Everything I do, revealed.

"What does Kalpit Veerwal do now?"

There has not been a proper account of my post college entrepreneurial journey, and this post will intend to do just that.

How it began

The first company that I started was AcadBoost dot com. Most of you are probably already aware of it. It’s an EdTech company that sells online courses, tests, guides for students. This was started right after my JEE in 2017 in an unconscious thought, although it was formally incorporated as “AcadBoost Technologies Private Limited” in 2019 (all my businesses still operate under this corporate entity).

AcadBoost was how I made my first $400-500k or so. Till date this business has done almost a million dollars in revenue, and is still profitable and ongoing. I have removed myself from it, the only thing I do is to appear in some videos and the rest is automated or outsourced.

Reflections

Around 2021, I started to realise that the EdTech market was quite shaky and had received an unnatural boost during lockdown. I was aware that the post covid levels of sales would not nearly be as high as the covid numbers. I needed another business to grow to the next level.

So, I started another business in 2021, where we help international clients start and scale their online business through the learnings of the first business. Most of these customers are from US, Europe and Australia. We sell them consultations, guides, software and other products to help grow their business. Some of these are in house, others are affiliated. I will call this the “consulting business” in future.

Slowly, my focus is to build more in house software to use for our existing businesses as well as sell to these clients. I recently built an internal AI writing tool which we also are exploring as a business vertical. I plan to build another SaaS early this year along these lines.

This business has been growing over 150% every year, and has almost touched the revenue from the EdTech business. I expect this to cross more than two third of the revenue by year end 2024 - which was my target since 2021.

I want to graduate from the EdTech business at some point, although I like the reach and relevance it brings me in a young audience. I might still continue content posting (like this newsletter or my YouTube videos), but it will be more from a relevance standpoint and a side hustle.

Stonks

Much of my focus has shifted to investing lately, I find it quite fascinating that I could simply buy a crypto coin or a stock and it could generate me income or increase in value while I just sit around.

I got a bit lucky and landed over 70% gains on my portfolio in 2023. I explained my investing thesis and portfolio in this LinkedIn post, I will write another post on this newsletter when I update my portfolio. Quite a large part of my wealth is due to my stock and crypto returns.

There are some more income streams like affiliate income, ad revenue from social networks, etc but they are very small and I won’t include them. My dividend income has been pretty large as the portfolio has been growing every year at a massive rate (all the profits are invested in stocks).

Numbers & The Future

I wouldn’t go into much detail about the exact numbers of all the businesses, but nearly $1M in profit (or asset value) has been generated by all these activities. The first few hundred thousand dollars were due to the EdTech business, but most of this number came from the consulting business and investing. Also, only a small percentage of this is in my personal name, the rest is held with my company which is technically not mine. I take a decent salary equivalent to an IIT Bombay CS grad, and that’s about it.

If you were to value my company, it would probably be worth a few million dollars (based on a decent profit multiple), but I don’t like the idea of adding a fake paper valuation to my “net worth” - for now I consider my net worth as just the assets I have. It’s a good idea to deflate your net worth for motivation reasons, sadly most do the opposite.

I aim to grow this business to a billion dollars by 2040, and the next step is to get to $10M by 2030. 10x every 5 years is not an unachievable goal, as investing coupled with rising business income can compound very fast. Let’s see how this goes.

See you next time!

Kalpit Veerwal

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