Hi friends!
The rewards on the internet are asymmetric. When you start an online product, there are no returns for a long time, but when they come in, it looks like this -
Todayās story is about one such creator - who gets more money than she could ever imagine. Struggling to figure out what she should do with all the money, she decides to start something again.
Read the story to find out how ā
ā Reading time = ~5 minutes
Abundance
āThanks, Rani, we are excited for whatās next!ā The old man wearing the suit said. Rani was in a dilemma ā whether to be happy for the most successful project of her life or sad that it was coming to an end.
She shook the old manās hands and left his office behind.
She had worked on the project for 3 years at this point, and to leave it behind felt a little sad. But she was exhausted from doing the work herself. Rather than let it die because of her negligence, she was handing it over to a company to expand it.
Apnafashion.com was a blog that focused on the modern Indian outfit for all kinds of women, with a strict focus on daily usage. Rani had started this as a passion project during her college days, but it had gained instant popularity āRani was candid on the blog. While most of the online world spoke about features (cloth material, stitching, etc.) and pricing of clothes, Rani wrote about how the world would judge the person wearing the clothes.
Her reviewing system was based around āHow jealous would this make someone you hate? What are the chances that your crush would look back at you? How would you look like wearing these at your office party?ā All practical questions that people thought of while buying clothes, but no one spoke about them openly.
Because of her unique approach, the blog was touching 1000 views per week within weeks of launching. When she started monetizing about six months later, she earned ā¹24,000 in the first month itself. It was a large enough sum that she could think of doing this full-time and not worry about the upcoming college placements.
Over the next three years, she continued to expand the blog, growing her Instagram following and also starting a YouTube channel. While the YouTube channel didnāt work out for her, the Instagram page did. She got a lot of brands reaching out to her for marketing their products, which created a flywheel effect. As established brands came, so came more followers, which resulted in more brands.
With all of this, her monthly income was crossing ā¹2 lakhs a month at the peak, while the lows could range in the fifties of thousands.
But there was a problem. Instagram had made her into a machine ā she had to post something every few days to stay relevant. With blogging, once she put out a piece of content, it would stay relevant for years to come if the content was good. With Instagram, that was not the case. There are so many people posting so many photos on Instagram, that you have to continuously strive for your audienceās attention.
This led her to work with more brands, post more pictures, go on photo-shoots even when she was sick, have back-to-back meetings with brand managers and her agents, and so on.
Life became hectic.
What was worse ā her Instagram feed started diluting in terms of quality. Where she used to post content from quality brands, she recently started picking promotions of brands that were not creating products of the highest quality, in order to chase money. Over the last couple of months, her following had started dropping month over month.
After due introspection, Rani did realize that she was fatigued. It was her constant desire to work with more brands to make money that was leading to a loss. As she thought more and more about it, she realized that the business didnāt seem very exciting to her. And she couldnāt afford to take a break from the business. If she did, someone else would work with the brands she would have otherwise worked with.
So, she decided to sell off her business. Finding a suitable buyer took her months of talking to random strangers on the internet, but when she did, she found a big one!
The value offered for her three-year-old business was ā¹72 lakhs - far more than Rani could imagine in the wildest of her dreams. She sold the business to this company, not knowing what she would do with the money.
When the money got transferred into her bank account, what to do with the money was the largest question on her mind. Apartment ā she didnāt need one. Car ā she already had one. Clothes ā where was the space to keep them? Jewellery ā she was not a big fan. A trip around the world ā no, never. Put all the money in mutual funds ā how boring. Donate it all ā but what about her own future?
These thoughts continued to linger in her mind for months to come. After selling, she hadnāt picked up any new work. She had not taken a break in a long time. She needed at least a few months to heal. But the thought of what to do with the money kept continuously nagging her.
She spoke to many financial advisors, with each one of them giving her a different opinion. But they all said this is the right time to invest in the market. Rani was somehow not convinced. She didnāt control the destiny of a company listed on the market. How could she predict whether a stock was going to rise or not? Also, the belief that the markets keep growing over the longer term, though true, was not Raniās cup of tea. Why would it not fail? Past performance, especially in financial markets, was not indicative of future performance. Her hard-earned money would go away in a whiff.
After months of questioning herself, she arrived at a simple conclusion. It is best to invest in yourself. She decided to pick another risk ā a new startup. She invested Rs 20 lakh out of this money into the startup and the rest she started putting into different investment instruments, agreeing to some statements by the financial advisors.
Her new startup was focusing once again on fashion to start with, but she decided to build a tech platform this time, rather than a content company. The idea was to create a portal that solved the problem she faced with Instagram, and the problem several other Instagrammers were facing - Social Media Fatigue.
As a result, she was hopeful that over the next few years, if this startup worked, she could hand the day-to-day operations to someone else and be in an advisory role.
She was back in action.
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Thanks for reading :)
Hemant