HYDERABAD: Rajesh Kumar Nalla, a young entrepreneur from Kagazhnagar, Adilabad, has been listed in the #Future50Global Leaders, amidst luminaries such as Sanna Marin (Prime Minister of Finland), Laura Jones (Special Olympics) and Miishe Addy (CEO, Jetstream Africa) and for a reason. With just his pilot project in Hyderabad in November 2019, both offline and online, he has impacted 5,000 youth in the country. They landed in gigs such as Full Stack Web developers, Machine Learning Engineers, IoT engineers etc.
Online with offline
“Luckily, we adopted a hybrid business model which we piloted in the physical realm and in the cloud and we did not have to stop our work. In fact, lockdown worked as a catalyst,” says Rajesh, 24. Not surprising for a techwiz who started coding at the age of nine and went on to start a next gen tech company, Techimax IT Services, focused on futuristic technologies at the age of 18.Known to be one of the youngest managing directors of the country, he says being in the #Future50Leaders list by Project Management Institute, an association for those who consider project, programme or portfolio management their profession, is a big milestone. Rajesh has been building a next-gen ed-tech platform with the motto, “To make every engineer skillful” with online learning platform – SkillLauncher, which is scheduled to launch this year.
Small town to big league
Born and brought up in Kagazhnagar, Telangana, Rajesh relocated to Hyderabad for higher studies. “While I was a kid, I was more fascinated with computers than academics, so I started coding at the age of nine and started exploring the world of computers and the internet. I had a strong ambition to start something on my own, in that process I started my career as a freelance web developer in Hyderabad at the age of 14 while pursuing intermediate first year and then I hired few more developers to work along with me as I was getting more freelance projects. As part of my freelance job, I have worked with many start-ups and midsize companies from different industry domains. I was primarily working on branding and web designing; I got the opportunity to work with senior level management of my customers and this helped me to understand customer needs. After working for four years as a freelance consultant, it was a logical step for me to start a company at the age of 18. I started Techimax IT Services which focusses on futuristic technologies.”
Chasing the dream
As he was fascinated with the technology assignments, he dropped out of intermediate and completed his education till graduation in distance mode. Currently, this 24-year-old is pursuing an Executive MBA in Technology Management from Osmania Campus.
Inspiring rural youth
“I have gone through a lot in starting the company and running it successfully for the last five years. I hail from a place where getting a reliable internet connection is a big deal even now, but 15 years back, I learnt technology basics in such a situation with very limited support and stood on my own to start a next generation tech company,” he says. Rajesh believes that being listed in this list will give him more visibility and hopefully inspire rural youth to dream big.
Tunnel vision
By the year 2024, he believes he can impact at least a million students and upskill them to get their very first job. On the other side, our future plan is to scale-up and focus more on product engineering projects where we are expert at.Has the pandemic affected his work? “As part of building our e-learning platform, SkillLauncher, we have started offline/classroom training two years back with a main objective to validate our course curriculum and teaching methodology. This classroom training business has not helped us to give feedback to our e-Learning platform development but generated good revenue for our company. Covid-19 pandemic has hit our classroom training revenue very hard and we have lost a significant part of our business.
Making the most of it
They released offer letters for a few fresh grads and in early February, they hired many fresh grads from different colleges across Telangana and AP through campus placements, but the pandemic affected these initiatives and they had to postpone their plans.“I personally had many expectations from 2020, but the pandemic changed my course of action. Initially it was difficult, and I worried so much but now this pandemic situation showed me different business opportunities in digital transformation and e-learning. As our company has already started building the e-learning platform two years back, it is easy for me to capture the market opportunity. Prior to Covid-19 , we had different plans to launch our e-Learning Platform, SkillLauncher but current situation has helped us to expedite our plans.In fact, lockdown has helped us to build our courses much faster than usual due to high availability of instructors during these times.On the other hand, everyone is looking for alternatives to the classroom and students are ready to adopt online learning platforms without much persuasion, so promoting my e-Learning platform is lot easier now.
Advice to startups
Passion towards learning the latest and cutting-edge technology and experimenting the new technologies in building new products have really helped in achieving current success. Working with like-minded passionate employees and providing great customer satisfaction has helped me in recurring business and referrals.
With zero external funding or external loans and no god fathers in the industry, it is a great deal to build and sustain a company for the last five years. I am not only running the company successfully but also built an e-Learning platform with a motto to make every engineer skillful.
Understand the need of the customer/market rather than fancy idea or product - Go with the customer.
Keep your expenses as low as possible. So as to save your money post product launch - Spend wisely.
Believe in yourself and give opportunity to all the passionate people around - Passion rules.
Transform your idea into minimum viable product/prototype and proceed with the market validation before spending too much time in building the complete product/solution - Build Small, Before Big thing.
— Manju Latha Kalanidhi
kalanidhi@newindianexpress.com
@mkalanidhi