Often it is said that an MBA, especially from an IIM is meant to provide you with a job with big fat pay packages and hence, one can then settle for the rest of life. But from very few, you will get to know the actual meaning of an MBA, which lies not with those big fat pay cheques; rather it is in the journey of how one becomes a great leader and develops a great personality that generations idolise for centuries. On January 29th 2019 PGP 1 students at IIM Nagpur felt honoured after experiencing the story of an emerging, strong and inspiring personality, Mr Ankit Doshi, the Creator of InsideIIM.com and Kampus Konversations App, the former being the platform where I am writing this instance, and you are reading my words. The name ‘InsideIIM’ is not latent from anyone, but very few people know about the courageous decisions that made this platform ‘InsideIIM.com’, that we now know today.
Ankit started his session by talking about his days on campus at IIM Indore back in 2009-2011. When a PGP candidate of our batch asked him about his association with the much-hyped ‘clubs & committees’ in an IIM, he said that ‘I didn’t do any of these on campus, just because I had done all these during my graduation days.’ Despite not being the part of any clubs and committees, he outshined among his batchmates to grab one of the most sought-after coveted jobs. It’s a stark truth which every MBA aspirant should learn. The limelight, focus and hype clubs and committees bestow upon us the moment we enter an IIM is never the benchmark or a must to do anything. If one has some experience in an extra-curricular or co-curricular activity, then that’s enough. If you are genuinely interested in pursuing any such activity then a B-School will always give you such a platform, but even if you don’t do, that hardly matters. The craze of doing so for CV Points is just an attraction to pull people; it’s never a crucial deciding factor for what you want to do in life or what you want to achieve. So, what’s important is that you should have the clarity of what you aspire for in life, once you are out of an IIM post two years of rigour. So, Ankit somewhere had the idea incepted in his mind of starting something of his own, and he started InsideIIM as a hobby that eventually drove him to leave his job. It took him to another path of opening a media platform to share opinions and ideas.
From his thoughts of starting a venture to a stage after he left his job, he worked for around 14 months and those 14 months gave us the insights of what challenges an entrepreneur faces along with the opportunities and hindrances in making a career in media space of a 21st-century lifestyle. He enlightened us with the fact that being in the age of democratic media, whose gatekeepers have lost their importance, every individual is now a channel of communication. Examples that Ankit mentioned along with the InsideIIM facts exposed us to the success stories of commoners, who understood the power of media and leveraged the platforms for successful marketing campaigns. The likes of Dollar Shave club video were the best example to demonstrate the power of media. Just an online video became the perfect pitch to the investors. If it was not for the availability of Youtube, TVF might not have succeeded. Ankit’s experience was a clear indication that today, the media consumption behaviour has changed. His experience in building InsideIIM showed how the tangible and measurable benefits give more incentives to the content creators and how advertisers can see the best ROI from video ads on social networking sites by the quantum of viewership. The media platform thus acts as a bridge to give the perfect product-market fit and hence, enables a win-win situation for both the content writers and the advertisers.
Ankit talked about his foresightedness that in future, the business rivalry will be on who truly leverages the power which media beholds. Because it doesn’t matter how many guns one owns, knowing how to pull the trigger is something which matters.
