Yesterday, we had an internship meet where HOD’s of the college were invited. The purpose was to speak about  XtremeHeights and introduce our internship Programme to them. We thank everybody who made it to the party and also to those who could not make up.

For those who missed the event let me introduce Interns 2.0 program - Interns 2.0 is a program launched by Xtremeheights, India and Appointy, Inc USA with a view to meet their manpower requirements. Every year XtremeHeights trained 15 people and absorbed about 30% of the trainees after completion of the program. Now  we are expanding and in order to meet our future requirements, we have started training on a large scale in the form of Interns 2.0. The idea is to create true professionals and also meet our future manpower requirements. So Interns2.0 is going to be a win-win situation for everyone.

Party started at 7:30 PM with the introduction. The idea behind Intern2.0 was encouraged and appreciated very much. We extended the introduction from Interns 2.0 to Xtremeheights and Appointy as everyone got more and more excited about our ventures and journey. We are glad that our efforts were being liked by our guests and would like to thank them for their support.

Our special thanks to Mrs Roopali Soni M’am, Varsha M’am, Bhoge Sir and Sanjay Sir who took keen interest in our ventures.

Then came the special moment when we got to meet the chance to our college time teachers who are now HODs of some of the colleges. Mrs. Roopali Soni M’am showed special interest in concept discussion of Interns 2.0 and actively participated in it. She was very much excited about the whole event. All the Ladies and Gentlemen were patient enough to give few hours to our plans, from their busy schedules. It gave us immense pleasure in sharing the knowledge regarding our internship program with them as they were genuinely interested in knowing how we can benefit their students. They were seriously concerned for the betterment of the career of their students and felt the responsibility.

In the last I would like to say that the vision of interns 2.0 is very different from the commercial companies into the market. We aim to grow big while making everyone grow big with us. There is lot of talent lying here in our city. We just need to give them the direction and they can really create the difference. Even during recession market is never down for the talent. Let’s find and nourish that talent so that there can never be any recession. Let’s make Bhopal a better place to work, live & compete. Let’s prove it to the world that we are here to take challenges and make success stories.

I thought to write a short story as many people are interested in us. I would be glad if I am able to motivate atleast one person who can create opportunities for others.

December 2004, I just wanted to do something different and that’s why XtremeHeights was born. Initially, with 1 PC gifted by my father, I struggled for many days and our bad debt ratio was 90%. It was hard to survive in such conditions as people were not serious about investment into software. Clients who were interested initially did not bother to implement the software and many times did not even pay for our hard work.

I always got support from my family and friends. One of my very close friends even fetched us a good project and client paid it on time and this made my belief stronger to continue as an entrepreneur. Things started moving somewhat but not exactly how I wanted too until one day I saw an advertisement in paper from a company who wanted people to work on projects. I contacted them and to my surprise it was handled by a person of my age. He instantly paid us advance and I was surprised. I asked him about his business. Like every businessman he was a bit hesitant but his talks gave me an idea and I started researching on the concept. He was basically working on Search Engine Optimization techniques. After few days I got a client who was interested in SEO and I did whole research for him and brought his website on first page for a very competitive keyword. The client was happy and asked us to handle his IT area. He asked me to replicate the server scenario in-house which he had rented from a Bangalore based company. He gave me 3 days but I did it in 1 day. Not only I saved my entrepreneurship but also his as the server cost was killing him and he was about to shutdown his business.

He started paying me 6000Rs/month for server maintenance and this is how it all started. I started researching for our client but actually we were working for ourselves. I found my first client Gaby, from USA. She is one of the most beautiful ladies I have come across. She is very soft spoken and true business woman. We both helped each other to climb the ladder of our success.

It was time now to add more team members. I wanted someone who can match my skills. Khushal, came to my mind who worked with me in a project in 2002. I told him the idea and it took me 2 months to convince him to join us. At last he joined and we moved ahead. We got 2 new clients from Germany & UK and within a year we started earning respectable amount.

It was time to increase our team. Gautam, Rajesh, Puneet, Lokesh and many more joined our team. We did lots of projects for our clients. We started providing turnkey solutions to our clients and instead of developing projects we even helped them with their product development and marketing. By working on our client’s product we learned lot of things. After so much of experience we started our own product called “Appointy.com” which is an appointment management system for businesses and a service search engine for users. The idea was simply to link business with internet users by utilizing the power of social networking.

We were not having environment like Silicon Valley and so only thing left was to imitate it as we were in Silicon Valley. I once read somewhere “Fake it until you make it”. I used to read blogs daily and used to motivate team daily during tea time sessions. It was the best part of my life. Even I started thinking like that we are next Google. I don’t know if I was too much ambitious but I just know that it helped me and my team to stay together and execute a million dollar concept.

We even managed to get the Angel funding for the project. After launch, Appointy was covered in nearly every web2.0 blog including mashable which included appointy in 270+ best business tools of 2008. On the first day of launch we got 2000 unique visitors which was an achievement for us.

In parallel, we were developing social applications for facebook, Orkut, myspace, hi5 etc. Our first 2 applications were “Chess 2.0 league” and “Its my life” which has more than 1 lakh users in 2 months. We are learning quickly and trying to grow very fast.

We even got nominated for India’s hottest startup award 2008. Even economic times covered us because we are trying to execute our idea from a non-metro city and till date are successful. (Even in recession too.)

We are still working on our client’s project for monthly expenses and trying to execute our ideas. We are looking for next round of funding for our project “Appointy.com” and our fingers are crossed.

Nemesh