusing only on admissions and exams. There was no unified platform for knowledge creation and sharing and hence we came up with the idea of creating it ourselves.
What is your life mantra?
If you have a dream or an idea, you need to start “NOW” and work towards implementing it
What was the most challenging part of your journey until now?
The main obstacles, which we faced, were on the technical front and taking the brand to the users and maintaining the content inflow. A portal like MBASkool can bring new challenges on a regular basis but finding a solution is a challenge, which we are willing to accept.
How did you overcome those challenges?
We overcame them by constantly improving our knowledge and skills. In addition, we never stopped believing in the idea and kept working towards the goals. We did face some failures but found out different ways and means to find solutions to these problems.
Share some details about the investments that you have been able to fetch for the business until now.
We have been bootstrapped from the beginning and had our breakeven point in March 2014.
According to you, what are the three qualities an individual must have to achieve success?
1) Constant Learning
2) Belief in the idea and yourself
3) Hard work
Which online tools/ services/ apps do you use the most and would like to recommend as well?
We use tools for online storage, video/audio communication, and social media platforms for reaching out to the audience
Share any one habit, which you think, makes you more productive.
Prioritizing all the activities every single day before starting the work.
Share any one habit, which you wish to change in yourself.
We are sometimes over analyzing things
Answer in less than 50 words
Believe in your idea and yourself
- One mistake you believe every individual must Avoid:
One mistake everyone should avoid is to stop learning
- One most important lesson that you have learnt until now:
You need to adapt to changing times and situations
What are your plans for next 3 years?
1) Expand the Team
2) Increase the reach and user base
3) Strategic Partnerships on a global level
If you get a chance to start your career, again what would you do differently this time?
Overall, we are satisfied with our career path, as whatever we learnt or worked on taught us something or the other, which is still useful to us in many ways.
What are your top three getaway destinations?
1) Singapore
2) Paris
3) Goa
Share a quote that inspires you the most.
“Start working towards your own dream before someone else hires you to fulfil theirs.”