From Selling Newspaper to Building a Tech Startup — A life story of mine

Navdeep Yadav

4 min readMay 4, 2022

A few weeks back, I resigned from my job and decided to Startup.

When I was working in a tech company, I realized some gaps and decided to build Float.

Read this if you want to know more about what we are building.

50 Investors said NO to us. So now we are building our Startup in public.

Back to the main story.

When I looked back on the life I realized how far I came on this journey.

I was lucky to be born in a village and spent my entire childhood between cattle and crops.

navdeep yadav childhood photo — A Childhood picture of mine

So from going to school on a bicycle to harvesting crops with my mother. I have done almost everything that you see in a movie.

I completed my schooling and later got selected at Delhi University for my graduation as the Govt. college fee was just Rs 7,000/Year (USD 100/Year).

So I didn’t have enough money to stay in Delhi so decided to do daily up-down from home.

I used to wake up at 3:30 am to catch a train at 5:30 am from Rewari that used to drop me at Delhi (Palam) at 8:30 am, followed by a DTC bus to the college.

And I was coming back home at night at 10 pm on the same train.

Things were getting tough over time, so after a year, I explored some cheap places to stay in Delhi and found a small room in Govindpuri for 4,000/month ($60/month)

I was sharing it with a friend for Rs 2,000/month ($30/month), So just Cook and clean by yourself, and you are good to go on a budget of Rs 4k/month.

After living for a year later, I shifted to a decent place and completed my graduation.

Those three years taught me much about life, money, risk, and goal. The majority of my time goes into thinking about money.

Fast forward to the next significant phase in life.

I started my career by selling door-to-door newspaper subscriptions in Vadodara, Gujrat.

I have probably knocked on more than 5,000 doors to sell an annual subscription of Rs 699/- ($10) to earn my first income of 3,000 rupees per month ($50).

Me delivering a Newspaper Stand to a vendor

Then joined a startup at the time of COVID-19 to manage their day-to-day operation of buying medicines from the local market and loading them in a truck.

Later started working on a D2C brand as a Day 0 team member. They helped me build managerial muscles like team management, technology etc.

After working for them for 18 months, later i joined a SaaS company as a Product Manager.

Here are the few lessons I have learned so far

#1 Majority of my growth in life happened when things were miserable (A good time is often inadequate for development).

#2 If you are extremely hard-working and focus on the right thing by taking calculated risks, things will work out.

#3 Don’t relax and be hypercompetitive all the time — from learning to execution.

#4 People back the people who have a backbone. So always build a strong safety net of money around you.

Back to the main topic

While working in a tech company, I was writing product documentation. I was frustrated by the effort required to explain a simple integration guide with many images and text lines.

So from uploading multiple screenshots of the dashboard to writing about the different integration steps.

The page length of documentation was becoming more than the length of the great wall of china, and the user experience was like reading a Wikipedia article (Text-heavy).

So, I asked my brother, is there a better way to do it?

And we started building Float to solve that problem by ourselves.