Vineeta Jain of New Delhi, India, knows not everyone has the time to read full newspaper articles, so she decided to start her own speedy news app Shortpedia, providing news summaries in 70 words or less. Three years in and Jain has built her business from the ground up without any outside investors. Today Jain employs over ten people and has an impressive 40,000 Andriod users.
Barnhart’s story, as told to The Story Exchange 1,000+ Stories Project:
I decided to start my business because of the hectic lives people nowadays seem to live. It does not leave them with enough time to read a newspaper or sit in front of a TV set and get updated with the latest news. But with the help of short news, they get the option of browsing through news online and get updated on the news in a short time. Some people may find it boring to read a newspaper as the news articles there are lengthy and require a handful of time to read. Hence, people find accessing the latest news via short news – a quick and more convenient option.
I define success as the accomplishment of an aim that you are setting for yourself in the future. Here at Shortpedia our primary focus is to provide an excellent experience to our users. We also want to save their time so they can get the news in a shorter amount of time. If we are able to satisfy the user’s demands that for me, is success.
“If we are able to satisfy the user’s demands that for me, is success.”
– Veeneta Jain, Founder of Shortpedia
We are not a funded company so we have to spend our funds very wisely. We started this company with three people, myself, Amarjeet and Gurjeet, and in three years we have achieved many milestones that our competitor have. To date we now have more than 40,000 users on android (which we achieved in a very short span of time) and we launched an iOS App too. Some funded start ups in the same field, who started almost two years before we did, have still not been able to launch their apps on the Apple App Store. Our primary key to success is the pace at which we are moving.
Our top challenge has been being a bootstrapped company. I had started the company with no money and very limited funds, doing everything by myself. I had to learn how to do a lot of tasks so that we could save money. Somebody once said, “Where there’s a will there’s a way,” and I really live by this. Our team is so confident with our product and technology that we even had the courage to say ‘No’ to investors last year. We are looking for strategic investors who not only provide us the money but also understand our product and our future plans for our product.
Steve Jobs is my role model. I admire his perfection for everything. He did the things that made him happy and had the courage to say no to things that he felt would not do good or be of interest to him.
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