IIM Ranchi · Ongoing hiring process, 2025
Founder & CEO, Tripyog
Not a straight line. A village-school beginning, a mechanical engineering degree, a near-fatal illness, a sales career built from scratch — and then, in October 2022, ₹100 and a decision to build something of his own.
Class 10th, at a village school in Bihar — no head start, no connections, no template for what came next.
Took admission and completed a degree in mechanical engineering — the conventional path, followed as far as it would go.
A health crisis took his weight from 68kg to 40kg. What recovery gave back wasn't just health — it was a reason.
"If you have been given another chance to live, you must make it meaningful and different."
Built a career in sales from the ground up — closing, negotiation, reading people — and drove it to ₹2 Cr before starting a company of his own.
₹2 Cr, built in sales₹100. Patna, Bihar. No investors, no inherited playbook, no Plan B — just a decision to fix what broken travel companies never did: accountability, transparency, and genuine customer trust.
Startup capital: ₹1003.5 years in. Zero external funding. 500+ hotels onboarded, 5+ live destinations, 4.9★ across 400+ Google reviews — and a set of institutions inviting a founder from a village school to speak to their students: IIM Mumbai, Ranchi, Shillong, Trichy, Udaipur, and IIT Bombay.
"Ten years from now, when you are sitting on your own rooftop — will you be watching? Or will you be flying?"Salaj Kumar · Founder, Tripyog
Young Indian professionals want to travel but have no trustworthy, curated option built for them. I started Tripyog from Bihar, in October 2022, to fix that.
Very few founders from a non-metro, bootstrapped background get this — official recruitment calls and speaking invitations from India's top institutes.
Delivered a session to students on building Tripyog from ₹100, without external funding — the decisions, the near-failures, and the discipline it took to get there.
Written during the same period as the "Dark Years" on my journey — a first-hand account of the 30-day journaling practice that helped me rebuild, offered as a simple, repeatable step for anyone in a stage where growth has stalled.
Journaling changed my life — and I've watched it change others'. This book is one honest way to start.
Get the book on Amazon
In March 2025, Tripyog crossed its first crore. Zero to 1Cr is the story of what happened in between — written from the second mile of a marathon still being run, by a first-generation founder from a tier-3 city, with a B.Tech from a college nobody's heard of.
For the 24-year-old in Indore starting something from her phone. The 30-year-old in Ranchi who keeps postponing. Every founder who's been quietly told serious businesses are built somewhere else. They are not.
Get the book on AmazonOccasional, first-hand notes on running a bootstrapped company from a tier-2/3 city — no growth-hacking threads, no borrowed frameworks. Just what actually happened, written after it happened.
Nothing published here yet. I'd rather write one honest note than ten empty ones.
Email me and I'll let you know when it's up →