Three years ago, if someone had told me I’ll be able to inspire other people (especially women) by sharing my story, I would not have believed them. Things didn’t change overnight of course. Everything I am today is because of years and years of hard work and a “never give up” attitude.
I am Shruti Balasa, a full stack developer and a tech educator. I work for myself — Creating courses, tutorials and writing eBooks as a full time job. Oh, and this full time is only part of my day because my actual full time job is being a mother for a 6 year old adorable boy.
I have always been a hard working, studious girl throughout my childhood. In your school days, if your parents ever told you - “Look at him/her and learn. Why can’t you study like that?”, that “ideal” person in your parents’ eyes would be me. Great at academics, but zero at everything else! But it all worked out great. I got into one of the best Engineering colleges in India. And I was told that, every student in Computer Science gets placed in this college and the minimum pay package was 3 lakh INR per annum. I did my math and said - “That’s cool. I will get at least 20k in my hand every month. More than enough.”
Yes, my dreams were that small. Much smaller than what I was really capable of. But I didn’t know that.
Towards the end of my first year of engineering, I happened to get introduced to a multi-level network marketing scheme. I enrolled into it mostly because I couldn’t say “no”. Turns out — this was the best decision of my life so far. It wasn’t the company itself, but the people who were leading me. I overcame my shyness, learnt how to speak to anyone (finally), started speaking at small gathering and overcame stage fright and learnt a whole lot about sales and marketing. I didn’t make much money, but who cares.
In the third year of engineering, Microsoft came to our campus to recruit students for internship. It was a BIG thing. Everyone around me started preparing for it a week prior to that. I really didn’t know how big a deal it was until I attended their orientation on the day of recruitment. It was supposed to be a 3-month internship programme at Hyderabad with a monthly stipend of 25k INR. That was in 2010. The stipend was way more than the average monthly salary one could get after engineering. I attended the written round and came out thinking - “That was hard! There’s no way I’m getting selected”. I hanged around in college until lunch time and was about to leave when my classmate came running to me and said - “Hey, you’re selected for the interview round”. I cannot forget this moment! It just showed how less I believed in myself. I completed three rounds of interviews but we were not given the results by end of day. I arrived at my college next morning and right from the gate till my classroom (it’s a long walk), I was congratulated by so many people and I had no clue for what! Apparantly, I was among just 4 people in the entire college selected for the internship at Microsoft - a dream for many! This changed my life forever. I knew I belonged in this industry and I knew I needed to aim higher.
I got placed at this amazing company Citrix through campus placements - another dream job for many. I was happy working there, but I soon realised I could never be a just a cog in the wheel. I wanted to be able to see the big picture. Just then, my mentor (who I met through the MLM) told me he had an idea for a social media and asked me if I could build it. I said, “Well, I do have a computer science degree, but I really don’t know if I can build a web app”. But I took on the challenge. I used to work at Citrix from 9 am to 6 pm, came back home and worked on my web development skills from 7pm to 1am (sometimes even 3am). Just 9 months down the line, I was confident enough to quit my high paying job and join my mentor in his start-up journey for zero income.
I was a self-taught developer - kept learning and kept delivering lots of web apps single-handedly for almost 5 years at this start-up. I learnt a lot more than just web development - how a start-up runs, how to get clients, crack sales, how social media marketing works and so on.
Then comes another turning point in my life - I was pregnant and I had no clue how to continue my career after my child was born. Every place I looked for inspiration, I only saw that career-oriented women didn’t always have the family life I was hoping for. I saw my tiny little baby and even after a year I was unable to imagine going back to full-time work, letting grandparents or a nanny take care of him. No. I wanted to be there when he spoke his first words, took his first steps, giggled, played, cried, got hurt - every single time he needed someone, I wanted to be that someone!
So, in the little time I got while he napped, I started taking up Udemy courses. While going through one of them. I thought, “Hey! This course on Udemy - I can do a much better job”. And I took that seriously. What would I lose if I created a course? I’m not working anyway. It took me 9 months of 2-4 hours of working everyday - mostly late nights because I couldn’t record during the noisy daytime. It was hard work! After an entire day of taking care of a toddler, it was hard to stay up after everyone else went to bed. But it was done. I published a course on basics of HTML and CSS! After all that hard work, I assumed it was time to reap the rewards. I thought students will magically find and buy my course. Of course I was wrong! Nobody knew me. How any why would someone buy my course when there were hundred other instructors who had more experience and reputation.
That’s when my mentor suggested that I start creating content on Twitter and / or Youtube - short videos or tips and tricks that I’ve learned during my self-taught journey. I started with no expectations. Followed tech people on Twitter, carefully observed how everyone’s creating content and started doing the same. Slowly, but consistently. My follower count started picking up. Simultaneously I started publishing short videos on Youtube too. People seemed to love my teaching style. Youtube started picking up too.
It was NOT easy because it took a long time for my family to actually see the results. Until then, they only thought I was wasting time, spoiling my health, working too hard unnecessarily. But I kept going without expecting, without knowing where I’m headed.
I observed the trend that once someone hit 10k followers on Twitter, they would write an eBook 😀 I wanted to do the same. And I wanted to do it really well. Again, didn’t expect anything, I just wanted to put out a good resource on “CSS Flexbox and Grid” because I really didn’t find much content on real-world use-cases of these two concepts. This book was a big hit. My very first book made a revenue of $10k in the very first month.
People started finding me on Twitter and Youtube and I started getting offers for creating courses, training teams, mentoring, appearing on podcasts and speaking at meetups and conferences. The ball started rolling. I continued doing as much as I could in the 3 - 4 hours every day while my highest priority was still being the primary care giver of my child.
In the last 2.5 years, I released 2 eBooks, published 4 courses on reputed platforms, spoke at 3 virtual conferences and 5 in-person international conferences and at various small meetups. I also have about 34k followers on Twitter and more than 12k subscribers on Youtube. Currently, I'm also co-building VoxPopSites - making it super simple to build websites for not-so-tech-savvy people. And I can see that all this is just the beginning of a long road ahead.
But my biggest success is that I still work for only about 4 hours a day, 5 days a week and spend crazy amount of time cooking and taking care of my family. I travel a lot and have time for friends, reading books and learning to play piano. I’m living the life of my dreams!
I did what I could, with how much I had, with what I knew and never stopped! I will continue doing the same…