My 42 years of life in 4 chapters - My Tedx Talk

Foreign I'm Avi Arya. Father of two girls, six dogs, husband to a superwoman, a streetcar racer turned hotelier, then travel agent, then social media marketer and now founder of Internet Moguls. And this is my story, ladies and gentlemen. The few minutes that I have with you now, I'll share four chapters of my story. Chapter one. When it begins, it all looks very ordinary. But it's not for me. It all began on the 29th of October. 29th October that just went by. I turned 42. But the story that I'm going to tell you now is when I was 19 years old. 19. Born and brought up in Delhi. All I wanted to do in life was to race streetcars. I used to race streetcars and organize races and make some money doing that. And I was very happy. And I knew that this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But guess what? My dad didn't think so. So one day I remember he called me to his office. I remember walking in as if it was yesterday. There was a reddish carpet, somewhat like this on a wooden floor. And I walked in and there was a smell of incense. Agarbatti. And these two landline phones were off the hook. My dad's phones were never off the hook. I knew there was a serious conversation coming. My dad sat me down and he said, son, I have two options for you. A, join my business from tomorrow morning. B, get out of the house. Now this came like a bolt of lightning to me. Nobody spoken to me like that. I was hurt. I walked out of the room. Guess what? Mom was waiting outside. I had a nice conversation with her and I think better sense prevailed. And the very next morning I found myself behind my dad's hotel reception. Now this was a small 40 room hotel and I learned restaurant. I learned how to take care of the housekeeping department. But I also learned that my dad is doing an excellent job of running the hotel. So that meant that I would always have to work under somebody's shadow. And how would I find my place under the sun? Now, while I'm thinking of this in my head, one day this foreign tourist walks into our hotel and he pays us in Dutch guilders and we convert the money into Indian rupees. It turned out to be multiple Indian rupees. And I'm thinking to myself, what if I'm able to convert all 40 rooms with foreign gas? I'm able to get extra revenue, extra family income. And the most important thing is that I'll become a star back in my dad's eyes. So with that force, I started thinking, but how do you get foreigners and how do you reach international customers? I knew of this new phenomena that people were talking about called the Internet, but it was still nascent in India. I told my dad that I've come across some paper magazines and they're talking about companies overseas. I want to go meet them. My dad was like, you want to go meet travel agents? I think it's a good idea. I said, no, they're not travel agents. They're saying they're technology companies. He's saying, I think they're travel agents, but go ahead. So then I got my first business suit and I left for my first business trip with two suitcases full of brochures. I met these people and they said, they introduced me to the Internet and what it could do for me. And they said, we will list you on our website. I didn't understand that, but since I was abroad, I went to some cyber cafes. And then everything changed for me because at these cafes I realized that I could be in touch with anybody. And whatever message I had, whatever service I had, I could reach out to anybody in this world. That just changed the way I thought about life. I'm charged, I'm excited, I'm young. I come back to India and I'm like, dad, we're going to make a lot of money. He said, did you get some business? I said, no. They asked me to send some forms. He said, did you get some letter of intent? I said, no, it's going to happen. I don't know what my dad was thinking at that time, but he didn't take me very seriously. Few months passed. Nothing happened. And then we got some queries started coming in. I went, there was an ad in the paper which said, satyam Computers looking for cyber cafe partners. And I applied for them. And very soon we had a cyber cafe in our hotel. And that was free Internet access for me 24 7. We, we spend money for a foreign trip, spend money on the cyber cafe. But I knew that I was getting closer to my dream. We had access to everybody. Now I'm getting on these forums, I'm talking on these blogs, I'm on Yahoo. I'm talking to these people and they're saying, do you have a website? Now during those times, ladies and gentlemen, very few companies in Bangalore had websites for their small businesses. I somehow convinced my dad we got a website done. Guess what happened to my business after the website? Precise. Nothing. Nothing moved. Now I'm working harder Going back into my forums, asking people what to do. Somebody said, do some call to action. Have some web forms, toll free numbers for foreigners. I tried everything. It took another six months to a year. And then what happened? Things started clicking. With all this hard work, I started getting some queries. 5 queries, 10 queries, 15 queries. I started answering these queries and these people started landing at my hotel from different parts of the world. This power of the Internet changed my life. I said, I can do something here. The message, we go to people in different parts of the world and they come here and make money for me. I'm getting more excited now. So we started doing more of this thing called Internet marketing. And then the business started booming. We had so much business coming in that we started leasing other hotels to fill them up with the customers that we had. After a few years, we bought another hotel. And then we bought another one. Ladies and gentlemen, my dad took 40 years to build his first hotel. After we discovered the Internet, in the next four years, we built four more hotels. Now this changed everything for us because not only did our family ecosystem change, but I was now having strategy discussions with somebody who wanted to throw me out of the house. A few years ago, everything had changed. Great stuff was happening. Now we have four hotels full of foreigners and all of them are asking me the same question, how do I go to Agra, how do I go to Jaipur, Kerala, Kesejana and all of that. Just to become more efficient. I bought a few websites, started putting information there. Those people started sending queries and saying, we want to book with you. My mom joined my business and we started a travel company because we had captive audience full of four hotels. So that started another travel company, the second business out of the Internet. Then a lot of people started asking, how do we travel into India by air? Then I, you know, like most of you must have done, I bought some 200 domain names. Guess what? All of them bombed except one. One website did so well that we had so much traffic coming on it and I was very proud of that traffic. One day I got a call from some of these large affiliate companies and said, we love the traffic on your website. We'd love to divert it on our website and whenever we convert a ticket, we'll pay you 6 to 800 rupees for the conversion of a ticket. Now I didn't understand what this affiliate marketing meant and I didn't want to sound foolish, so I said, send me an email, I'll get back to you. I went through the email and I said, I've got nothing to lose, let's divert the traffic. I diverted the traffic. We started booking 30 to 60 tickets a day on an average, ladies and gentlemen, this meant I was making 30 to 60,000 rupees every single day. 15 years ago doing Internet marketing, this was the third business that came off after discovering the Internet. So things were going great. And then I realized that I need to talk about this a little more. Many large international companies came to India and said, why don't you come and speak on forums and tell the whole world about your success and how you did this for your father's business. Great publicity, right? And as a youngster you love it even more. So I went on to those stages and I'm talking to people. People started coming up to me and saying, hey, can you do this for us? And I'm thinking, why not? This might be another option by then. Did I tell you by then my Internet website crashed badly. I didn't know. I was a youngster. I thought everything is going to last forever. But it didn't happen. One business went down. But then by that time we got offers for consulting other clients. So riding high on confidence, the only name I could think of was Internet Moguls. Hired a team of four people and started a company called Internet Moguls. So lesson learned. First chapter. Sometimes seemingly small opportunities that are placed in your path can become huge life turning events. Chapter two the struggle of doing what I loved versus what people said I should do. Now I have three companies which are doing really well. But I'm thinking, what should I do? How should I take it to the next level? All of you know, you know, we all go to VCs, investors, you know, people who are making a lot of money and you know, have more experience. I went to them and I said, what should I do? What should be my next step? They all told me one thing. They said, if you stick to one path, you will perish. Diversify. Because you're working in one hospitality travel industry and you might perish. That's the first time, that's the first time in my life that the voice in my heart was much louder than the voice in my head. Because the voice in my head was fed by other people. Guess what I did? I respectfully declined to take any advice from all these people who'd given me their time. I went back to the office and me and my team sat down and put our head down. We started working very hard on just one industry to become number one at that. And today, after 10 years with a team of 200 plus people and one of the most specialized digital marketing agencies in the subcontinent. Lesson learned. If you're sure of what you love and you are good at it, then let nobody shake your confidence about your own specialty. Chapter three. Now in this chapter of my life, I'm thinking I'm getting redundant. Things have been going for a long time. Competition is coming in. You know, I'm not the first mover anymore. What should I do? I didn't invest any money in watches or fancy cars or whatever. I put in every saving that I had into traveling to conferences and meeting people who would give me their time. I met influential people like them. I'm sure you know many of them. I met all of them across the world, took many, many trips. And the one thing that I realized which was common and the message that I got from all of them was that if you have a message in your heart that can change the world, if you have a product that can go into somebody's life and make an impact, if your service offering can change other people's families and lives, then you are doing a disservice to yourself, your family, your loved ones and the entire world by not sharing it. I took this message really seriously. I started sharing online. Even If I got 20 posts, 20 likes. I started sharing seriously with people all over the world. I made connections with people I never thought was possible. I won deals from all over the world that I never thought was possible because I chose to listen to this advice and I chose to share. Lesson learned. If you believe in your message, product or service, you cannot not use social media and share it with the world. Chapter 4 But what should I share and how much should I share and what will people say? You know Hindi me KE teacher rog kya kahing rog. You know, this one line has killed more campaigns, more endeavors and more dreams than ever before. I didn't want that to happen for me. So what I said was, I said, I will share who I am. I said, I will be vulnerable. I'll share who I am. This is what I looked like when I was growing up. I was overweight and I felt trapped in my own body. It was not comfortable for me to share these kind of photos, but I did. You know what? When you are brave and you have the guts to share who you really are, genuine people start connecting with you. I started sharing what's happening in my office, how we hiring people, how we're growing, what we're doing. I started sharing about my dogs you know, in my family, we run a rescue. At any given time, we have six to eight dogs at home. Some dogs are coming in, some are getting wrapped in bow ties and, you know, their hair is being done and they're given being beautiful homes are being arranged for them. So these are real stories. This is me, this is my family. And I choose to share this on my social media. I've got two girls. This is my proudest slide. Two girls, Raya and Aviana, 13 and 9. Both of them I read bedtime stories to a couple of years back. I was like, when I'm reading bedtime stories to them, it's all about fairy tales and a beautiful world and all of that. I believe in the beautiful world that we live in, but there has to be a reality check. So we started talking about entrepreneurship and to make it interesting, it had to be about them. So Raya and Aviana, we joined their names and made it Raviana. And the passion was around chocolates. So we made a comic book series called Bedtime Stories for tomorrow's entrepreneurs, where Raya and Aviana go to Raviana Chocolates every day. And what happens? What is their everyday story look like? We've sold about 550 copies on Amazon and both my girls live in Canada and they go to schools all over Canada and give talks like this. Motivating young entrepreneurs. This is my story. This is a real story and I chose to share it. Ladies and gentlemen, I dared to share my real stories. I made connections, I got invited to stages all over the world. My business massively grew and I got all the freedom that I ever wanted. Just imagine if you would let go of all fear in your mind and openly share what's in your heart on social media. Imagine the kind of people you'll meet. Imagine the connection that will come out of it. Imagine the stages you'll be invited to. Imagine the kind of. Imagine your book release happening. Imagine your message being shared by millions in this world. Just imagine it and go ahead and do it. My name is Aviarya and this is my story.