Ventures

Origin

Fancall was born in the Covid lockdown of 2020. I was doing what everyone was doing — self-learning from YouTube — and I kept running into the same wall. The knowledge available to anyone with an internet connection was unbelievable, but there was no way to actually ask the person you were learning from a specific question. No way to book thirty minutes with them. No way to have a real conversation.

"As an avid self learner myself, I remember, during the lockdown, feeling awed by the sheer knowledge available on YouTube for anyone who seeks it, but at the same time found it extremely difficult to get my personal queries answered by these YouTube gurus. There was no quick and direct way to connect with them. This, I thought at the time, was a problem I would give anything to solve. Thus, Fancall was born."

I incorporated Fancall Private Limited in July 2020. We launched on the Play Store on July 29, 2021 and on the App Store a few days later. Since then we've grown the platform into the most organized space in India for creators, fans, and brands to actually find and connect with each other.

What I've learned building Fancall

• Bootstrapped scaling in the creator economy is harder and slower than venture-scaled competitors — and more durable. We've watched funded competitors come and go while we've kept compounding.
• The brand side of the marketplace matters as much as the creator side. Most platforms focus on one; solving both is where the real economics live.
• Trust, safety, and creator verification are not features — they are the product.

Where we are now

Fancall is India-only today. Pan-India user base. Revenue growing. Team growing. The thesis — that the creator economy needs organization rather than more content — has held up.

The thesis

The raw-materials supply industry in India is built on long credit cycles — suppliers deliver first and get paid months later. That's the default, and it's a default that eats capital and buries smaller players.

My insight, after working in mining through Sarva Minerals, was that if you were willing to sacrifice some margin for shorter credit cycles — and if you only supplied to buyers with a track record of actually paying on time — you could reduce risk dramatically and dramatically increase the velocity of capital. The money would move faster, so you could do more volume with less working capital, and the lost margin would be made up by the higher turn.

What we did

• Supplied only to reputed buyers with strong payment track records — Ultratech, L&T, Tata, and a few builder groups.
• Accepted slightly lower margins in exchange for payment in days, not months.
• Kept the team lean, the ops tight, and the focus narrow.

What we did during Covid

Instead of cutting costs, we doubled down on paying our employees. It was a call I made because of something I'd learned at Career Gujarat Academy: when things go wrong, how you treat the people in the boat with you is what people remember when the storm ends. It cost us in the short term. Long term, it was right.

Where it is now

Advait Logistics came out of the pandemic and kept growing. I stepped back to full-time on Fancall, and I'm a silent partner now. I still earn from it.

What I took from it

Sarva Minerals was my education in a different kind of business. Career Gujarat Academy was a solo operation — I made the calls, I lived with the outcomes. Sarva was different: multiple stakeholders, legacy ways of doing things, and a real lesson in how hard it is to push new ideas into an industry that has been doing things its way for decades.

It made me a better operator and gave me the capital and the insight that would eventually become Advait Logistics.

Where it is now

Still running. I'm a silent partner.

Origin

I started Career Gujarat Academy with ₹90,000. My parents had saved that money to buy me a new laptop for my birthday. I took the money, got my old laptop repaired for ₹10,000, and put the remaining ₹90,000 into starting a coaching institute.

My parents found out months later and were disappointed — they came from government-employee backgrounds and looked down on business as a career. For the first time in my life I had to make peace with the idea that I was going to do something my family would not approve of, and that I'd have to do it anyway.

I told myself: to be a man of my own, I need to cut myself off from their approval of me.

What I did

• Read 300+ books on business, marketing, entrepreneurship, investing, and self-development across the next three years. More than I'd read for any degree.
• Learned the Indian competitive-exam market from the inside — I'd prepared for these exams myself, so I knew what students actually needed.
• Built the institute from a single small operation into a profitable, growing business.
• Treated the students I taught like the person I'd been two years earlier — because I had been.

Why I wound it down

By 2018 I had learned what I needed to learn. Coaching was not where I wanted to build my life. Sarva Minerals had come along, and Advait Logistics was taking shape in my head. I wound Career Gujarat Academy down cleanly and moved on.

What it actually was

Career Gujarat Academy was the three years where I stopped being someone preparing for a life and became someone building one. Everything I've done since — Sarva, Advait, Fancall — was possible because of what I learned in that first institute, with ₹90,000 and parents who didn't speak to me about it for a long time.