Hi, this is Riten

Here's a bit about me, my background, my journey building a startup from remote India and a little about my life

Disclaimer

This issue is going to be about me, I’ll try to put up everything on my mind about myself. I have never done this before. I love learning about people, their stories, likes, dislike, their worldview, concepts, and essentially everything. I’m writing this because I want you to know about me. So that we can be good friends. No bluff, No BS, nothing.

So, Hi! my name is Riten Debnath. I’m based in Agartala, a small town in Northeast India. I’m currently building a startup Fueler with my team from different parts of the world.

We are remote time, considering you have figured that out by now. We don’t have a physical office yet. Our virtual office is Discord and Google Meet. We get together after 2-3 months and try to make some amazing memories along with our work.

Curious what is Fueler? (in brief)

• Millions of skilled individuals around the world miss out on thousands of dollars worth of opportunities every day.

• This is just because they are not able to prove themselves or due to lack of discovery.

• We have built a simple and easy-to-use tool that helps skilled individuals prove themselves by showcasing their work. Introducing Fueler, a new-age portfolio tool for those who go the extra mile to prove themselves.

• It just takes 30 seconds to setup a profile on Fueler and guess what, it's free.
  

Fueler is an online portfolio platform for knowledge workers to showcase, publish and manage their proof of work aka project. Fueler helps them land better opportunities with the help of their Proof of Work instead of credentials and certificates.

In simple words, Fueler is like Github but for knowledge workers to help them showcase their work on the internet.

How can we build a skill-driven society?

When we reward the folks that go the extra mile to create their proof of work, to prove their skills through projects. Hence, Fueler is one such place on the internet where anyone from any background can come forward to show their work.

My background

I’m a computer science graduate. I love running, reading, lifting, writing, music, sports, and making new friends.

Internet has been one of the best things happened in my life. I got access to the internet in my 9th standard when we had to submit our assignments for different subjects. Surfing the Internet was like magic to me. I was simply amazed by the fact that you can literally search and learn anything you want in just few clicks. All I needed was to come up with keywords. It just fueled curiosity in me. I came naturally to me.

Before 9th standard, I was traveling to different parts of Northeast India. My dad’s in defense and for the same reason, I was fortunate to travel around meeting new cultures and gaining new perspectives.

But the not-so-good part about that was disconnecting from the world. The places I have lived in didn’t have network coverage, hence no internet. It was all dense forest, hilly region mostly unexplored.

Also, I feel I was never that much into exploring (now I regret though :P) I was so much into studies, I somewhat knew my goal back in the school days for my annual exams: to score really well.

Reading

I started reading back in my school days, but it was a very casual one. I remember I started with a fiction novel and I literally had hangover from the story. Fast forward to my college second year when I took up reading as a habit, it has literally my life for great things. This newsletter will have a lot of references from the books I have read throughout my life.

I love reading personal blogs of some of the amazing minds on the internet. I have created The Internet Library to document all the best minds on the internet.

Friends, I have always wanted to have a shelf of books in my home more than having anything in life, here’s a picture of that.

Guess, it is the only tangible asset I have with me collected over the years in my early twenties. I feel blessed and thankful to have received some of the books as gifts from my friends on the internet.

Professional Career

I have been into freelancing for more than 4 years, worked with 70+ brands throughout the world. Freelancing has allowed me to study businesses inside out. It has helped me learn about processes, product/service cycle, team building, operations, and a lot more. I’m passionate about the different industry and their working model, I knew it was through freelancing, that I would be able to get in and learn how it works

I come from an unconventional background trying to do something in the field of entrepreneurship. My life has been highly influenced by the military forces, as I belong to one. Due to this, I was fortunate to travel, meet and live with folks from different cultural backgrounds. It has taught me a lot about leadership, empathy, decision-making, discipline, and sacrifices. All of these have shaped my core values and principle for any kind of endeavor I’m a part of. I try to put my best or else I simply say no.

I have never worked from an office setup, I have always worked remotely living across places. That was something I was preparing for from my college days. But let me tell you this, It’s not an ideal thing to do especially early in your career. It’s really important to be in an ecosystem where we learn by seeing others. I quite really like the hybrid mode of work and maybe moving forward we might implement the same for Fueler.

Building a startup is curiosity on steroids. There is not enough time to learn, build, distribute & more. Have seen some of the lowest times in our journey building Fueler

Everyday we learn, build, fail and again relearn from our mistakes. We are trying to become better everyday. Meet Chandan, Abhishek, Aquib, and Anshu in action. We are just college graduates and dropouts building Fueler from small towns and villages in India

Present days

At present, I’m bootstrapping Fueler with my team. It's currently self-funded. We work as a consultant and freelancers to grow and build Fueler simultaneously. Yes, very difficult but not impossible. We are trying our best everyday to survive and extend our runway.

I have started sharing my learnings and our journey building Fueler on my Youtube Channel. You can check it out here. Please do subscribe, it will support our little team.

I feel startups are crazy, it builds you as a person in the least possible time. It is about compressing 20 years of a journey into 5 years. It is going to be the most ambitious years of your life. But coming from a small town, situations, people, support, and a lot more things are quite different for me and our team.

But does it all stop us from building a world-class startup? No. Not a single point in time. I know I just have to keep trying and keep going. Because, it’s not just about me, it's about team fueler, it’s going to be about million others who are going to believe themselves when chasing their dreams like us from small towns of India.

At times, I’m so excited to see startups coming from different parts of the country with innovative solutions for some of the daunting problems in our society. I have huge respect for the folks who have taken the leap of faith to work towards their dreams.

Friends, it comes with a huge opportunity cost along with so many challenges we often take for granted living in tier 1 cities. Simple example: I’m making a fractional amount of $$ working in my startup compared to my friends working at startups and MNCs.

I pray and wish for all those folks who are trying their best to succeed in their endeavor.

Life as a tool

From my personal understanding, I feel Life is a tool. Each and everything around us is a tool, and we are the main character of this game called life. You can pick up any tool you want and create the life you want. But always remember, a few high-leverage tools will always come at a cost and the cost is not always $$.

I will further expand this on my future issues with more ideas such as Internet Farming, Foundational Knowledge, Career Buffet, Point of Leverage, Compounding Excuses, Blue Chip Ideas, Radioactive Individuals, Permissionless Mindset, Templatized Efforts, Jigsaw of Luck, Credibility Distribution and many more.

If you are reading till the end, thank you so much. I hope you enjoy my future issues.

Your friend,
Riten

P.S - You can now join my community on WhatsApp. It’s going to be fun, trust me ✊