Mr. Prakhar Mishra is a law student by profession and an entrepreneur by heart. He took the brave step of venturing into something unexplored by him and excelled with sheer dedication and passion for his work. Here’s Mr. Mishra in conversation with Desi Kaanoon about his ventures, future plans and more.
Q. How were your early law school days like?
A. I believe I had an ideal first year which every law student must have i.e. commit a mistake and learn from it. I made a lot of mistakes in terms of choices, whether it be choosing my subjects (I chose BA where I felt sleeping could have been a better alternative and then migrated to the majestic arena of BBA after 2 months), friends, internships, study methods, time management but most importantly, I made sure that I rectified my mistakes and learn from it. My aim was always to be the fast mover and hence, I did one of the highest numbers of internships any law student could do in his or her first year and simultaneously made sure that I never sacrifice the quality over the quantity. This gave me a huge variety of experience in just my first year itself.
Q. How would you describe the environment at your law school?
A. A law school is something where you can learn from your day-to-day observations of your friends, teachers, seniors and their experiences which make sure that you do not fall into any pit in which they have already fallen. One of the best things about the National Law Universities is the cultural diversity which they offer. This helped me a lot in planning my products’ offerings in my ventures. This is different from any state college where you meet, greet and live with people from the entire country and hence become very well-versed with the taste of the people of different states of India.
Q. From where did you draw inspiration to set up your startups?
A. After my first year I had an aim to clear the judicial services as the power and authority factor fascinated me at that time. Then in 2020 when the lockdown happened, I along with one of my juniors, launched a venture which was based on legal updates and other legal stuff. After a few months in September 2020, I launched Law Mentoring and due to some reasons I had to withdraw my partnership from my very first venture in November. That was a tough time for me to see myself pulling back out of something where I held the position of a founding partner. Keeping the pain aside, I, Mr. Pallab Das and Mr. Govind Singh (my perennial and by default co-founder in every venture) vowed to make Law Mentoring a huge hit among law students. As a result, just after two months, we stood at 10k followers on Instagram, successfully hired and worked with 600+ interns and paid 50+ people, what they call “Zindagi ki pehli kamai”. After this, I made up my mind that entrepreneurship was something that I was made for. The day I decided that I have to quit the plan of going for the judiciary (or was rather made to quit by Govind), we decided to launch Success Boat and dive all in to help the anxious and suffering CLAT aspirants. To the present day, we have launched 5 ventures and plan to launch more in the coming time.
Q. According to you, what should be an ideal mindset to initiate a legal startup?
A. According to my observation, some of the most basic mistakes that every start-up founder in the legal field makes is having many co-founders or partners, being reluctant in investing even a small amount, expecting monetary returns from the very first month, not having that X factor in their idea and just following the herd and just blindly partnering up with every organization that they see for just getting their logo placed on that organization’s poster or certificate in the name of being a media partner. If someone reads this and takes the mistakes as their learnings, he/she can definitely get a gist of the ideal mindset to start their own legal start-up.
Q. Your venture for law aspirants-Success Boat is working amidst a lot of competitors. What makes it different?
A. First of all, Success Boat is not coaching. When we analyzed this field, we saw that there are huge giants already who successfully brainwash people every year and fill their pockets with huge chunks of money by playing with the aspirants’ dream and trading with their parents’ hard-earned money. We have come up with a concept whose main aim is to provide whatever an aspirant requires (apart from the coaching) to secure his/her seat in their dream college or university. Ranging from question banks to mocks, from mentorships to study plans, from live sessions to de-stressing sessions and personal phone calls to calm them and motivate them at a price, the entire team of 60+ people at Success Boat are consistently trying that if the aspirant gives 100%, we’ll give out 200% for their preparation. Witnessing the pathetic remuneration scenario of the entire legal industry, it was our aim at Success Boat to make it the only legal start-up to remunerate 100% of its position holders, members and interns. As a result of this whole concept, we are successfully helping more than 1000 law aspirants right now at the date of this interview and guess what, we launched just 85 days ago!
Q. You have also had significant experience in Marketing. Has that experience been useful in marketing your current ventures?
A. Yes! If I had experience in marketing, I would definitely use it to the fullest in my ventures. I believe that was one of the key reasons why we were able to grow both Law Mentoring and Success Boat from zero to what they are today in such a short span of time. Your ventures survive on marketing as their oxygen cylinders.
Q. Your startups are offering internships to many ambitious law students across India. Do you feel there is any need for improvement on their part?
A. What I have noticed while recruiting legal interns as an employer or a co-founder is that not everyone has professionalism. Rather, they get triggered when I point out certain behaviour as unprofessional. They weigh the job in hand with their year and the name of the college and want that they should be allotted work accordingly and not on the calibre they have. It is a proven fact that someone from 1st year could be way better than someone in their 5th year or someone from a college whose name we haven’t even heard might outperform some from tier-1 NLUs.
Q. How has the experience of entrepreneurship been so far?
A. It has been a magical journey so far. I can’t even go back and think that I was about to prepare for Judicial Services which would have simply ruined my life as I would have been doing something which I would have never enjoyed. When I open my eyes, every day as an entrepreneur unlocks new challenges, new ideas, new growth prospects and new rants from different people. It is hard for me to put the thrill I get into words here.
Q. What do you count as your most valuable learnings?
A. Finding the right people for the right spot, polishing the uncut stones into diamonds, ignoring bad-mouthing or random criticisms and working on my services and products to enhance user experiences have been some of my key learnings.
Q. What are your future plans?
A. My future plans are to venture out of the legal field and the show has begun with the launch of Writoflix which is a Content writing agency where we are already serving 30 plus big media houses and companies. We open up vacancies frequently for content writers and ensure that they are paid handsomely for the content that they deliver to us.