I didn’t start with a course, a mentor, or a roadmap. I started with a curiosity I couldn’t switch off — and a Blogger account that nobody read. Here’s what happened in the five years that followed.
It started before the laptop
Most people wait until they have the right setup to begin. I didn’t have that option — I started anyway. Back in Class 12, while most of my classmates were focused on board exams, I was obsessing over how websites worked, why some blogs got traffic and others didn’t, and whether I could figure any of it out myself.
I started a blog on Blogger. It wasn’t good. The writing was rough, the SEO was nonexistent, and the design was whatever the free template gave me. But it was mine — and more importantly, it was real. I was learning by doing before I even had a vocabulary for what I was doing.
That phase taught me something that no course ever could: that starting badly is infinitely better than not starting at all.
2021: A laptop changes everything
When I got my first laptop in 2021, something clicked. Suddenly the gap between idea and execution got a lot smaller. I built my first WordPress website — then a second, then a third, then a fourth. Each one taught me something new. One was a general niche site. One was a finance website. I was figuring out how no-code web building worked, how to structure a site for SEO, how to actually get pages to rank.
At the same time, I enrolled in a BBA degree where digital marketing was a core subject. For once, what I was studying in class matched what I was actually doing outside it — Google Ads, SEO, SEM. I wasn’t just reading about these things in a textbook. I was testing them on real websites with real (if tiny) audiences.
“The classroom gave me the theory. My projects gave me the scars. Both were necessary.”
The TikTok experiment that worked a little too well
2021 was also the year I went deep into affiliate marketing and social media. I built a TikTok channel from scratch and grew it to 30,000 followers in 30 days — purely organic, no paid promotion, no collaborations. Just content, consistency, and a genuine obsession with understanding how the platform algorithm worked.
I launched Instagram and grew that too. I built five YouTube channels across different niches, generating views and learning what made content actually get watched versus what got buried. Every platform taught me something different about attention, audience psychology, and what people actually want to see versus what creators think they want to make.
By the end of this period I had more practical knowledge about growing audiences than most people with “social media manager” on their LinkedIn profile.
My first real job — and what I proved there
After completing my BBA, I joined xFanatical — the company behind Safe Doc, a Google Workspace management tool for K–12 schools — first as an intern, then full-time as a Digital Marketing Specialist.
In six months of full-time work, I grew their LinkedIn impressions by 30x, increased Reddit reach by 50%, and improved YouTube engagement by 10%. These weren’t flukes — they were the result of a deliberate platform-by-platform content strategy, community engagement, and a lot of iteration.
Around the same time, a friend asked me to help with their startup’s marketing. I ran Meta ad campaigns for them — built from zero, tested aggressively, optimised weekly — and delivered 200 qualified leads at ₹1,000 total spend. That number still makes me proud every time I say it out loud.
The thing I’m most proud of: building a tool without knowing how to code
At some point I got frustrated that there was no easy way to analyse the script style of a YouTube video and replicate it for new content. So I decided to build one myself.
The problem: I’m not a coder. I don’t know Python. I can’t read a line of JavaScript without getting a headache.
The solution: vibe coding — using AI tools to build the product piece by piece, testing constantly, fixing what broke, and shipping something that actually works. The result is a tool that takes a YouTube video link and outputs a replication of that video’s script style, ready to use for your own content.
“Not knowing how to code didn’t stop me. It just meant I had to figure out a different way in.”
What I’ve learned from all of it
Five years in, the through-line is pretty clear: I learn fastest by doing things I’m not yet qualified to do. Every website, every campaign, every platform, every tool I’ve built has come from jumping in before I was ready — and figuring it out as I went.
Digital marketing rewards people who are willing to experiment, fail quietly, adjust, and keep going. Credentials help. Courses help. But nothing teaches you faster than having skin in the game — your own project, your own audience, your own ad spend on the line.
If you’re at the beginning of your journey and waiting to feel ready — don’t. Open a free account somewhere. Build something small. Break it. Fix it. That’s where the real education starts.
Divam Kaushal
Digital Marketing Strategist based in Dehradun, India. I help small businesses and personal brands grow online through SEO, paid ads, social media, and content strategy. Building things on the internet since Class 12 — and somehow still not bored of it.