Ninja Of The Week: Shruti Chaturvedi

HER STORY
I’ve previously worked with a couple of media houses and then at an advertising agency. This gave me a fairly good idea of operations in the media industry, however, I found that there was hesitance to give space to inspiring, positive stories, especially in TV where every minute counts. It was then when I decided to use the power of digital to tell these powerful stories of people who inspired me.

Chaaipani started as a personal one-year blogging project, however by the end of one year, we had a strong community of readers with some very powerful impact stories through the platform. I decided to build this as a dedicated media property for progressive journalism. On Chaaipani, we tell positive, impactful stories that are worth your time and that makes the world a better place to be in.

With little knowledge of building a business and a team that was more of believers, we started a year back. Our seed money was supported by 190 people who believed in the idea and execution. All of them got together and pitched in their bit. In less than 10 days, we raised INR 5.18 Lakh. This was one of the proudest moment for me because these 10 days brought me close to people who selflessly trusted in the idea with their money.

I had a certain ease at doing this because of my parents, who ensured that there was nothing holding me back. From the background that they come from, they have given me a lot of freedom and support to do what I want, as long as I can logically justify it. In fact, my father who wasn’t really convinced with my decision to choose to startup over doing an MBA was the first person who agreed to invest in the company and has been a great mentor since then.

We now cater to almost half a million readers, and we are aggressively working towards our first short term goal to build a community of 2 Million subscribers.

ADVICE TO THE READERS

1. Keep learning. You never know enough about something. There are abundant resources beyond excuses.
2. As students, focus on academics and take work experience in diverse fields.
3. Don’t do engineering or any other course for that matter if you only want to crib about being forced to do it after 10 years. That as an excuse is just overdone.