Interview with Vikas & Sandeep | MEW

Engineering is one of the highly respected domains in the world. It develops the capability of logical thinking and industrialises this world using laws of physics, formulae of mathematics and basic knowledge of chemistry. This motivated us to do something in the field of engineering and we thought of bringing engineers from the corners of the entire world on a common platform, which further motivated us to start Engineering Insider Page which now has 2 million followers. Later we started another page, Mechanical Engineering World which now has 2.7 million engineers in the community. But our journey didn’t stop there; then we developed Hello Topper, a social networking android app (strictly for students) which got 1.4 lakhs to download within 3 months. Until now, you might have got that we want to do something for the students.

“Making quality education available easily & freely is our motive”.

1. What gets you out of bed in the morning i.e what’s your source of motivation?
FEEDBACK! We have highly educated crowd in our community; professors and alumni from MIT, Stanford, IITs etc. follow us. Serving such great minds is always a challenge for us. They never excuse us for conceptual mistakes & typo errors. So, every morning, first we go through the feedback we have received on posts we scheduled for the night. Many times, we find comments by highly qualified engineers, professors or experts who are scolding us for the mistakes. So, this is the situation which naturally motivates us every day to perform better.

2. Why should people choose your product/services?
The Class of Followers We Have!
Not everyone can get admission in prestigious institutes of the world. But if anyone has a deep interest in any field of engineering, he or she can join our community and can ask doubts from the experts of these institutes in our comment sections. There are lots of experts who are willing to help such curious minds.

Anyone can get millions of followers like us but it is not easy to get the class of followers we have, who are always eager to share their learnings.

3. What’s your competitive advantage and why can’t it be copied?
We started earlier! Yes, that helps us to grow very rapidly. Now social media algorithms don’t allow to reach to millions of followers. Now everyone needs to struggle for every single follower. So, building such a big community of HIGHLY EDUCATED EXPERTS is not easy now.

4. What risks are you facing?
REACH! As social media platforms have restricted the reach for serving users only the content they like has affected us too badly. Most of the people surf social media only for the purpose of entertainment, so, we are facing the risk of extinction from the feeds of such users who prefer entertainment over knowledge on social media platforms.

5. Have you considered any alliance/partnership?
We are being offered many partnership proposals every week. If we are being reached by any organisation that can provide qualitative video content to our followers, we will definitely consider for suitable opportunities.

6. What are your cash flow projections? When will you break even? How much will you need in investments?
This is the most difficult question and can’t disclose this right now due to some obvious reasons. But for the newcomers, I will say that you can earn handsome money by working hard.
“Earning easy money online is a myth” now.

About the investment part, we want to explore the Automobile Market of India and have a project in the pipeline that requires 1 Crore (Rupees) as initial funding to reach up to break-even point. If we get any investor, we will be an established brand in India soon.

7. What comes first for you money or emotions?
Quality at first, money at second and emotions are at the 3rd position if I arrange them in order of priority and I strongly think this should be the priority order of any all ‘wannabe entrepreneurs’.

8. What are your strengths and weaknesses?
We are quite good at bringing people together. We have done it many times. We have to build many communities on social media as well as on play store having 1 lakh plus users each.

We are often being approached by a few investors who can help us set up as a brand. Having such great opportunities, we are having a habit of losing them. We think some investors take unnecessary time in decision making.

“But we hate long follow-ups”

This is the weakness we have, I think.

9. Tell me about an accomplishment you are most proud of.
We are two partners (Vikas Shukla & Sandeep Chaudhary) and living in two opposite side cities of India – Delhi & Pune. We are working together for 4 years and not met face to face even once. Even then, establishing this trust and bonding is our best accomplishment for us. Without this trust, it was not possible to build the world’s best page for mechanical engineers.

10. How do you handle the pressure?
To generate quality content is really a hard task. It takes so many efforts. A little compromise with quality, costs us kicking out of the timelines of many followers as well as we have to face ire of professors & experts. It has been more than 6 years we started this journey, but still, we are learning to handle the pressure.

11. If you sold your company today, what would be the tone of the conversation? What would you want to gain? What would you want to avoid losing?
Actually, we are managing two similar communities with the same content but have different names. If we find a potential buyer, we will like to sell one and will invest that wealth in creating better content for our followers.

12. What advice would you give to someone starting out?
Don’t think about the money in the starting. As I said earlier, first focus on the quality and build a strong user base. Later, you can monetize in so many ways.
Second, if you can’t do it alone, don’t hesitate to add a partner who has the same vision.

Both are general facts and apply to all startups. These things have worked very well for us.

Follow Links:
1) Mechanical Engineering World ( 2.7 Million Followers )
https://www.facebook.com/mch.eng.world

2) Engineering Insider ( 2 Million Followers )
https://www.facebook.com/engineeringinsider

3) Mechanical Engineering Network ( 175K Followers )
https://www.facebook.com/Mechrocks12

4) Mechanical Engineering World ( 220K Members )
https://www.facebook.com/groups/Mech.Eng.World.Group/

5) Mechanical Engineering Network ( 150K Members )
https://www.facebook.com/groups/191315081631419/`