Namase is my surname. This is my corner of the internet.

A surname on a domain

In 2010 I was a BE Information Technology student at TKIET Warananagar, and making a website was not new to me. I had built my first in 12th class, on paperonity.com, from a mobile phone. In a Networking lecture, A. G. Patil Sir opened his own Blogspot site to show us how submarine cables carry the internet. Over the Ganesh Chaturthi break that followed, Suraj Salunkhe and I made our own blogs on Blogspot. I showed mine to my mama, Sanjay Bhatgaonkar, my mother's brother. His advice was to stop writing in a corner of somebody else's site and get a domain of my own. He suggested namase.com and helped me register it, for one reason: it was my surname and nobody had taken it. He also explained what WordPress was and why a CMS was better than Blogspot. Much later, he introduced me to Peter, a talented freelance writer from Scotland.

In my third year my roommate was Nidheeshdas Thavorath, a final-year senior. He showed me how to install multiple operating systems, and at one point my laptop was carrying five of them. Programming and Linux came from him, and so did setting up our own website on a VPS host. We talked about technology for hours, and we still do when we get the time.

Tips, tricks and a new name

namase.com became a tips and tricks site. Computer tricks, Linux commands, Windows hacks, whatever I was learning that week. Nobody told me that running a tips site teaches you two things. You learn to explain a technical thing plainly, and you learn SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because your traffic graph shows you every morning what Google rewards. The second one is the skill my whole career is built on.

By early 2012 the site was all tech, and my surname was the wrong label for it. I wanted something brandable with a tech word in the name, and TechLila came from my mama again. I liked it. The site took that name on 4 February 2012, with my final exams a few months away. The same date is Facebook's birthday, which was a coincidence. Fourteen years on I still work on it and still publish new articles there.

Two months at TCS

TCS selected me in a campus placement at TKIET in August 2011, in the first semester of my final year. It was the job every parent in my town wanted for their son. I graduated in May 2012, but TCS did not give me a joining date. Since I was waiting for it, I could not join another company in between. So I put that time into TechLila, and it showed me that my hobby could become my full-time work. I finally joined TCS in March 2013. By May I had resigned. Two months there were enough for me to decide.

You can imagine the reaction at home. My mother asked me not to come back to the village and to stay in Pune with my elder brother Mukund instead. She was worried that people there would think I had not been capable of the job and had come home a failure. Nothing had gone wrong. My site was growing, and my skills were already paying me. If you have an inner voice like that, give it time and listen to it.

The site that vanished

My first affiliate site came right after TCS, with a friend, Vedant Kumar. Together we chose the niche: how to save your marriage. He was in 12th and I was 22, so neither of us knew the first thing about it. It lost money on domains and backlinks, but I learned more from it than from any success. The next one I built alone, a web hosting niche site, with everything the first one had taught me. Within months it sat in the top three results worldwide for its keywords, and the checks were way bigger than the salary I had walked away from. I did what any 23-year-old does with a check like that: I started planning my life around that money.

Then someone I knew well ran a negative SEO attack on the site. I had taught him blogging and SEO myself, and I considered him a friend. The rankings were gone in a week. A year and a half later I was still struggling to rank for those keywords. Sreejesh Suresh, a blogger, had already shared the lesson with me: "Never set your targets in terms of money." Losing that site proved him right. I had started for the work, not the money, so I kept going. 2013 also gave me my first flight. In June, AMD flew me to Bangalore for their "Behind 2020 game console" event, and they arranged the hotel and the airport pickup. For a blogger a few months out of a job, that was the first sign the site was being noticed.

Tushar, and a handwritten card

Tushar Thakur and I started building affiliate sites together at the end of 2013, once I had a working grasp of SEO and digital marketing. Two years running, 2014 and 2015, Bluehost counted us among their top affiliates, and instead of a certificate they mailed us a card written by hand. We still have it. In 2015 we also sold two web hosting sites, both to the same buyer. In January 2016 the partnership got a name, WebGeeksMedia, and I have run it as CEO ever since. A decade in, we still build news sites, tech blogs and affiliate sites together.

He fixed my money habits as well. My early earnings went on clothes, CCD and parties, until Tushar pointed out that whatever sits in a savings account gets spent. Park it where you cannot reach it, he said. Everything I know about money grew from that one sentence; the people who taught me the rest have their own entry.

Prudour: from eight people to a hundred

Pramod Pawar approached me at the end of 2015 about going into business together, and by November we had registered GlobeMetrix as a partnership. The planning started that October. The real work started on 1 May 2016, and the first sale came on 22 June, seven weeks later. Ramkrishna (Pavan) Lipare and Sudhish Mohan were partners in it from the start, though their names were not on the GlobeMetrix paperwork; when it grew into Prudour Pvt. Ltd. in March 2017, their names were.

In September 2016 there were eight of us, and we signed a lease on a floor with fifty desks. At the time, one of my relatives even asked why we were taking such a huge risk. Twelve months later sixty people were working there. At the peak, in March 2019, there were 102 people on the payroll. Additionally, we had freelance developers and writers, plus the CA, the CS and a couple of vendors who kept the place running. That growth needed a second office: three floors agreed in August 2017, fitted out through the first half of 2018, and in use from June 2018. I gave up my director's seat in October 2023 and kept my investment. Photos of both offices are in the office we built.

TKIET Warananagar, my college, made an industrial visit to Prudour in March 2018.

Five years after that initial visit, the relationship came full circle. On 10 March 2023, eleven and a half years after my own campus placement there, it was our turn to visit. Prudour held a campus placement drive at TKIET, open to students from five branches: computer science, mechanical, electronics and telecommunication, civil and chemical.

The SaaS arm

Nidheeshdas Thavorath first proposed a SaaS products arm on 14 November 2018. In February 2019 he moved to Pune to set it up inside Prudour, and his team built our own software applications there. By April 2020 the arm was closed, just over a year after it began.

The business model was not the problem. Each partner had a different definition of success, and all of us had too many other things on our plates. If you start something with partners, agree on what "success" means before you agree on anything else.

WiredRelease

WiredRelease was a service for distributing press releases. We launched it in July 2019 as a separate firm, not a division of Prudour, with Prudour's partners and money behind it. The first sale came on 22 August 2019.

We shut it down in March 2021. The main reason it failed was that some partners did not do the work that was expected of them. Before you start a business with partners, make everyone's role and responsibilities clear, and agree on profit shares based on what each person contributes.

DataFeature, and letting go

DataFeature began in July 2022 inside Prudour as an app for reading and using research data. When I stepped down in October 2023, Ramkrishna (Pavan) Lipare and I bought it from Prudour. We rebuilt it as a blog about routers, home internet and web browsers. We sold it in March 2026. Selling something you built yourself is never easy. We had been thinking about it for months, so by the time we signed, the decision was already made.

24 hours

Everyone gets the same 24 hours. I was 25 before I really believed that time, not money, is the asset that runs out. Two experiments proved it to me. In 2015 I went 30 days without opening WhatsApp, and it gave me back one to three hours a day. And I built a time-block timetable for the whole day, which I still run in a Google Sheet, with Google Calendar for meetings and reminders. I have overdone it too, once working close to 12 hours a day for two and a half months without a day off. It moved the targets and cost me the gym, my friends and a few kilos. Know thy limits! The details are in the time entries.

Pune, Dipali, our daughter

I married Dipali in 2018. She is a commercial artist, and these days she has a hand in the business as well. Our daughter arrived in 2020. Since 2022, WebGeeksMedia has also looked after the tech and lead generation for my elder brother Mukund Namase's real estate project. So family and work are not separate rooms for me.

Business is my first priority, and everything else still gets its own time block. Gym in the morning, or the badminton court, 90 minutes either way. Yoga has stayed in the routine for years. Away from the desk you will find me with a book or on a trip planned months ahead. The milestones came in their own order: my first flat at 25, my first car in 2024, fourteen years after the first website. All the lessons from it end up in this journal. If one of the lessons saves you a year, that's the whole point.