Being an entrepreneur is a daunting yet thrilling endeavour. Many people have ideas for a business or a product or a service, but only a few take the necessary leap of faith to try their luck out with turning that idea into reality.
The advent of the internet brought numerous opportunities, opening doors for creators and innovators to traverse new territory. The world wide web not only transformed the way business was conducted but also created new avenues for entrepreneurs to explore.
With an internet connection and a computer, entrepreneurs today can set up shop at a cafe, at a library, at their homes, or pretty much wherever they prefer, and live a lifestyle in a way they deem fit. Abhishek Yadav and Shalmali Parkar, did just that and chose the life of being internet entrepreneurs.
Abhishek and Shalmali, driven by a passion for entrepreneurship and technology, with a blend of expertise in digital marketing services founded Baclinc – a one-stop-shop for all things digital marketing.
Baclinc is a full-service digital agency offering coherent and bespoke solutions for brands and businesses. It provides its clients with detailed, highly actionable advice and services that help them get a grip in the digital space. They deal with a multitude of services like SEO, social media management, Facebook and Instagram ads, influencer marketing, and content writing to an overall strategy and more.
In the following interview, Abhishek and Shalmali share the story of their incredible journey, and also give us some insight into how two young individuals came up with such a simple yet sublime idea for a startup.
Kindly take us through the journey of your company and its objectives.
Baclinc is a digital marketing company based in Mumbai that provides end-to-end digital marketing services to small and medium companies. It was established in December 2017 by me (Abhishek Yadav) and Shalmali Parkar when we were 18 and 17 years old, respectively.
Back then the goal of the company was to grow and manage the blogs that I had been running for the past 2-3 years handling it by myself and with Shalmali’s help later on. The blogs grew to an extent where we had to quit our jobs and have a team working for and an office to help us to grow and optimise our blogs and websites. We continued this till late 2018 to solely focus on the blogs and their growth. But after a point, we realized that we were only making money, but no one knew us and our team in the digital marketing space for the kind of skill set we had. Soon we concluded that this is not the best for the long run as we were in the initial stages of our career and did not have anything tangible to showcase to the world except for the case studies of our blogs. And that is when we made the shift of our business model to start providing digital marketing services to clients. We established Baclinc in 2017 itself when we started our office to manage the blogs, but we opened our doors to clients only in early 2019. Our aim is to provide high-quality, end-to-end marketing services to everyone and create a difference in the digital marketing space.
Tell us more about the services that Baclinc provides.
We specialize in SEO as that is the service I have been practicing for years and now so has my team in the journey of building up these blogs into online businesses. We have been in the SEO industry since the days it was all about ‘Keyword Stuffing’ and you were ranking overnight.
We have a very minute understanding of the Google algorithms and have seen it evolve over time and we are on top of our techniques to get our way around it and make sure that our sites, as well as our client’s sites, always rank on top.
R&D is critical to the success of the company. What measures do you take to keep the focus on research and stay a step ahead of the competition?
Our SEO team always stays on top of the game by keeping ourselves updated by reading blogs like “searchenginland.com”, “SEORoundTable” and more, we are also very active on Twitter where Google officials share official updates and insights about the algorithms and search performance. Apart from it, we run a lot of experiments trying various techniques on our blogs and our A/B testing (split testing) always turns useful.
What according to you is the one takeaway from the Covid-19 pandemic?
When the world came to a pause and our clients had to face the trouble of losses in their business, it affected us as well but our blogs, SAAS websites helped us stay afloat in this tough period. What we learned was the importance of having multiple offerings to share with the world because that means new ways of generating revenue and maintaining a solid base at all times.
The lockdown also helped me give time to projects close to my heart such as launching my Podcast, ‘Internet Bread’ where I teach people how to make money online. The goal of the podcast is to cover 101 ways to make money online in 101 episodes. This is my way of giving back to the community and to enable more people to start the career digitally.
What are your views regarding the start-up business scenario in Maharashtra?
Our office is located in Powai which is kind of like a ‘Startup Hub’ within Mumbai. We see a lot of businesses coming online, the digital revolution is really pushing every company to become heavily reliant on technology. But Maharashtra needs more successful startups and the youth should be more focused on bringing their ideas to life. I see Maharashtra lagging behind Bangalore and Delhi in this one particular thing, despite Mumbai being the financial capital of the country.
What are the company’s future objectives and where do you see yourselves in the near future?
We are expanding into new services and bringing a lot of services inhouse and growing the team that we earlier had to outsource or partner with other companies to fulfil. We now have a full-fledged graphic design and content development division which is really helping us change gears in the quality of services that we offer and deliver results instantaneously.
We are really excited to launch our upcoming startup, which has been in development for almost a year now, which is called ‘PostBing’ it is a content distribution platform that can help startups reach new audiences and help make the most out of their content. We are expecting to launch it by the end of January 2021.
