Vaibhav Sisinty is the founder and CEO of GrowthSchool, an ed-tech platform that encourages you to get “industry-ready” and seeks to upskill you for the real world. Before starting up, Vaibhav worked as a growth hacker and marketing consultant for various brands, he even had a LinkedIn Growth Hacking online course.
The purpose of GrowthSchool.io is to promote problem-solving skills that are required to survive in the real world, i.e. the skills that the formal education system failed to teach us.
And, GrowthSchool does this by partnering with the top 1% of instructors to create high-impact cohort-based courses on personal and professional growth for learners all over the world.
The Beginning Story
Vaibhav was born in a small town in Berhampur, Orissa in 1993. When he was just in 4th grade, his mother, who was the absolute love of his life, sadly passed away. Things started to go downhill from this very point in his life. His grades started to decline, he became this arrogant guy and he’d completely shut the world out.
He was never one of the brightest students in school but was into so many other interesting stuff such as robotics. Vaibhav used to build robots during his high school years for engineering students and charged a hint of money in exchange.
But in 10th grade, something else happened which again proved to be a turning point in his life. In his 10th pre-board exams, he failed in seven subjects and secured less than 30% marks. He was deliberately told that he wouldn’t be able to appear for his board exams, and his whole world came crashing down.
Everyone around him was sceptical about his capabilities and he, naturally, wanted to prove them wrong. He studied with everything he had in him and scored 77% in his ICSE board exams!
“Believe in yourself, nothing is as hard as it looks,” says Vaibhav. Hitting rock bottom is an inevitable part of life, but what you choose to do with it is entirely up to you. In Vaibhav’s case, he decided to come back better and indestructible.
Later, he aimed for one of the best institutes i.e IIT but had to settle for the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management and opted for Computer Science Engineering. This is where he says that you do not need to get into a reputable college to be respected.
Entrepreneurial Journey
When Vaibhav was in his first year of engineering, he was determined to make his own money. He learned how to build websites from the internet and built one about Android called Discovering Android.
This ended up being his first startup when he was just 19 years old. In just three months, the site amazingly attracted 100,000 visits per month and Vaibhav generated a profit of 25,000 Rupees in those three months. Unfortunately, in the 4th month, Google banned the site due to some issues and discoveringandroid.com was no more.
But as they say, failure doesn’t come without its teachings. Building websites and marketing were two very important skills that he managed to acquire from his first startup. So for the next 7-8 months, he invested his time in learning and some more learning.
Starting Up a Digital Media Agency
In his second year of engineering, Vaibhav Sisinty started another company called CrazyHeads, a digital media agency, with three of his friends. They had a mission of conducting a huge ethical hacking workshop to promote their company but lacked sufficient funding.
His extreme marketing skills paid off as he and his team managed to sell 450 tickets in two months, each worth 1000 rupees. They were thrilled to conduct the workshop.
Just three days before the event, all the colleges shut down because of the separation between Andhra and Telangana. However, this didn’t stop them from conducting their event. In fact, they now had 750 attendees at their workshop, making it a huge success.
After this unreal accomplishment, they thought that clients would come rushing in but that wasn’t the case at all. Vaibhav had 6 months’ worth of free work in order for the clients to recognize his unending potential.
Slowly but steadily, clients kept coming in and in the next 18 months, they worked with over 100 clients Vaibhav managed to clear his education loan before even finishing college! CrazyHeads won the award for Fast Emerging Digital media startup of the year.
Venturing into Growth Hacking
On top of that, money no longer remained the sole destination. Vaibhav set out to explore and learn more and as a result, joined Uber as a city coordinator. In one and a half years, he was promoted to marketing manager at Uber.
He was working with people from top colleges like IIT which made him realise that the prestige of your university doesn’t really play a part in where life takes you next.
After working at Uber for 4 and a half years, he was supposed to move to Mexico City. Everything was sorted out from selling his house in Hyderabad to renting a house in Mexico.
Just a day before, his move got canceled and he decided to leave Uber. He then started working for a smaller startup called Klook, as the head of marketing. Right before the onset of Covid in September 2020, he lost his job.
Vaibhav has been using LinkedIn for quite a long time, and his profile has consistent growth of followers. So he launched an online course on ‘LinkedIn Growth’ which was a great success. In addition, he also used to consult different brands for growth hacking which is a subfield of marketing focused on the rapid growth of a company.
Startup Story of GrowthSchool
Vaibhav was always passionate about scaling up his businesses and finally started up GrowthSchool to take his online course along with other experts to the next level of upskilling people making them industry-ready.
Today, GrowthSchool provides crash courses and masterclasses on numerous domains like Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Copywriting, UI/UX Design, Google Ads and Facebook Ads Marketing, and others.
GrowthSchool is one of the most successful e-learning platforms where you get to learn from the top 1% of educators from all over India. Vaibhav says that just the idea of learning from people who you want to become is, and I quote, “absolutely freakishly powerful.”
Inspiring Words of Vaibhav Sisinty
“Stop trying to tick boxes, you don’t have to be good at everything, you don’t have to be good at what your friends are good at. Work on things that you are good at. Don’t get constrained on degrees and marks” says Vaibhav.
Unlike most people, he actually finds self-doubt to be a good thing. He says it keeps you grounded and lets you question yourself and discover your shortcomings. He feels that it is a sign that you’re grounded and not getting ahead of yourself.
“Even the most successful people have self-doubt on a regular basis. It’s all about not letting that self-doubt paralyze you from taking action.”
Super inspiration here. Once again, we see freedom and worldly success often leading off with some tough failures. Virtually all successful entrepreneurs fail for a bit to face fear, to gain clarity and to establish a sense of direction with their ventures. How can anyone gain perfect clarity as new business builders? We all have quite a few fears, doubts and anxieties to knife through for a bit to get clear, to trust, to be confident and to build a granite-like foundation for a business. Keep up the great blogging work here.