The youngest CEO in India – Ashwin Ramesh

DailySEOblog had already featured Suhas Gopinath as the world’s youngest CEO in the world sometime earlier. The story was about a guy who made it big owning a company at the age of 17. But hey! That’s old story.

Meet Ashwin Ramesh, the “Youngest CEO in India. Probably the youngest in the world.”

I met Ashwin at the SearchCamp Chennai and was deeply impressed with his skills and am sure you too will be. He is CEO to OrganicApex a company which is into SEO, SEM and SMM services. He started his first firm when he was 15 years old and evolved into Organic Apex. Today Organic Apex has branches worldwide and employs around 35 people.

I managed to interview the man and this is the first of it’s kind interview he’s given ever. Exclusive to DailySEOblog.

How much money do you make per month?
- That is something which I cannot say that openly but yeah, its a good amount. I reinvest most of the profits I make..

What is the size of your company?
- Almost 35 people ( as per my knowledge )

What services do you offer?
- Organic SEO, PPC Related Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Internet Marketing Solutions

What opportunities do you see forth?
- I see an imminent boom in the Internet sector resulting in people everywhere trying to monetize on it.
But as always, only the early birds will really make loads of cash and also Internet Marketing is going to be HUGE ( h1 tags for that? )

What is your current business model?
- We currently do direct sales marketing ( does that make any sense? ) for our services and I do have a set of web ventures which are doing pretty decent for the time being.

When did you start this business?
- I started this about a year back and before that i was here and there into Adsense and affiliate marketing.

What actually made you think about it? Please describe how things rolled out.
- Well, that’s a very very long story.

A friend of mine ( or should I say mentor ) told me that he got his first Adsense cheque. I didn’t know what the heck Adsense was and i though “WTF! When he can do it, I can too”.
I started out with my first blog trying to monetize on Adsense but miserably failed.
I was making 0.00$ a month from Adsense and I decided to resort to click fraud, I worked with click fraud till i made 99$ on my Adsense account and my account got banned just then. That small mistake of mine, is costing me a lot now…
Once Adsense was done with, I met this guy who taught me affiliate marketing and clickbank, I did make a little money with it but wasn’t satisfied.

Then there came Mr. SEO Guy…
He was this guy who was 1 year elder to me who was bragging to me about his BIG SEO FIRM ( which turned out to be bogus ) and his large kitty of earnings.
I obviously got jealous and set out to create my own firm and made enough money freelancing from home to create a fully functioning unit.

Were there any bottlenecks during this time running your business? How did you overcome them?
You Bet! Being a Young Entrepreneur in India Sucks! Especially if your from a very conservative family like mine.
My dad wanted me to become a software engineer and it took a whole load of persuasion and a not or recommendation from my uncle to really make him have a look at the potential in this industry ( I’m sure my dad would agree now that it was stupid to call this a waste of time now )
I still face these bottlenecks – Formal Education.

It gets very tough pursuing formal education and running a firm.
Worse cause people in school don’t understand what I’m doing ( I’m nicknamed foreigner after I told them that I might be going to Adtech NY this year )

Actually, none of my teachers know what I’m doing and I wouldn’t want them to know.

Most of the people I meet think that everybody who makes cash must wear a costly sneaker or own a BMW car – That is dip shit ( inspired by Mr. Someone from Taiwan at SearchCamp )

PS: I get a pocket money of 25 cents a day
PPS: MY bank account is in my mom’s name.

Anybody else in my shoes would have dropped out of school, but I still stick to school because I think I should be DIFFERENT ( Lets see how long that lasts )

If other people were to take inspiration from you, what would you recommend them?
I really don’t know.
If my story inspired you, maybe you should keep this in mind ” Always do what you want even if someone tells you not to do it – They’re telling you not to do it because they couldn’t do it or think it cant be done ”
( Flicked from the movie “The Pursuit of Happiness” )

What are your future plans?
Short Term:
Make Organic Apex the Largest Organic SEO Firm in the World ( IS that too BIG? – Then lets settle for Asia )
Long Term:
To create something which would make everyone else would look up and take notice at ( A competitor to one of Google’s products )

I want to do so many things one of which would be to clear the Internet of people projecting themselves to be nice guys but clearly trying to make cash.