Your Name: Sandhya Valecha
Business Name: Contentorial, a service for marketing, copy writing, and content writing
Type of Business: Writing and Education
Business Location: Mumbai, India
Website www.contentorial.com
Twitter @Contentorial
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/Contentorial
Reason for starting
Three words sum up my answer to this question: ‘Freedom, Passion and Money’. Although I earned well writing for leading organizations in London and was appreciated for my work, I wasn’t quite satisfied professionally. I wanted to have the freedom to pursue my passion and work to advance my dreams, make more money than I was making and still do things I wanted to do. Writing for a variety of genres has always excited me and the diversity of clients in the online world has given me the freedom to write in the niches I want to. Initially I started off working on my own. My 1st writing project was for an Australian client. Soon, he offered me bulk work. As I was working alone I had to decline work. And I felt really bad about declining work. That’s when the idea of starting my company Contentorial evolved. At Contentorial my aim is to provide remarkable content to all the clients across the world.
How do you define success?
Good question! Success is a destination and yet a journey. Once I achieve the destination of a smaller goal, I feel successful but I don’t stop there. I go on to set the next bigger goal and the journey towards a higher destination begins. Accomplishing daily goals makes me feel successful because I’m growing by that much more. To sum up, success is a heady combination of a sense of fulfillment with my daily work, a sense of purpose in life, happiness and contentment of contributing to others’ life, adding value to their life (and making them better).
Biggest Success
When an engineer passionate about writing (he worked with Contentorial on weekends), decided to quit his job with one of the leading IT firms in India and started working with Contentorial full time. I was incredibly happy for him and proud that Contentorial was helping writers fulfill their dream of pursuing a career in writing. My vision is to create more jobs and help more writers. Every new writer joining my team is a big success.
What is your top challenge and how have you addressed it?
The biggest challenge for me was to generate capital for my start up. Business and finance were like foreign languages to me. It simply wasn’t in my DNA to discern which doors to knock to raise capital. However I was pretty clear I wanted to do things my way. Soon I dropped the idea of getting investors. I started with whatever I’d saved from my job (and continued to save more from writing online). Renting an office back then didn’t seem feasible. But I needed a team to work with me and manage the existing work so that I could get more clients and expand work. This is when I developed an online team structure and online work management system. My new system allowed my writers to work from home. My writers saved their time and money they would otherwise spend getting to a physical office. And I saved on the office set up and management costs. It was a win-win for everyone.
Who is your most important role model?
Not out and out a role model. I didn’t have entrepreneurs in my family. So everything I did was based on my judgment. I succeeded at some attempts & failed miserably at others and I cherish all my failures. But someone who inspired me the most to work online & start Contentorial is Vince Delmonte. Though Vince is from a totally different niche, I was absolutely blown away by what he had achieved as an online entrepreneur & how he had turned his passion into business and found money and fame.