Every week, join 7000+ others that receive the case study of a maverick who did something daring & unconventional—and succeeded. Each edition also contains surprise gifts 🎁 & behind-the-scenes of my upcoming novel, "1000 Days of Love."
tcm #3: survived leukemia & built $10M company
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Hi [FORMATTED_SUBSCRIBER_NAME GOES HERE], Soundarya here, aka thecuriousmaverick :) Welcome to the third edition of the Curious Mavericks newsletter! (Each newsletter will begin with the tag "tcm") 🎁 Every edition will have a surprise gift hidden in the newsletter. For this week, it's hidden inside a word. Whoever clicks the link first will claim it. Scroll to the end to see who won last week! With that, let's go. This week's maverick: Amit GuptaTL;DR: Watch the story of a maverick who overcame 1 in 20,000 odds to beat blood cancer, rebuilt a new life, and has built 3 companies—with the first one at age 19. Imagine getting a call that changes your life. A call from a doctor telling you that you’re gonna die. For Amit Gupta, that call came in 2011 when he learned he had acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer. “If we don’t get a bone marrow match, you have a 25% chance of living,” his doctor informed. “And if get the perfect bone marrow match, you have a 50% chance.” “50% still didn’t sound like great odds,” Amit shares, “but it was better than 25%.” Little did he know that finding a bone marrow match would be harder—much harder—than building three companies
Lesson 1: Build a company, not a startupAmit dropped out of college at 19 to start his first startup, “The Daily Jolt.” He went as far as raising $1.5M, but the startup was crushed by the dot com bubble in 2000. "With my first startup, The Daily Jolt, I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was 19 years old, so I was really learning everything from scratch. We raised money since everybody else was doing that, and eventually went through both the dot com bubble and the dot com bust. I spent a year trying to get the money back, and eventually got burned out. So, when I started Photojojo in 2006, I didn’t want to take any money. We were bootstrapped. I wanted to build a stable, solid, profitable company and grow it as much as I could without an investment.” And Amit did that.
Lesson 2: How his friends & family (literally) saved his lifeAfter Amit’s doctor told him he needed a bone marrow match, he had exactly a month to find one—and an odds of 1 in 20,000. “The United States has a National Registry of Bone Marrow. Anyone can register for free, and I highly encourage people to do it. Sadly, back in 2011, there was no match for me. This, as I realized, is very common for people who are non-white because most of the people in the registry are white. So if you’re Asian, Black, Latino, or mixed race, it’s incredibly difficult to find a match.” But, within a month, Amit was able to find a match thanks to his friends and family. “About a dozen or so of my friends started to host donor drives—at first in New York, which then spread to across the country, and even some in India. We got tens of thousands of people to go to these drives within a month to swab their cheeks send a sample to the registry. My friends wrote posts, spread the word so millions knew about it, used their connections so I could go on CNN and NPR. Every day we’d have a conference call to discuss the efforts and update. It felt almost like my hospital room was a political war room. On one side, I was fighting cancer and dying. On the other side, I was taking calls and writing emails.”
Lesson 3: How ChatGPT doubled Sudowrite’s growthAfter Amit recovered from leukemia, he didn’t return to his “normal life”—since nothing felt normal. Rather, he moved to Hawaii, got a dog, learned to paint, and founded Sudowrite, a unique tool to help novelists overcome writer’s block. This was two years before ChatGPT came out. “When ChatGPT came out, it was a pretty scary moment for us. Now here there was a state of the art language model that anyone can use for free. So why would anyone pay for our tool? Except, what we saw was the opposite. We saw a lot of people trying ChatGPT because it’s free. They found it useful, but not well-suited for what they wanted to do. So they went out looking for a tool like Sudowrite—and found it. Our growth literally doubled overnight after ChatGPT.”
This week's tiny experimentExperiment: Install a Newsfeed Blocker for just a week to practice intentional content consumption. Reasoning: A big reason for social media’s addictiveness comes from its endless scrolling. Sometimes, you want to just log in, check your messages, visit a creator’s profile and get the heck out of there! This extension will help you do that. 💡Bonus tip: I’ve also installed an extension that hides YouTube comments on my computer. This is after I realized I always go read the comments for a video, which stopped me from thinking about what I watched. This week's question for youQuestion: If you got to know that you only had 30 days left, what is the first thing you'd do? Answer by Zoya Brar: I would call all the people I truly love and convince them to take the next 30 days off and travel with me. And if they couldn't afford it, I would find a way to get it financed :) And I would take a few minutes everyday to write something for my kids to read when they were older and without me. I would keep as many memories for them to discover as I could - photos, videos, notes, anything. 🤔 Question for you: What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to do but have been too afraid to try? How a novel gets createdThe past week, I crossed 44,000 words in the manuscript (still only a first draft!). This happened in less than 8 weeks of focused writing. When I shared this with a friend, he was shocked. “Sounds unbelievably fast!” he remarked. But as always, there’s a method to the madness. You may know that I am currently living in a tiny house on a remote farm in India. But, the reason for this productivity goes beyond the farm. There are 3 factors that, in hindsight, helped make this happen. I’ll talk about one of them today: capturing ideas rigorously. I’ve used Roam Research for almost 5 years now. I began capturing ideas for “1000 Days of Love” formally on Sep 19th, 2021—but really, everything I’ve captured in Roam can be useful in one way or another. For e.g. this week I was writing a scene between the protagonist (Riya) and her therapist. To get inspiration, I went over the Roam pages of the two therapists I’ve worked with. Each of their pages had 20+ notes I had taken with insights after the session. This helped immensely in creating a realistic dialogue for the book. See below for a sample insight I captured: So, while on the outside it seems like it only took 8 weeks to write 44,000 words—the work began several years ago. :) What do you think? How do you capture ideas? Hit reply and let me know. 👑Last week's winner: Rahul Menon👑Congrats to Rahul Menon who won a free copy of the book "Business Storytelling from Hype to Hack: Unlock the Software of the Mind" by Jyoti Guptara :)
This week's winner will get a free subscription to Sudowrite. Start searching 😉 (psst: it's hidden within a word) Quote of the week: "We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us." ~ Joseph Campbell |
Soundarya Balasubramani
Every week, join 7000+ others that receive the case study of a maverick who did something daring & unconventional—and succeeded. Each edition also contains surprise gifts 🎁 & behind-the-scenes of my upcoming novel, "1000 Days of Love."
Hi there, Soundarya here, aka thecuriousmaverick :) Welcome to the seventh edition of the Curious Mavericks newsletter! (Each newsletter will begin with the tag "tcm") Let's start! This week's maverick: Anne-Laure Le Cunff TL;DR: Read the story of a curious maverick who walked away from a stable career at Google to embrace uncertainty, rediscover her love for neuroscience, and build a thriving community through curiosity and experimentation. What constitutes the recipe for success? It’s fair...
Hi [FORMATTED_SUBSCRIBER_NAME GOES HERE], Soundarya here, aka thecuriousmaverick :) It's been six weeks since I started this newsletter and podcast. I'm planning to record two more episodes for 2024 before ending Season 1 of the podcast. I still plan to continue the newsletter beyond that and am currently thinking of what would be most useful for you. What would you like to hear from me? What questions are you trying to answer? Hit reply and let me know. 🎁 As always, every edition will have a...
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