Today is 2nd September 2021. Yeah, we just published this blog post so we can tell you today's date. Just Kidding! Today is a pretty important day for us. Because today is the day that marks the 1-year completion of our company. 🥳
So, we wanted to share with you our journey, our ups & downs, our lessons & the achievements we made along the way. And, we surely have come a long way from where we started but we're not perfect, we still haven't reached where we want to be & we're totally happy with that. You know, why? Cause we're working every, single, day to achieve that goal.
They say "Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." - Vince Lombardi
PulsAero is the brainchild of Kushal Kahar and Bhawana. Before opening up their venture both the co-founders had a very successful career in the digital world. Kushal used to work as a graphic designer previously, while Bhawana had experience in digital marketing.
How did the company come into existence?
In February 2020, when the world was in the thrall of a pandemic, and people were fearing for their jobs and businesses going under, these two took a brave step to leave their well-paying jobs and pursue the dream of being an entrepreneur.
Creativity is not that well appreciated as a talent or career in our culture. In India, jobs like engineers and doctors get put on the pedestal while all the other careers are treated as peasants’ in comparison. Both of us, the co-founders beg to differ on this. For us, creativity is highly important and we wish to make it as glorified a profession as all the mainstream ones. This is the reason why we went on to build the creative agency in an attempt to break the stereotype and emerge as the benchmark in the industry.
I am more focused on art and technology so I bring design and strategic planning to the table while Bhawana being an SEO consultant and brand optimizer brings marketing communication expertise. We form the perfect duo with our combined knowledge and hence can run a successful agency even during the dire situation like the ongoing global pandemic.
Well, frankly speaking, many people think naming a brand is an easy task. This is far from the truth. Initially, we thought that we’ll name it something like “ATA: All Things Answered”. We literally meant that, since we are giving you all the answers it would be perfect, but it didn’t feel like it had a soul in it. And hence, it was discarded. We also came up with “Sphere”, but that didn’t stick either.
We wanted something unique and meaningful and then after a lot of debating came up with PulsAero: Focusing dynamic energy (Pulse) within ourselves in the right direction (Aero). This is how the term was coined by us to give the company a fresh look.
Well, though the company had started its formation in February, we got our very first official client in May 2020: Revive. Dr. Shilpa Talati, an expert holistic health coach based out of Ahmedabad contacted us as she felt that her brand message wasn’t delivered in the right way to their potential customers. We helped Revive build its identity from the ground up.
We were able to communicate the holistic health approach to the clients and were able to increase brand value. This gave a huge confidence booster to us as well as gained us a footing in the digital marketing world.
Have you heard the phrase “Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard” by Guy Kawasaki? Well, that is very much true when opening up your venture. We knew enough about branding and marketing. So it should have been easy to make all the systems, right? Right? Wrong.
The reason is simple when you have your own business, you have to tackle every aspect of the business. You need to be able to manage all the administration work as well as the creative end. For this, we went out of our comfort zone and learned a lot of things to keep things going smoothly.
We built systems to make every aspect of the business clear to ourself and everyone else. We learned to account: hired an accounting firm (well we don't know everything at this stage). We started understanding the financial aspect of the business like using financial tools or Zoho books. We had to develop the human resource work like recruiting and making policies and all, on top of everything.
We believe that using emails for every aspect of the agency was not a suitable choice. So we went on to Slack for all our communication. Also, we explored a lot of project management tools like “Asana”, “Monday.com” and "Trello". But in the end, we ended up using Notion. But that being said it was a lot of work to set up all the workspaces and SOPs in notion did take a lot of time and energy.
We are strong believers in the term that a tired agent is an unproductive agent. Hence, we adopted the unique focus management method called “90-minute sprints” In this, a person works for 90 minutes efficiently and then can take a 20-minute break to refresh themselves. This keeps the productivity of each individual much higher than the continuous 9-5 jobs.
Well if you think the administration part of the business is hard, then you are going to be surprised with all the legalities. We had to learn between “LLP: Limited Liability Partnership” and “Pvt. Ltd.” We didn’t even know in which category the company came under before this. We went with LLP finally.
There were a lot of other things as well, like
and a lot of other legal activities.
We initially planned to launch in August but certain government paperwork forced us to push the date to September 2020. It was a frustrating thing to miss your deadline, but the wait was worth it.
Finally, the day had arrived for the launch. We incorporated our company on 2nd September 2020. We made our online presence known for the very first time. We had initially built the landing page with the URL: pulsaero.com, but then felt that something was missing and hence ended up with pulsaero.agency. We even bought pulaero.agency by mistake. So be very careful when deciding on buying the domain name. Do double-check it to avoid mistake here.
We created our website using Webflow (our go-to for website hosting and building) and started building our name in the market. We joined some local communities, business listings, and social gatherings, and started extending our customer list.
Everyone wants to enter the international market. So did we. We were able to achieve this by gaining Aionveda as our first client based in the USA. Erik Kucera, the founder of the said company was impressed by our work and wanted us to help him build his brand where his prospective clients could easily connect with him at any time.
We started with creating an aesthetically pleasing yet functional website that promoted his concept of holistic healing and then went on to create a unique identity for his brand. We made him the face of his brand so that when anyone saw him, they would associate him with his brand. And trust me he was more than impressed.
I can say that for sure because he came back to us with another project. This time he wanted something very different. He wanted a 3D art gallery. Chromomatrix is an extension of Erik himself. He wanted us to create a digital space for him where he can showcase his unique art digitally but still give his clients an experience similar to physical art galleries.
With the pandemic in full swing, the art showcasing was shut down and he had some doubts regarding taking his art digital. It was not easy though. As we were attempting to build a digital art gallery for the very first time, our initial results were not up to par. But with the help of technologies and tools like Blender, three.js, and Webflow we were able to meet his expectations and deliver him exactly what he wanted.
No machine can work without all the parts working in sync, right? Well similarly, no business can expand without involving the right people in it. So, in the pursuit of creating our dream team, we started by hiring the first set of agents. We had undergone the process of getting hired before but had never been the ones who did the hiring.
This was a whole new experience for us. But we pushed through and hired new graduates while offering a pay above the industry standard. We believe in our work ethics and expect the same from our employees. So that also led to some premature goodbyes in the forms of retirements or terminations. A lot of mistakes were made, but we learned a lot from them as well. And finally came up with the current team of 5 agents.
When your team expands you need a place to work together as well. So we took up the project to set up an office space. This brought another set of firsts for PulsAero. We created the interior design on our own.
Scouting and hiring local vendors while maintaining the budget and art direction, the execution of this big project was challenging. There were a few setbacks and a few delays, but we were finally able to inaugurate our office on 15th December 2020. This gave us a footing in the market and we were able to attract even more clients.
Working with more than one person means you need to develop a correct atmosphere for it but also have a certain SOP in place to avoid any miscommunications. So that was the first step. We believe in an open-door policy. So there are no cabins in the office. Anyone can walk up to another team member and ask for help or clear their doubts. But creativity also comes when you allow a person to work in their manner. So, though there are no closed rooms, no one intrudes on other’s work.
But all work and no play make life boring. So we do have a lot of activities that we as a team do. We celebrated Christmas, we celebrate birthdays, farewell parties for retiring agents, board games, and so on. So the working culture and work atmosphere are quite balanced out. We didn’t achieve it from the get-go, but yeah we were finally able to form it slowly over months.
We dipped into the webinar world for the first time on 10th February 2021. We were dedicated to solving the confusion between what should come first branding or marketing. This is the first question that pops into the minds of all new entrepreneurs.
So that was the topic and we had an overwhelming response. We had 750+ registrations and with 1-month planning and a lot of nervousness, we were able to successfully execute it. It was a great learning experience and a pivotal move for us.
We had grown a lot from the point where we initially started. So we wanted to include this into our brand and give it a different outlook completely. For this, we underwent a major project i.e. PulsAero 3.0 where we changed our website for the betterment. We have two modes on our site: “Business as usual” and “Alternate Reality.”
You can experience the difference in both sides of our website with a simple click. This has helped us showcase our vision and the level of work we can achieve. This drastic shift has brought us a lot of appreciation and a constant stream of new clients like Bare Minimum and Saiyyam. If you wish to enter an alternate reality do visit us at www.pulsaero.agency
We currently have 3-4 ongoing and 2-3 upcoming projects but we aspire to grow a lot bigger than this. We are trying to form a lean agency and optimize the processes and operations to the best possible standard.
We are looking forward to hiring even more agents and a lot of new experiences like awards, foreign office, trips, and events. Slowly but steadily we wish to achieve the title of “Best Creative Agency in the World” and we are working towards it each day.
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