mYwindow

Started with an idea in late 2011 to allow creators build a portfolio-like media-rich profile and connect with like-minded people within their community.
Launched the private beta in Jan 2013. Creators could build their media-rich profiles by showcasing their designs, ebooks, video courses, independent films, speeches, publications and other creative work. Creators and all other users could also follow and create content for communities (curated by us) around UI design, Independent film-making, Entrepreneurship, Baking, Real estate etc. to consume content in it and connect with other community members. It involved all social interaction elements like comments, likes, embeds, integrations, tagging, DMs and more. According to us, we were enabling people to follow content over people by not having a 'follow this person' button, but follow this person only when he posts content in the UI design community, because people posting about their pizza dinner party last night made no sense because you followed him for his UI design skills.
We were a team of 6 full-time developers, 3-4 interns from IITs and NITs across the country. I lead the UI-UX by coding CSS myself writing thousands of lines of code every month. I self-learnt UI design by unbundling complex websites and online learning by putting in late night hours. I couldn't believe how designing & building products came so naturally to me and that it was so intuitively artsy, bringing back old memories of creating stories and designing screenplays for our indie film projects.
After having a few hundred creator profiles for our beta within a couple of months, we started receiving feedback to allow creators to sell their digital products from the profile itself. There were some similar startups that allowed creators to monetize their digital products, so to avoid becoming a similar competing service, we felt our focus on rich profiles and community would put us on a different tangent.
The payments domain was really bad in India at that time, hence we immediately incorporated a C-corp in Delaware, got an account with SVB using a good reference and immediately had a payment solutions setup within mYwindow.
Got an invite to represent Asia at International Startup Festival in Montreal, Canada to present mYwindow to an amazing audience of people working in startups and investors, advisors etc. Unfortunately my Visa got rejected and I lost this opportunity, in spite of having all the invitation letters, other important documents and a decently good international travel history. It was quite frustrating.
Got an invite to attend Y Combinator Startup School in the Apple's Cupertino office in Oct 2013. This was my first Silicon Valley experience which gave me great learnings and helped me make new friends working in great tech companies. One of the biggest highlights of the trip was to meet Steve Woz at his favorite restaurant in San Jose. I've written more about the SV trip experience here.
One of my biggest goals coming to SV was to meet enough people to get advise on how to scale mYwindow and raise more funds. The most important learning from my US trip was that the creator economy and early adoption around online communities was way behind (almost non-existent at that time) in India compared to the US market. We were hustling in the wrong market and if we would've stayed locally in the US and would've dived super deep into the creator community in NYC, LA, Idaho, Utah, Boston, SF and built right relationships/evangelists for our product, we would've seen a different trajectory for mYwindow.
From Jan 2012 to Sep 2013, we had spent way too much personal and family money, most of which went into salaries and infra costs. Since we had to limit putting personal money after a certain extent and because we weren't able to generate an upward MOM growth, we had to start exploring taking some difficult steps like raising funds urgently or run out of cash and go into debt, ship immediate-revenue-generating features (soft/hard pivot), or quit. Fortunately quitting wasn't something I'd be comfortable with, especially because we had invested so much personal family money into it.
Our team was a tight knit like a family, but unfortunately we had to lay off half of them to save costs, but their blessings and after-hours support was always helpful.
Veer and I had very different opinions on our pivot strategy to get out of the current mess. After a lot of discussions, mental stress, and family pressure - we decided to part ways amicably. We still remain really close friends and really respect each other's journey post that.
I wrote an article on 'Incorporating in US as a foreign national' which got picked up by several popular online media sites in India, Africa and other developing countries. It went really viral and for at least 3-4 years I use to get hundreds of emails every month from people having more questions and asking for guided help/advise. I made sure I replied to all the emails and while interacting with a few people who were wanting to incorporate in US mentioned that their main goal to do so was to get a payment solution (use a payment gateway GUI tool) to accept international card payments from outside India at scale.
EUREKA: This is when it struck me that we could pilot a pivot project in mYwindow where we allowed small businesses, consultants, and freelancers to accept international card payments from their clients outside India. In 2014, there was no PayPal or similar service which made this possible within seconds. We started converting such folks who'd reached out to me (via the article) to start transacting using our platform and in March 2014, we had our first revenues. Within 4 months we had processed over $60k and were growing 30% MOM.
I badly wanted to take a small break to recharge my mind after constantly hustling under immense confusions and pressures since 2 years. Me being a crazy CRICKET fan, I booked myself a solo trip to UK around India's series schedule against England in Sept 2014.
We were a small team of 3 people, generating great profits, without any outside investor pressure to scale heavily. I was spending not more than 20-25 hours per week to run the business which was scaling on its own through word of mouth and article referrals. I wanted to grow slow and steady with a clear thought of using mYwindow's profits to re-invest into other passions I had and also wanted to start returning money against our family investments we'd one which had created some bad debts. I was very honest with myself that my goal was to create a platform for creators and interest-based-communities, but ultimately our business had pivoted to B2B payments processing which didn't inspire me much. I just considered myself lucky that after spending so much time and money into a wrong market to build a good product, the business was at least returning good returns in an automated fashion.
By Feb 2015, we were processing around $40k each month
I decided to start writing a book 'Just F***ing do it' to share my learnings of doing independent film-making without any formal education and building mYwindow.
I booked another solo trip to Australia & New Zealand to follow the Cricket World Cup in 2015. I booked my tickets for both the Semi-final matches happening in Auckland and Sydney and the finals in Melbourne. I created my itinerary around these dates to make sure I cover the other important cities to travel to. The plan was to use the time to complete writing my book, brainstorm few ideas for the next startup. Unfortunately, the beauty of NZ & AUS and the heart-break to see India losing the semi-final match to Australia, caused me to never really find enough time to complete writing my book.
In June 2015, decided to start building the MVP for Corselo (an ed-tech marketplace for physical offline courses)
Our family business ran by my father was into leisure travel & tourism and because I loved traveling so much, I thought of exploring the online travel space by helping our family business go online. It will grow our family business and will also help me figure out what interesting opportunities are lying around to build something valuable. In December 2015, I started speaking with GDS suppliers to enable flight inventory for our online travel product.
Around March 2016, we had crossed ~ $1mn in transaction volumes in mYwindow.
In April end, everything went to ZERO. Our banking partners noticed high chargeback ratio in our transaction volumes. Given the strict risks and regulations in the payment card industry and some clients not delivering satisfied services on time (maybe due to their poor contracting methods) to their clients, there used to be some chargebacks raised by card-holders. Also, since there wasn't a way to put our customer's name on credit card statements as 'charged-by', card holders often mistook mYwindow as some unrecognized name and ended up raising a ticket with the bank. To circumvent this, we even kept local international numbers for timely support if anyone called us. We had also made an automated tool to manage chargebacks for our customers and card holders to submit their proofs. But it all came down like a nuclear attack one day due to our lack of knowledge around that time about card regulations and that we didn't filter companies which crossed a certain level of chargeback ratio. We were just letting the companies come, start accepting payments and automated all parts of the processes without worrying about any red flags or risks.