My Story

People ask why they should listen to me before they take a single word of advice from this codex. Fair question. So here is the actual story, not the highlight reel, the whole messy thing, step by step, from school to now. Take what is useful and leave the rest.

I was nobody

In school, I was nobody. Then I liked a girl, and that gave me drive.

I wanted her to notice me, so I did everything I could think of. I took up running and won gold medals. I went hard at science and maths so I would look smart. I learned to dance. None of it felt like strategy at the time. In hindsight, those were my first pieces of leverage, and they all pointed at the one real talent I have: my mind, the way I think, the way I am able to study.

Eventually I asked her out. She said she'd talk to her friends, and then she said yes. Best day of my life. The next day she said yes, straight away, to another guy. His name was Tushar, and he was smarter, sharper and funnier than me.

It broke me. It also gave me more drive than anything before it. I set about learning charisma and humour, and I competed with him. If one person changed my life in school, it was Tushar, and that is why.

The joke notebook

From thirteen, I took comedy seriously in a way that probably looked strange from the outside. I studied comedy videos and wrote the jokes down in a notebook, with a dot wherever the laugh came.

Over time I built my own definition. A joke is an anticlimax. You set the listener up, then pivot, and the pivot needs surprise at the reveal. But the surprise has to sit inside the listener's reference pool, the things they already know. I picture a diving board over a bucket. Land too close and the joke is predictable, the kind we'd call "pakao". Land too far and it's a "bouncer" that goes straight over their head.

Years later I found books with similar ideas. That felt good, but it wasn't where the understanding came from. Primary data, the stuff you find out yourself by doing the work, goes into your blood in a way that reading never does.

Emotion drives, calm decides

School taught me one more thing about myself. My drive has always come from emotion: a crush, a rejection, a rival. My decisions have always gone better without it.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studied patients with damage to the part of the brain where emotion and reason meet. They could reason perfectly well, and still could not decide. Without feeling, nothing moves. But the feeling that gets you moving is a poor judge of where to go. I go deeper on this in Emotion is the Driver: choose cold, execute hot.

I also had a habit I'd call waiting for double XP week: holding off until conditions were right, the way a gamer waits for the week that doubles their points. It set me back. It also taught me something true underneath the excuse: conditions matter.

Fifteen, and a party to impress a girl

My career started at fifteen, by accident, in the pursuit of impressing a girl. A different one, by then.

I figured that if I threw a party, I would be the rare guy who made things happen, and the attention would come to me. So I haggled my way into a party hall next to my school, with water, a DJ and AC, for about ₹10,000 on a Monday evening. It was close to farewell, so I priced tickets at ₹200 to ₹250. I borrowed about ₹10,000, mostly from friends, a little of my own and a little of my dad's, and paid the hall an advance. I wasn't even thinking about profit. I just wanted to break even and return everyone's money.

I did not sleep the night before. It was the first real stress of my life, the unease I now know every entrepreneur lives with. I was certain it was all going to collapse, and fairly sure a beating from home would follow.

It didn't collapse. We sold out, close to ₹18,000. After I paid the balance on the hall, about ₹8,000 was left. I spent ₹2,000 on a treat for the friends who'd helped and took ₹6,000 home. My mother's first thought was that I had stolen it, and that if I had, I should go and return it.

That was the first time I felt risk and reward in my own hands, and a few things clicked that I still lean on.

Fail young. At fifteen the downside is cheap, and every risk you survive makes failure feel a little more familiar.

Learning is a change in perspective. In physics we were taught light as a ray, then a wave, then an electromagnetic wave, then a photon. The light never changed. The way of seeing it did. That party changed how I saw the hall next to my school, and that is all learning really is.

The opportunity was always there. The hall, the farewell crowd, the ticket money: all of it existed before I looked.

No one is actually dumb. Everyone just lacks the perspective. School teaches you profit and loss as theory, but it never teaches you to be enterprising. The whole system is quietly priming you to be a cog in someone else's machine, not to build your own. And I'd noticed that almost everyone in our textbooks got there by going against the grain. When most people think A, there is usually a hidden option B.

So at fifteen I had what I now call my Copernicus moment, a decision I couldn't have put into words then: I would take agency, think from first principles, and act on conviction, even when it meant going against convention.

I try to hold that with grace for the herd, though. One of my grandfathers lived in a chawl. On my other grandfather's side, siblings died of malnutrition. My parents didn't go against the system. They beat it at its own game, and their win is the floor I got to stand on while I rebelled.

11th and 12th: science, and more parties

Science was not my choice. My mother has an M.Tech and a PhD from an IIT, and my father is a chemical engineer at BPCL. Science was simply what you did. I hated it, and I finished 12th with about 70%.

The exception was computer science: 198 out of 200 in 11th, and about 185 in 12th. I loved it because it kept showing me how humans work. RAM, storage, a CPU: the parallels with the brain were everywhere. The one that stuck hardest is that a single-core CPU does one task at a time. What looks like multitasking is just switching. Multitasking is a myth, so I work in bursts.

Meanwhile the parties kept going, ₹5,000 to ₹6,000 here and there, and each one taught me something about selling. Freshers are nervous and hard to sell to. Farewells are emotional, and that changes everything about the sale. I learned to sell, and I learned to delegate.

I also came close to getting into MLM schemes in those years. Thinking from first principles is what got me out.

And a rule came out of that stretch that I still use: when my perspective stops changing, I change my environment.

Rebelling into the "worst degree possible"

My parents wanted engineering and a safe job. I rebelled, hard, and chose BMM (mass media), which everyone treated as the worst possible degree. Going from a 600-page science textbook to a 60-page semester was a breeze, and I knew it left me basically unemployable. But it left me something more valuable: time. Time to say yes to everything else.

Saying yes to everything

For the next few years I just said yes. To anything.

I'd always wanted to do stand-up, Kenny Sebastian fascinated me, so when a college festival ran a comedy challenge (dub, live, over whatever played on screen), I entered. The joke notebook finally had somewhere to go. I came third. That third prize snowballed into more events and festivals, and within a couple of months the college scene felt too small. So I did open mics in Mumbai, got noticed, met producers, and ended up co-producing shows with a venue partner and a curator, around ₹2 to 3 lakh a month in revenue. I didn't pocket much, but it gave me a confidence I'd need much later.

None of it looked like a plan. It was exposure. And exposure is the thing that compounds when you have nothing else.

The guitar class that became a venue

Then my brother found a guitar class, and I fell in love with the concept: ₹3,000 a month for unlimited sessions, free coffee, free wifi, a members' library. So much value stacked into one membership that I became its evangelist, and then its head of marketing. It was called Adagio.

I helped scale it from a small branch in Chembur to a second in Bandra, pretending we were a startup when we were really a tough little service business. And tough businesses make you creative. I worked out that Bandra was worth more as a venue than as a guitar class, so we ran comedy nights, pulled in traffic and press, built funnels, even a "black card" membership with perks across partner venues. We got it humming, up to about ₹18 lakh a month. I ran a team of ten, some of them with master's degrees, reporting to a kid who hadn't finished his undergrad.

What I was actually earning

The venue numbers were the business's, not mine. At eighteen I was earning very little: a party here and there, ₹5,000 to ₹6,000 at a time.

In December of my first year of BMM I got a sales internship at ₹3,000 a month. The same year, I invested ₹6 lakh of my dad's money in Adagio. It earned about 30% over the year, I paid my dad the bank's rate of 6 to 7%, and I kept the difference. By my third year I had ₹10 lakh invested, and with every side gig running, Adagio, stand-up, parties, I was making close to ₹60,000 a month.

The money taught me two things. First, how funding actually works: a company can lose money and keep growing, as long as investment keeps coming in. Second, that the hunger for money never gets quenched. Every number I hit just moved the line. What filled that gap, when something finally did, was helping people, and gratitude.

Nineteen, on my own, and the problem framework

When I was nineteen, my parents were transferred to Kochi. I stayed in Mumbai on my own.

Suddenly everything arrived at once: Adagio, a team of ten, college, laundry, groceries, payroll, branding calls, family fights, money on the line. Too many unknowns, all day, every day. Somewhere in that mess I noticed I wasn't facing one big problem. I was facing problems as a category, and every one of them had the same thing inside it: something I didn't yet know.

That is where the Problem Framework came from. A problem is not a thing. It is an unknown, and your position relative to it. Your frontier of the unknown is your horizon of problems. Picture a live bomb in a packed stadium. For the person in row twelve it is a problem. For the person watching from a hill three kilometres away it is only news. Same bomb. What differs is each person's distance from the unknown.

There are two ways to make an unknown known. Secondary data is asking people who already know, and it frees you. Primary data is finding out yourself, and it becomes your asset. And because problems bring emotion, and emotion is drive, the trick is to let the problem fuel you while you strategise calm.

COVID, and Kochi humbled me

Here is the lucky part first. My dad has an instinct: he won't keep money in a business he can't physically reach, and by then he was living in Kochi. About a month before the lockdown was announced, he pulled the investment out of Adagio. A few weeks later and it would have been gone, because when COVID hit, Adagio, like most venues, turned to dust and the investors got wrecked. We got out on pure timing.

My income didn't get out. It went from close to ₹60,000 a month to about ₹10,000.

Lockdown left me stranded in Mumbai. Just as college ended, on a quick impulse, I went to Kochi to join my parents. I stayed seven months.

Kochi humbled me. It taught me that where you are matters more than I had ever admitted: the environment, the connections, the opportunities, the mindset of the people around you. I was an outsider there, and an extrovert in lockdown, and the mental toll was immense. It even got physical: I lost some sensation in my fingers, a palsy of sorts. Maybe I could have handled it better. But I was hurt.

I was desperate enough to work for free at a production house in Kochi, just for the exposure. By December that year I was back in Mumbai.

Those months taught me the first hard lesson: never lose your composure, because that is exactly when you stop seeing where the money is moving. And they taught me a second one about myself. I had been too impulsive, and I had none of the leverage. I hadn't met my business partner yet.

Ad films, 18-hour days, and 40 kilos

Back in Mumbai, nobody was hiring, and I took a job in ad-film production at ₹10,000 a month. It broke my confidence and it was brutal: 18-hour days, seven days a week, sometimes 56 hours straight. I went from 70 kilos to 110. I do not recommend any of it.

But I learned how a production house works, end to end: ideation, pitching agencies, winning the project, pre-production, production, post, servicing, and not for small clients. I worked on Microsoft and Cadbury campaigns, saw what world-class brands demand at the ground level, and built a stack of vendor and freelancer relationships and specific know-how. By month six or seven I hit my ₹40,000 a month target, and the moment I did, I quit.

A referral, and then a partner

Two people changed the trajectory, and the order matters.

Just before COVID, planning my exit from Adagio, I started taking graphic-design internships, because I just wanted the skill. One of the people who gave me those gigs later referred me to the person who would become my business partner.

I met him after Kochi, still in lockdown, on a Google Meet, never in person first. He was a year younger than me, and he was teaching people how to make money and how to do graphic design, by learning it himself and immediately teaching it. "When one teaches, two learn," he'd say, and it stuck with me for good. He wasn't scaling it or making it a real business; the kid in him got in the way of the cold decisions. But he was pulling in about ₹1 lakh a month while I was doing ₹20,000 to ₹30,000. Watching someone younger and less experienced out-earn me, and then offer to build something with me, broke something loose in my head. He walked me through invoicing, client communication, how to break a project down, and he had this habit of taking on work he'd never done before, which is exactly what turned both of us into real problem solvers.

We fit because we brought different things. He had a network he'd been building since he was seventeen or eighteen, goodwill everywhere he went, and a real eye for creative direction. I brought systems thinking from scaling Adagio, a commerce sense, and ad-film production. Around the time I was turning 22, we started working together, and that December we formalised the company.

The NFT run

We'd found something very specific and very lucrative: building NFT projects for wealthy clients during the boom. In our first month working together, we did about ₹20 lakh in revenue. That is the one number from that run I'll put in writing.

It worked because I was prepared for it without knowing it. Computer science from school, the know-how and contacts from the ad industry, and my partner's network all met in the same place at the same time. Opportunity favours the prepared.

It also taught me a lesson I still lean on: solving rich people's problems pays disproportionately well.

Aditya John, and the first surgeon

Aditya John was a mentor-like figure to me, someone who gave me genuinely good advice, and after I told him about the NFT run he became a great friend. It was a real exchange of value. He found value in what I knew about crypto, and I found it in his advice.

Somewhere in that exchange, I got my first surgeon client. I had no idea then that this one client would become the base of my business, and eventually of my whole client portfolio. You never know what happens, and how things happen.

The years nobody puts on the highlight reel

Here is the part that never makes it into anyone's origin story, and it is the part that matters most. After the boom, it got hard, and it stayed hard for a long time.

My partner and I kept the company alive, but barely. Some months we broke even, most months we scraped. Rent was a genuine question every single month, and somehow we always figured it out, usually by taking on some random piece of work we had no business taking. Nobody had taught us how to run a business. We were reverse-engineering the whole thing from scratch: how to invoice, how to price, how to find the next client, what a pipeline even was. Lead generation wasn't a strategy we had. It was a phrase we hadn't learned yet.

We became a do-everything agency and consultancy because we couldn't afford to say no. Some of the work ran through real rooms and real brands: Ogilvy, Publicis, Grey, a WPP agency. Some of it was a quiet trap. An events project where we somehow ended up losing money instead of making it. A website build for a company abroad where three of us spent an entire year to earn about a lakh and go two lakh underwater once you counted the time. Not every rupee of revenue is good revenue. Some of it is just an expensive way to stay busy.

What my partner taught me

I have to talk about him, because I wouldn't be here without him, and because the ways we are different are half the lesson.

He is one of the smartest people I have ever met, a genuine intellectual. He is also a giver in a way I have never quite managed. He hands out value and favours for free, constantly, expecting nothing back, and it has built him a network most people would kill for and a mountain of goodwill. He almost never does anything purely for the money. That is his gift, and for the business it was also his limit: too brilliant to stay focused, a little too eccentric, a little too everywhere at once, precisely because of how much was going on in his head. I am probably his single biggest fan, and I learned an enormous amount from him.

He changed my life after COVID, and he still does, every day. He is the person I exchange the most value with, and I believe he'd say the same about me. When I was almost homeless, he gave me a house to live in.

The line of his that stuck hardest, at an age when neither of us had any right to know it: money never solves problems, it only upgrades them. He said it almost in passing. It became a whole chapter of this codex years later. That is the kind of mind he has.

What I took from him goes beyond any one line. Partnership is leverage, and your network really is your net worth. He changed my environment, which, by my own rule, is how my perspective kept changing. And he showed me a famous line in reverse. "With great power comes great responsibility" is true, but it runs the other way too: choose responsibility for a big problem, and the power follows.

But being brilliant and generous is not the same as being paid, and eventually I got tired of struggling slowly. So we went separate ways in business, as friends, each to chase our own shape of the thing. Only the business split. The friendship continues.

More than a hundred meetings

On my own, I did the only thing I knew how to do. I got in rooms. A lot of rooms.

I did more than a hundred meetings. I had no car, so every meeting was an Uber there and back and a meal I paid for, two to three thousand rupees a time. That is well north of two lakh rupees spent sitting across tables from people, out of money I did not really have.

And here is what I did in every one of them, which felt generous and was actually the mistake. I would meet someone, learn about them, ask about them, look for a real way to help, hand over a genuine insight or some value, and then close with: let me know if there is anyone you think we could help, we are a creative team, we can handle more or less anything. Anything. That last word is why almost none of them ever sent a reference. I had given them nothing specific to remember me for. A creative team that does everything is a creative team you cannot introduce to anyone in particular.

I joined BNI, another lakh and a half to two lakh a year, and it did keep me afloat. I picked up a handful of clients at ₹30,000 to ₹35,000 each, about five of them, scraping together maybe ₹1.5 lakh a month for roughly three months. Then all of them left, back to back.

I have thought hard about why, because it was the most useful failure I have had. I hadn't given any one of them focused, high-intent work. I hadn't charged enough to set a serious expectation. I hadn't set the right expectations in the first place. The cost economics were sloppy. I was selling generic social-media and personal-branding work on a thesis, that personal brands are the future and not companies, which I still believe is true, just not for everyone and not for every kind of client. I was right in general and wrong in the specific, which is its own kind of wrong.

The client who was quietly paying my rent

Through all of it, there was one exception: the surgeon who came out of my friendship with Aditya, paying us around ₹1.1 lakh a month without much drama. Once you took out the team and the real cost of running the whole thing, the hiring, the managing, the process, what was left for me was modest, closer to a steady salary than a windfall, essentially a work fee for building and running the machine. But he was the smoothest, lowest-drama client we had ever had. He gave me the room to do the work and the time to actually produce results, and we reached a point I did not fully appreciate until later: he was, in effect, paying me to stay out of his hair.

If you have ever done creative work, you know that is the dream and the rarest thing in it. Most clients pay you and then eat your time, your calls, your evenings, your sanity. This one paid us to deliver an outcome and then leave him alone. He was the cornerstone I didn't yet know I was standing on, and the lesson underneath him took me years to really hear: a smooth, steady, modest-margin client you can build a real process around is often worth more than a flashy one that drains you, because calm and predictable income is exactly what buys you the clarity to find your next move.

How I found the niche

Three things landed around the same time and rearranged how I saw everything.

First, a video about a company that mapped out who their single best customer was and what kind of work they most liked doing, cut almost everything else, doubled down on just that, and multiplied their revenue tenfold. Cut, focus, multiply.

Second, a guy online I only half remember, who ran a course called something like Smart Internet Money, built entirely around teaching architecture students one very specific thing. Small niche. Not many videos. Not much engagement. High ticket, and genuinely good money, precisely because it was so specific.

Third, Alex Hormozi, talking about how little time he actually spends making content, and sharing the machinery underneath it.

I put the pieces on the table and looked at the one client who was already paying my rent. Surgeons do not have time. Surgeons need to be discovered, because discovery is patient access, and patient access is their whole livelihood. What if a surgeon was a high-ticket client, precisely because they earn so much per single conversion? What if I helped them build awareness and a personal brand? I was already getting my one surgeon a few extra surgeries a month. My entire retainer cost him roughly what a single surgery earned him. So the only real question was: can I reliably get him twelve surgeries a year, so that the line with my name on it in his ledger is unambiguously positive? The moment I framed it that way, the answer was obvious, and so was the whole business.

Twelve meetings

So I made one decision, the same shape as every good decision I have ever made, and narrowed everything down to a single sentence: I only want to meet surgeons.

The meetings that went nowhere had taught me exactly what not to do. This time it took twelve. Twelve intentional meetings, all with surgeons, each one asking only to be introduced to more surgeons. Two of them became clients.

Then one of those two, my third client, liked the work enough to bring me two more: his hospital's retainers, at a much higher value.

The first surgeon, two from the meetings, two through the referral. Five accounts, ₹10 lakh a month in revenue, a crore a year, within six months.

That gap, more than a hundred meetings for almost nothing against twelve that rebuilt the business, is the whole point. That is what specific effort buys you. Knowing exactly where you are and exactly what you are doing does not shave a little off the work, it collapses it. This was the 80/20 made real: the same person, roughly the same skill, a fraction of the effort, a completely different universe of output.

And once I was focused, I got sharp. I understood what surgeons actually need, the commonalities between them, what they are really paying for. I understood that I was quietly undercutting the general practitioner who takes a 40% cut on every patient he refers, and solving a stack of other problems nobody had bothered to name. To a surgeon, I became close to undeniable.

Why the surgeon, specifically

It is worth being precise about why this one identity works so well, because the logic is what transfers to you.

A surgeon has plenty of money to pay me. Their real scarcity is time, and they do not want to spend that time solving this particular problem, which happens to be the exact problem I solve. As long as I get them what they want, they won't take me for granted or chew my head off. They usually have no reference point for what this should cost, which makes them far easier to price to. They are not shrewd operators running procurement games. There is one decision-maker, not a committee of four or five. And nobody else was solving their exact problem.

So I built the offer around their scarcity. The retainer cost about what one surgery earned them, so the only question was whether I could bring them twelve more surgeries a year. It asked for about fifteen hours of their time every two months. And it was a defined one-year commitment, not an open-ended someday.

None of that is because social media is some breakthrough product. It isn't. All I did was take a general offering, aim it at one very specific audience, and optimise the entire thing for exactly them. That is a blue ocean built on purpose, and the same move is available in almost every industry, which is why the opportunity is effectively endless. Teaching anyone to make that move, deliberately, is a large part of why Lazzzy Hustler exists.

Where I am right now (the honest part)

By this point I had changed my life completely, from zero to real money, enough times to notice it always takes about six months to a year. And this was not a lucky streak. I have been working since I was fifteen, I am twenty-seven now, and in those twelve years I have moved across a dozen industries: events, sales, marketing, video production, Web3, even product work. I have taken a business past a crore three times: once as the owner, with the surgeon business at a crore a year, and twice as the key operator inside someone else's company, without a stake in it. The through-line was never one hot market. It was the same repeatable structure, run again and again. I am certain I will do it again, and that, honestly, is the whole reason I think I am worth listening to: I have run this cycle enough times to see what is actually common across every turn.

Which brings me to now. As of mid-2026, I have just lost about 75% of my revenue. I am not going to hide that. If anything, it is the point. I am not selling you a course. I am documenting what works and what doesn't, in real time, including on myself.

Here is exactly what went wrong, because it is the most useful part. I hit my crore-a-year goal and I stopped. Stopped building deal flow, stopped selling, stopped the funnels. You are always either growing or decaying, there is no flat, and I chose to coast at exactly the moment I should have kept pushing. Life happened too, I got married, the personal front got busy. But the mistake was mine: you never stop creating deal flow, not after the niche, not after the hunger is gone.

And there was a sharper lesson hiding underneath it. In 2026 my third client left, and his hospital's retainers left with him. Three of my five accounts had come in through one door, and they went out through it together: about 75% of my revenue. The results were great. It didn't matter, because the hospital was never really my ideal customer. My model works for a clinic-owner surgeon who is glad to trade money for time and just wants one clean brand touchpoint to call their own. It does not work for a hospital, and now I understand exactly why. A hospital is usually in growth mode, constantly raising funding, watching every cost so its books look clean to investors, with generating revenue as the whole game. It is structurally driven to pull work like mine in-house and squeeze the price, no matter how good the results are. Same service, opposite fit. Good results weren't enough. I had been earning good revenue that quietly gave me false security. So now I know my real qualifier: high-earning individuals who trade money for time and have no reason to ever replace me, not organisations built to eventually do it themselves.

What I measure now

I don't measure myself by revenue anymore. I measure the time I spend against the money I earn, and how much control I have over my time. The goal is wealth without trading time for it.

My mission runs through three things: surgeons, because helping them get discovered is patient access; Lazzzy Hustler; and the people I have counselled into entrepreneurship.

The idea I keep coming back to is from Adam Grant's Give and Take: givers end up at both the bottom and the top, and the ones who reach the top give strategically. My hundred-plus meetings were generous with no strategy behind them. Everything that has worked since came from giving with a point to it.

Done is better than perfect

If you take one thing from all of this, take this: done is better than perfect. Consuming content feels like progress. Reading this probably feels like progress. But the edge only comes from primary data, the stuff you find out yourself, and primary data needs work.

That is the story. Every framework in this codex is something I paid for in one of these chapters, and I am still paying, still in the middle of the next climb. I will keep documenting it as it happens.