Vishal Jain reveals how he started 6 companies with nothing

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Vishal Jain, the Serial Entrepreneur, Investor, Mentor, and Internet personality (among other things). Here's what he had to say when we asked him how he made his millions.

The entrepreneurial bug bit Jain early. As a young child, he used to sell WWE & Pokemon cards in school, at the age of 15 he started organizing events and by the time he was 19, he decided to dropout of college and start his first company SunShy Digital Media Agency. He now owns four digital media agencies, a manufacturing plant, a jewellery business and has also written an e-Book to help people start their own digital media agencies. 

You told us that you started with nothing, can you tell us how?

I always had an urge to start a business but I didn't want to take financial help from anyone to start it. I googled one day how to make money online and landed on a few freelancing websites. I started selling Virtual Assistant services on a website called Fiverr. After few months, I discovered few more freelancing websites like People Per Hour & UP Work and started doing any kind of hourly jobs I could, be it data entry, data research, transcribing or being a virtual assistant. I saw the demand for designing and social media marketing on these platforms and started learning about it. I watched thousands of youtube videos and read hundreds of articles on Quora to develop my skills and started providing digital marketing services on those freelance platforms. Once I saw good response and reviews from my clients, I decided to start selling them on my own website to save 20% of my income which those platforms charged, so I could provide more competitive rates and acquire more clients. I didn’t want to waste my money on a professional website designer so I learned how to make websites by watching various youtube videos and started my first company SunShy Digital Media Agency. I started my agency with only $25 (Domain & Hosting Cost) and put rest of the money I had to promote my services to acquire new clients.

That’s really commendable! How did you grow from one agency to four?

When I started my first agency, SunShy Digital Media Agency, I had all SMM services in it. Website & App Designing, Logo Designing, SEO, Copywriting, PR, Social Media Marketing & much more. After few months I noticed a lot of my clients wanted to increase their influence on Instagram. Instagram at that time was the next big thing in social media and people wanted to grab onto the opportunity. So, I decided to start another agency named Realstagram just for Instagram growth related services and Realstagram started generating more revenue than my first agency within 2 months of its existence. After that I started one more agency, Social Media Specialist which focused on growth of major 5 social media platforms, namely Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube & LinkedIn. I started getting a lot of demands for services like App & Podcast Promotions, Marketing for Websites like Tik-Tok, Quora, Snapchat, Spotify, Soundcloud, Reverberation, Shazam etc so I made one more agency, Grow Social Influence dedicated to all these services which covers almost all social media websites in the world.

How did you go from Digital Media Agencies to Manufacturing Industrial Goods & Selling Jewelry?

My dad has a business where he supplies industrial goods to factories. I saw growth potential in the market if we could start making some of the goods ourselves and increased our product line. So I decided to invest in the opportunity and started my Firm SunShy Enterprises. My vision is to make it all in one store for any kind of industrial goods that a factory requires, the DMart of Industrial goods. I started jewelry business in partnership with Sejal Joshi, who heads the Brand Management, Advertising & Influencer Marketing department in my agency. We started the company SunShy Jewels to sell handmade jewelry made by our Indian craftsmen to people in USA, UK, Europe & Australia. We use Influencers marketing as our biggest source of client acquisition and our vision is to start selling real Gold jewelry on our website in near future.

Amazing! What is your website Journey To A Million Dollars About?

I started Journey To A Million Dollars to share my thoughts and journey with other young aspiring entrepreneurs. I write blogs on it related to Finance, Investing, Education, Culture and Lifestyle. I get hundreds of messages and emails from people asking for help to get into the digital media space but my companies are very young so I don’t have excess time to provide personal mentoring or start a youtube channel to teach people what I know. So, I decided to write an eBook in which I have shared all the information on how you can start your own Instagram agency and start making money from it. It includes information on everything from Increasing Influence, Getting Leads, Using Instagram AD’s, Influencer Marketing to Hashtags, Bio Customization & a lot more.

What’s the next thing in line, another new business?

For now I want to concentrate on growing my already existing businesses and get them established. In context to next thing in line, I want to start a non-profit organization this year to provide help with food and education to people in need in India. Millions of people die in India due to hunger every year and I want to do my bit to get India out of hunger crisis.  India is a young country and the youth needs to know about new arising opportunities, they need to think beyond Engineering and MBA and I -want to help them with it by sharing my own experience of digital and ecommerce marketing for which I’m planning on starting a Podcast and Youtube channel.

What are some opportunities for new entrepreneurs during and after Covid-2019 ?

That’s a very good question. I think because of the coronavirus crisis the biggest thing we have got now is time and no outer disturbance. The time we have got should be used in learning new skills related to APP development, Digital Marketing, Copywriting, DropShipping From India or anything that is of your interest. Once you are ready you can start your journey by providing services on freelancing sites for free and then start your own company with experience. Also, if you are into education or fitness industry you can start making courses, diet plan and even take live classes and start a very rewarding career.

With Government’s motive of Self reliant India and welcoming foreign companies to start their production here, there will be a big opportunity in manufacturing space. You should look to manufacture “helping parts” like nuts for cars or aluminium body for phones anything which those companies coming here in India will need to complete their products.

For Information on all the businesses: www.sunshy.in