The Exchanges

Q And what, what made you stick to it? Right. During this journey, because you could have thought from, let's say that let's bring some other services also in the business, but you were very focused on only working on, you know, uh, improving the content for coding. So, so where did you get that kind of focus from?

A So you can say like, we are a bootstrapped company. So one thing is, uh, We did not have any choice because if you're building a business, it's very important that you focus on one thing only, right? Because when you diverse into multiple things without much money or without much resources, your existing business might also impact. So for a long, long time, we just built the content business. And once the content business became into autopilot mode, like people are writing the content, content writing is crowdsource, content reviewing is crowdsource. Then we started the, uh, courses business, uh, around 2.5 years back. Uh, once this went into autopilot mode, then we thought get up, which or because of them coding, because we now have a lot of traffic around coding. So we started building the courses, started with lots of free courses. And now we have, uh, both live courses where experts come and teach online. And we also have cell based courses, which are built by our team. And, uh, we have pre-recorded videos. We have practice questions. We have quiz questions and everything, uh, in a single course. So I would say, uh, if you are an entrepreneur, uh, make sure that you first bring your business into an autopilot mode, set up the processes, set up the rule book. And once you feel like you're in without your intervention, it's running, then you can probably think of other busine…

AI assessment note: “we are a bootstrapped company. So one thing is, uh, We did not have any choice”

Q And, and you shared just before starting off a podcast that on a daily basis, you have 30 to 35 interactions with different people in the team, one-on-one interactions. So, so how do you manage that?

A So right now what happens is I have a BA and anybody can book a slot with my BA in the company and we have open door policy. Also anybody can walk into my cabin. And once the person books the slot, I, I reached to that meeting. I talked to those people also, uh, Since we are not a funded company, we do not have very highly paid people, very highly experienced people that we can get from other companies. So most of the people in the company are very, very young and these young people, they are very, very energetic and they work really, really super hard. You just need to give them the vision. You just need to give them the direction. So that's what my role has become. Now I just talk to try to talk to maximum people daily in the office. And just try to tell them like, why are we doing this? Why are you involved in this project? What is the motive you are serving? What is the motive we are serving as a company? And, uh, with time I need once. I mean, once we have more and more senior people, I would love to reduce those number of meetings for sure, but that's the situation as of now.

AI assessment note: “I have a BA and anybody can book a slot with my BA”

Q Uh, Sandeep, uh, would, would love to, uh, go beyond, you know, The starting of geeks for geeks and to your family background, right? Uh, in Ferozabad, where did you grew up? What did your parents do? Uh, and also, right. Uh, how, how was the environment and where did you learn the love for coding?

A So, I'll first talk about coding. So I started using computer in my first semester of beating. So many beating the first. And talking about my background, I was, I was grown up in the city, we were, we were like four siblings. And my father was a clerk in a government office. And, uh, I had seen like really bad quality of teaching, uh, many UP board, which was municipality school, uh, the school topper told me that there's something called IRTG. So like everybody else, I also went for it and prepared for IRTG exam for two years. And since I was coming from UP board, one year I took for Hindi to English translation because most of the popular books, they are in English. And after two years, I felt like heartbroken because I ended up in an engineering college where, uh, you know, there was, this was a tier three engineering college where there was zero person placement. And when I went to this engineering college, I like felt a lot of struggle in that college. In fact, my health struggles started, uh, my stomach started having a problem. Because there was too much Academy pressure and I could see my seniors. They were not getting any jobs. Uh, for me qualifying the academic itself was very, very difficult. And after four years, there was no job. I was sure about it that I'm not going to get any job and talking about teaching. Like I started teaching from schooling itself. Um, I, …

AI assessment note: “my father was a clerk in a government office. And, uh, I had seen”

Q So moving a little forward, right? When you were leaving your job in Deeshaw, what kind of traffic was there on this blog and what kind of content you used to publish?

A So traffic was not very high, but the speed at which it was growing was really great to see. It was, you know, doubling every two, three months at that time. And, uh, content I was publishing, I was in IIT Roorkee. So I appeared in many, uh, top companies, uh, like I appeared in Google, Microsoft and all the other companies. I applied some places off campus also. And we had a very good circle. Like when you are in IRD, you have these friends who appear in interviews. They talk about the interview preparation. They tell you like what kind of questions company asks. So with this IIT rookie environment, I could get a very good grasp of the expectations of the company. Like what kind of questions they ask, how many rounds they have. And I appeared also in top companies after we did, I didn't appear in a single software company. I could not even get a chance to appear as the interview, but after M tech, I could appear in these companies and I got a very good idea. So I used to publish a lot of content around these interview questions because we study a lot of things in engineering. Right. And like, if you see our energy, when we, when we people reach in third year, That's when we realize here. And there are some standard data, such an algorithm that all you need to know. And mostly companies are going to ask variations of these, uh, standard questions only. So I used to publish only…

AI assessment note: “traffic was not very high... I used to publish a lot of content around these interview questions”

Q And can you describe your journey? Let's say, I assume in 2015, you were making 1.5 lakh rupees per month from Geeks for Geeks blog. We are advertising. So who are the first kind of people that you hired and how did the team grow in the last seven years?

A So initially we hired four people. We were a team of five people. So those, uh, there were three interns and one full time employee. And fortunately, I don't know how things work. There's some super power that makes things happen. What happened was, I was in this teaching job and there was an employer. She also had to leave that job because her husband was being shifted to some other city. So she was okay to work with me, even without any salary or at a very, very low salary. So I got a senior person. She had experience of teaching in multiple colleges. And since I was a teacher, I could get some top quality coders from the college itself, right? I knew who was a good coder, who was good at coding. So that's how we had four initial people that one person, she was, uh, experienced and three interns.

AI assessment note: “initially we hired four people... three interns and one full time employee”

Q How, how do you inspire so much loyalty when, you know, your competition can offer them two X, three X salary?

A I think they have been involved from the beginning and they're the people who have decided most of the things who have And I, I can tell you for sure that many of these guys, they don't even apply, right? They don't even reply to the messages when they get from other companies or other competitors. They are so much into the company because they started at a very young age and they built most of the stuff here. They did make a lot of decisions also in the company. So I strongly believe that many of them don't apply to many other companies and they don't even respond to the messages when they get some offers from the other companies.

AI assessment note: “they have been involved from the beginning and they're the people who have decided”