From a 16-year-old Agra-based entrepreneur to a 14-year-old who has travelled to 24 countries to an eight-year-old who has developed a mobile app to help identify everyday objects, there is no bound to young talent. MUSBA HASHMI catches up with these young guns to bring you a report of their achievements
Age no bar
At the age of 16, he is an entrepreneur and an author. He started his career when he was as young as 10 and has already seen both highs and lows. Meet Agra-based Ojas Batra, Founder and CEO of Hive Group of Companies and author of Teenage AF, a book that will be the torchbearer to all the readers out there and help them to adapt, improvise and step forth in life.
Take us through your journey. How did you start your career at 10?
“When I was 10, I realised that school didn’t make much sense to me, as what I was learning didn’t have a lot of implementation and practical application and to a certain extent was outdated. That was the reason I started experimenting and exploring practical skills that had value and were needed in the real world. I experimented with different skills and freelanced to implement my skills and understand if it is meant for me or not. While I was doing this, I stumbled upon e-commerce, specifically dropshipping when I was 12 and I was allured towards the concept so I invested some of the money that I had made through freelancing in my first store. The store failed but I understood the workings and learned a lot about marketing and e-commerce,” Batra tells you.
Even after the failure, Batra didn’t lose hope. He learnt from the mistakes and thought to give it another try. “I opened my second store and it succeeded beyond my expectations. I ended up having 14 successful ecommerce and selling all of them, and I left dropshipping in 2019 as I realised that it’s becoming a saturated market and it is not suitable in the long-term. While I was running my e-commerce stores, I also started an EdTech startup to give back to the student community, as not everyone has the opportunity to leave school and go out of their way and experiment with skills. My startup helped these students learn skills that I experimented with, like web development, digital marketing, content creation, 3D and VFX at an affordable price while they engage in school studies,” he explains.
This startup got acquired in less than a year in 2019. “I had the option to take an investment in exchange of 25 per cent equity, but I rejected that and offered the whole startup as I realised that even though the idea was good and we were profitable, I lacked the knowledge and skills required to scale the startup. That’s why after getting my startup acquired, I went on to work with multiple startups and with corporates to understand operations and skills needed to scale a company. I also started my marketing agency — Advengers in mid-2019. Once I had enough confidence about skills to run and scale startups, I started Teen Hive and Skill Hive, which focuses on helping teenagers develop life skills, educate them about mental health, makes sure that they have the right mindset and help them build a career road map for themselves and helps individuals do trial and error with skills like web development, data analytics, digital marketing, content creation and others,” he tells you.
Ask Batra what does it take to achieve so much at such a young age and he is quick to respond — acceptance of failure and self-believe.
“In order to achieve something at any point of your life, be it as a kid, a teenager or an adult, one needs to accept failure and learn from it. Self-believe, self-analysis, persistence towards your goal, the ability to make decisions and getting the best out of it is just as important. Also one should understand the difference between criticism and hatred and learn to take it sportingly,” Batra says.
His success mantra, he says, has always been to explore things out of the comfort zone and keep challenging myself.
However, not everything was as easy as it sounds in Batra’s life. He had to struggle a lot.
“When I started my journey of learning and experimenting with skills, I had to learn everything myself with help from YouTube and Google as institutes were not willing to give admission to a ten-year-old, which ended up being a good thing as I learned the ability to do research and figure out things all by myself. I faced much criticism from my relatives, teachers and friends around, who thought that this is not my cup of tea and that my focus should be on studies at this age. This was something that made me question myself in the early days. Even when I started freelancing, I had to do many projects for free as the clients were not able to trust a 10-year-old to do their work. But I learnt from it as well. Today, I even suggest my students to do their first few projects for free to understand how things are implemented the right way. Another big challenge I faced was when I started my first company. When I hired employees, they wanted to run my company for me as they had issues working for a 14-year-old but that also gave me many learnings about why credibility matters,” he tells you.
Not that Batra didn’t feel like quitting. He just overcame all the fears and setbacks. “There were many instances when I felt like quitting. But I always had my parents by my side who told me to give it another try. I also realised that such situations are a significant part of entrepreneurship, and ups and downs will always be there, we just need to learn from them,” he says.
He has a piece of advice for students who want to do something similar in life but are not sure of where to start from. “The important thing is that you start, not where you start, find out the skills that are needed in the world and make a list of five that you might be interested in. Start learning and implementing them, as it’s all about trial and error. One last thing that I would like to mention that my mentor always says is that confusion is what leads to clarity,” he tells you.
The world is her oyster
Once in a while we all must have dreamt of travelling around the world. But with age, the interest often fades away. But not for a Mumbai-based 15-year-old Rainna Goel, who is already a travel influencer, author and photographer.
“I began travelling when I was a toddler with my family for holidays during the summer and spring. That’s how my love for travelling grew,” she tells you.
Her first trip, she says, was to Dubai when she merely two years old. “I remember my first trip being to Dubai, UAE when I was one or two years old, the reason being a vacation. I couldn’t remember much about it but it definitely added to my love for travelling and exploring the world,” Goel, who has travelled to 24 countries, tells you.
Her most memorable trip, she says, was going for the Disney Cruise. “It was a cruise by Disney itself, taking us through the Scandinavian-Norwegian route. Since I was around 10, Disney always fascinated me, and being paired with travelling across seas, was the best part because as I said, exploring new destinations is something I absolutely love. It was truly a dream because Denmark and Norway were such tranquil and scintillating places,” she tells you.
Taking her love for travelling to another level, Goel recently launched A Luxury Wanderer’s Book, which is about understanding what luxury means to you, your preferred kind of travel. “The book takes you through destinations and places you’ve never even thought about. Right from hotels and being en vogue to going to your destination, this book covers it all,” she says.
Having a travel blog for three years, writing a book was always on her cards. “I began writing my travel blog when I was 12. I showcase all my travel experiences through writing and pictures. My blog is titled Travels A La Carte. And having had a blog for three years, I always wanted to pen down a book. Hence, I stepped out of my comfort zone and inspired myself to come up with a because I was appreciated for my blog. Now, I finally had a topic I knew I was passionate about to write a book on, and so I did,” she tells you.
The biggest lesson that she has learnt while travelling, she says, is to travel is to live. “I feel that every time I travel, I forget everything else and I feel like I am just living in the moment. Without this serene feeling, I don’t think life is complete. And so, to travel most definitely is to live,” Goel, who has recently been awarded Young Exuberant Traveller and A Budding Author by India Book of Records 2020 and nominated for the Young Author Award by The India Awaz 2020, says.
Her parents too has been extremely supportive and have always motivated her to do what she loves the most.
“I balance my time well by setting deadlines and allotting a certain amount of time to each of my chores. I prioritise the important things and balance the others. I really believe that if you want something then you automatically make time for it and because I consider writing, travelling and academics as things I love, I make time for them on my own. It doesn’t feel like an added pressure at all,” she tells you.
At 8. She has an app of her own
If you thought that eight-year-olds are only good at making sand castles at the beach, then you are clearly mistaken. Meet Manya Singhal, a Class IV student of Suncity School, Gurguram, Haryana, who has developed a mobile application to help identify everyday objects.
The app, Pickaboo (available on Google Play Store), helps kids scan real-life objects to hear the name. The application takes a picture of the object and sends it to a Microsoft Image Processing API. Once the API returns the description, it is sent to a Translator API (based on language settings). The result is then sent to a Text to Speech Converter and a translator engine that spells out the scanned object’s name in five different languages including English, Hindi, Spanish, French and German.
“I got this idea by seeing my two-and-a-half-year-old sister who keeps on asking everyone about the objects that she comes across in daily life. And no one was patient enough to keep on repeating the names of the object until she learns to pronounce it. So I made this app to make her and other children feel independent,” Singhal tells you.
It’s been seven months since Singhal has been learning coding on WhiteHat Jr and the app is nothing but a result of implementation of the learnt skills.
“There were times when I got stuck while making the app. Sometimes the design was not what was desired and sometimes the result was not perfect. That time, I took my teacher’s help and solved the problem. Apart from this, there were no major problems, however the design was the most challenging part,” she explains and tells you that there are a few features that she want to add in the app. One of them being a more personalised touch to the app.
It took her around one month to make the app, the reason being it is in its simplest form. “I worked for about two hours a day on the app,” she tells you.
Apart from technology, there are many things that interest Singhal. “I love doing yoga, dance and reading books,” she says.
A message that Singhal wants to give out to children of her age is that one should never try to pull down others. “There are many children who bully their classmates. Some even try to pull down others by telling them that they can’t do a certain thing. Instead one should always motivate his classmates. This is the best quality one can have,” she tells you.
Seeing Singhal excelling in her domain at such a young age, her parents, teachers and friends are already on cloud nine.
“Manya dedicatedly spends time teaching new things to her sister. While she loves that little routine of hers, she was curious to create something that would not only help nurture a young child’s exploratory nature but also make them self-sufficient, and the learning experience fun. We are proud of Manya for her perseverance to create this app. It’s endearing that despite being a kid herself, she’s trying to help other kids deal with real-life problems with the aid of technology. We will continue to encourage her to find such creative projects that contribute to her holistic development,” Harsh and Shikha Singhal, Manya’s parents, tell you.
Though there is no specific thing on Singhal’s cards, but she is sure to make best use of technology and make her parents feel proud in future too.
