Three IIT Delhi classmates decided to leave their comfortable jobs at the height of the dot-com boom. They had a very simple aim, “we wanted to build the next Infosys!”. As these three IITans - Pradeep Chopra, Kapil Nakra, and Purvesh Sharma  - saw it, if Infosys could do it, why couldn’t they?

The next step was preparing a business plan. This plan, with detailed financial projections that will make an MBA proud, visualized the trio hitting the first million dollars in revenue within the first year, with a few months to spare. Onward to drumming up business and wooing potential investors. And they started pounding pavements.

Reality now worms it’s way into our story.

“Best laid plans of mice and men”, the poet Robert Burns wrote 225 years ago, “often go awry”. So did theirs. No one wanted to hire their services. Neither did anyone want to fund them.

Their usual explanation, whenever they couldn’t convert a prospect into a client or successfully pitch a potential investor, was, “this guy is not mature enough to understand us”, recalls Kapil with a laugh.

After months of getting no business or financial backers, a friend suggested building software for Java certification test preparation as stop-gap for generating some cash. “Making this just needs four days”, was the immediate estimate, says Pradeep. It finally took 27.

Another month later, after doing the rounds of more than a hundred IT training institutes, they had not notched up a single sale. Pradeep then had another idea, “Let us put this online”. No sale again.

The first purchase happened, unexpectedly, after 18 days. Twenty days after this first sale, two purchases in the same day!