How I became an Entrepreneur by writing a Medium Blog

I know that the title might sound a bit weird, but that is what actually happened. In May 2020, I had written a tech blog on the topic Angular Google Maps on Medium. You might think that the article received a lot of claps and became super damn popular. Nope, that is not how it turned out.

Well, I received a few claps and responses. Not too bad for a beginner, I would say. The responses I got were mostly enhancement requests to the feature I had explained in the article. I tried to address some of them and updated my Git repo accordingly.

Around the same time, I was looking for freelancing jobs, mostly on platforms like Guru and Upwork. If you have tried freelancing before, you will know this fact for sure.

It is too damn hard for a person to get the first freelancing project and become a recognized freelancer on a given platform.

I even spent money on Guru to have my ID verification done and yet, none of my quotes got accepted.

My friend (who is my Co-Founder at present), hearing all of this, came back to me with a brilliant question.

Why can’t you convert the responses that you got on your article into paid consultations?

Thus, Hire the Author was born.

There are a few good reasons why we decided to pursue Hire the Author.

• Being a software engineer, I cannot imagine a world without blogs and most importantly, Stack Overflow answers. Most developers would have to agree with me when I say that a good amount of code we write are referred from sources like Stack Overflow and Medium. In my personal experience, I have spent hours, sometimes days, trying to follow an article/answer but failing to make it work within my application. Imagine how easy things will become if you can have a 1:1 session with the author of the blog or the person who has written the Stack Overflow answer, at that moment? It is super cool, indeed.
• The reason why it is super hard for a beginner in a freelancing marketplace to get the first project is because of the lack of good reviews. Yeah, it is a solid chicken-egg problem. But for a content creator, the story is different. Reviews aren’t required in this case. The content vetts its creator.

Hire the Author connects the above two groups of people and solves their problems in the coolest way possible!

A viewer stuck with any query regarding the content can have a session with the author with the click of a single link. For an author, in order to get paid consultations, all he/she has to do is to keep on publishing quality content.

How it all works

I do not want to do a lot of marketing here. But let me give you a gist of how we make it work.

• An author who signs up on our platform has the option to choose a unique username. We then generate a link in the following format: hiretheauthor.com/<username>. For eg, mine is hiretheauthor.com/maria.
• The author has an option to configure the hourly rate and the chat subscription service. The author can also add his/her free slots within the inbuilt calendar so that the viewers are well-aware of when they can hire the author.
• Once the profile is set up and looks cool enough, the author can share the profile link in his/her blog posts/ YouTube videos/ social media bio, etc. and the clients will be able to hire the author with a single click. As easy as it sounds!

We had an MVP ready in 2 months. We also applied to Y-Combinator during that time but failed to get in. Since we wanted to be a global platform and accept payments in dollars, we set out to register a US company using Stripe’s Atlas program. But just like anyone else in the world, COVID hit us too. Not literally, but our company registration got delayed due to a delay in IRS (which was due to COVID :D). It took a while for us to get our EIN (since we were Indian Founders) and we had to wait till March 2021 for our launch.

Looking back, we could have started off with an Indian company so that we could launch soon and get user validation. But yeah, we were first-time founders. Mistakes were expected.

I am a BTech Computer Science grad from NIT Calicut. I got into Oracle as an Application Engineer, right after college. The next hurdle I faced was convincing my parents to leave my full-time job to be an entrepreneur. I thought it would create a lot of drama in my house and the worst part was that I was working from home — which means a face-to-face conversation was needed. I finally took all of my courage to pitch our idea to them. I did it so poorly that my Mom ended up asking me, why I was almost crying.

But, the verdict was in my favor. I was extremely happy and touched by their belief in me. My faith in this venture was reaffirmed with such strong support pillars backing me up. I finally joined full-time in Hire the Author in March 2021.

Right now, I am doing the tough job of reaching out to skilled authors and getting them on board. If you know of a skilled author or are dying to get help from one, you can recommend the author to our platform here.

Startup journey is always challenging and beautiful at the same time. I am learning a lot, doing things I never used to do before. For every negative feedback you get, you have an action item for the next day, and believe me, there is no greater pleasure than knowing what you have built makes someone else’s life easier.

When people ask me what took for me to have the guts to be an entrepreneur, my answer is this.

Willpower — to learn and to help.

Let me know if you like my story. Also, put down your comments on Hire the Author.

P.S. I can also help you out with any query regarding Angular & Serverless. Hire me, with Hire the Author. :D