An Engineer by Mistake, An Entrepreneur by Passion
Tushar Bhatia is a serial entrepreneur and a youth marketer who operates in student space and aims to strengthen GigEconomy in India. He is currently working as a Director at Floatex Marketing Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Founder & CEO at Digifuse and Chief Operating Officer (COO) at Picxele. Apart from this, he is also an enterprising foodpreneur, having his own ventures in F&B industry in the QSR sector as well as the cafe & bakeshop sector. He works as a Director at Streetpirate Foodworks Pvt. Ltd. with registered brand names – The Roll India and The Momos Heist™ having fast food franchise outlets in North East India as well as he owns a very beautiful bakery & cake shop with name “7th Heaven” at his hometown – Amritsar, Punjab.
A B.Tech graduate, Tushar completed his engineering degree from BML Munjal University, Gurgaon (a college backed by the Munjals & the Hero Group) in the Computer Science field with flying colors. He bagged the highest placement package in his college at Addverb Technologies, a global robotics company based in Noida, however, much to his family’s surprise, he rejected this lucrative offer bluntly without any second thought as he knew life has some other plans set for him and he needs to work hard towards building them.
He started his entrepreneurial journey by founding ‘Brainweave’ during his college days itself which focussed on brain development programs and workshops to escalate intellectual level of students. He along with his team started conducting workshops on IOT/Robotics and other technical stuff in nearby schools and colleges. As their work prospered, they got a big project from Hero company which dealt in running teaching programs in Asha Centers for underprivileged students as a part of Hero Group’s CSR activity program. They gathered some students from their college itself who could become teaching fellows after college classes and hence, delivered the project very efficiently. Apart from this, they even got an international project from Little Angels’ school at Nepal where they delivered a robotics workshop for the school students and it was covered by big media houses in Nepal. This was the first startup which got functional for Tushar. This inculcated entrepreneurial instincts inside him and acted as a stepping stone for him into the startup field.
Over the college years, he also constantly applied for various marketing internships which helped him in gaining profound interest in youth marketing, brand promotions & influencer marketing. He found a long gap among brands and students as students were running after brands to work for them while brands were running after youth for their marketing needs, however there was no mediator to mediate between them. This was the time he stepped into student space and learned about GigEconomy. The term “gig” is actually a slang word for a job that lasts for a specified period of time. So, GigEconomy is basically the presence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs. He researched on this area extensively which led him to kick-start his career in this field by starting ‘Digifuse’ which blends global digital technologies to help businesses build their brand presence through an extensive student network pan India. Digifuse is a combination of two words – Digi and Fuse i.e. fusion of digital technologies. Under Digifuse, he used to take up marketing requirements from brands, then design appropriate marketing campaigns according to the requirements and eventually get the work completed directly from the students and pay them a stipend for the work done. As time passed, he kept on increasing his student reach which helped him to generate higher user traffic and in turn provide better results to the brands. By becoming a bridge between brands and students, he could observe goals of both the brands and students being met efficiently. Students were able to work with so many brands under a single platform/roof and brands who had to hire their own interns or high charging agencies for their smaller marketing requirements were able to get their work done more efficiently through Digifuse as they were directly connected with a large pool of college students pan India.
During this time, the biggest challenge faced by him was lack of legal knowledge. There were few clients who got their work done from him but never paid later. This used to upset him many times as he would get their work done with utmost dedication and honesty and when payment time used to come, they used to ignore all the reminders and he had to clue on what to do next – Should he shutdown his startup or do a legal case for which he had no knowledge, guidance or assistance. This was the time, he got into dilemma – One part of him told him that if you are not getting any payments from the client, what is the need to pay ahead to the interns, simply shutdown the business and don’t pay anyone anything and the other part of him told him that those interns actually worked for his company and not directly for his company’s client, so he is the one who needs to fix it up. So, he agreed to his second thought and paid stipend accordingly to all his interns ahead. This thing may have made him end up with the loss in his first ever project, but this thing also helped him in gaining trust of his users for his other campaigns. A loss in a single campaign was nothing compared to the profit in other five campaigns which were executed by the same users to whom he paid for the first campaign where he was in loss. This thing made him learn to always stay honest with people connected to you and your customers as your users are the only one who will help you grow your business.
Problems are a part and parcel of an entrepreneurial field. You can never taste success without facing any hardships. During his college days, he used to go to his routine college classes and also had to manage his startup side by side. As all offices operate from 9 to 5, he used to get calls from clients in between classes and he used to attend those calls by going out for the washroom. So, it was actually a daily routine of going out of classes and then when he used to come back, he could see his friends staring at him with a look – Why the heck this guy goes out of the classes so frequently? At that time, only he knew what he was doing and he was actually enjoying that phase. He always had google sheets opened in his laptop and was always on his laptop and phone for 24 hours and used to work late nights to manage everything. At that time, some of his friends used to wonder why this guy is always in his room and constantly on his laptop while they all are out enjoying their college life. However he never felt any boredom as he was following his passion and was having utmost satisfaction with his ongoing progress.
As work increased and more and more brands were onboarded, it actually became difficult for him to manage everything offline. As he was directly connected to a large pool of students, it was getting difficult to manage the ever increasing chain of people. So, at that time, he along with one of his friend came up with an idea of “Picxele” which provided them a platform to manage all the work smoothly and make process of getting work done from large pool of students in a more streamlined way. Picxele is a customized student centric application with an idea of bridging the gap between the brands and college students by providing users a platform to avail exciting offers, rewarding tasks & campaigns, cashbacks, part/full-time internships, quests, jobs, etc. Picxele helps companies meet their on-demand work requirements through trained Gig Workers, where companies pay only for results delivered, not for manpower. So, what was the idea behind Picxele? It all starts with three basic problems in a student life. In our college lives, we always experience that a college student has three major concerns –
1. He isn’t able to grab good internships and job offers. He had to search numerous websites and platforms and still end up applying for nothing
2. He always lacks pocket-money at the end of the month and he doesn’t have the courage to ask for extra bucks from his parents.
3. He always looks for various techniques by which he can save his expenses.
After analyzing these issues, they thought to develop a simple application customized for students by which all his issues are resolved under a single integrated platform. So, they developed “Picxele” with an idea of “LEARN, EARN & SAVE” to bridge the gap between students and brands.
– LEARN through jobs & internships
– EARN through cashbacks, campaigns and tasks
– SAVE through offers & discounts
The idea is to allow students to develop their skills as well as bring it to profitable use in order to earn and learn at the same time. Picxele currently has 1 million users on their platform and is a profitable bootstrapped startup.
Now coming on to his foodpreneur journey, he has established an innovative food cart based chain pan India and Nepal under brand names – The Roll India and The Momos Heist™. They aim to revolutionize the street food industry by delivering consistent quality of food and beverages with excellent focused service in a hygiene friendly environment. Currently, they have franchise outlets running in Bihar & Chhattisgarh and are expanding at an exponential pace with their FOFO (Franchise Owned & Franchise Operated) Model. The Roll India is a chain of food and beverages restaurants with an aim to provide the most hygienic and innovative rolls across the country. Originating from the city of joy – Kolkata, Kathi Roll is a street food dish consisting of a filling enfolded in an Indian flatbread. They provide wide variants of scrumptious rolls in a delivery and take away format. Along with this, they have a pool of refreshing beverages – Splash & Blaze, offering a perfect closing to a memorable meal. The Momos HeistTM is a chain of fast food restaurants specializing in momos, a dumpling popular in Nepal, Tibet and India. Their cuisine includes momos in various variants (Steamed, Fried, Tandoori, Gravy, Chilli and Kurkure), snacks, burgers, beverages (splash, shakes, coffee and tea) and dessert.
In addition to this, Tushar has recently opened up his new project of a bakery cum cafe shop at Lawrence Road, Amritsar, Punjab with the name “7th Heaven” which is a chain of cake, bakery and desserts chain with over 450+ franchise outlets pan India. The pure veg bakery provides fresh from the oven experience through its live kitchen and fresh cakes are prepared within 7 minutes. They offer all types of designer cakes, customized 3D Cakes, desserts, savouries, cheesecakes, dry cakes, brownies, french macarons, mug cakes, jar cakes, lava cakes, pizza, waffles, burgers, fries, puffs, patties, cream rolls, hot and cold beverages, cookies, brownies, sandwiches, etc.
A passionate and visionary executive, Tushar is a true left and right-brain professional. His spread of responsibilities have helped him hone his skills in brand strategy, performance marketing, integrated communication and engagement. In response to sharing a message for our readers, Tushar said “There is no age for being an entrepreneur. I never knew if I am an entrepreneur, not even after starting my forest successful venture. I just went on with my passion and never went down with problems coming ahead. Rather, I learned from them and got better day by day. Ideas will come to you everyday but it is upon you to pick up the right one and get into it irrespective of whether you will fail or succeed, you should surely give it a shot once. Your hard work will always pay off, the timing of success may vary but success will surely come to you one time or the other. Just remember – Don’t sleep just because it’s night. Sleep only when you have left nothing for tomorrow. Let the dawn wait for you to get up.”
