An Interview with Mustaqh Ali Shaik from Moschip
Mustaqh has spent almost seven-plus years working as a Digital Marketing professional with companies like OdigMa, Trinity and Elmeasure India Pvt Ltd. He currently takes care of marketing and branding activities for Moschip Technologies as Associate Manager, Digital Marketing. Student for a lifetime, strong-willed about his ideas, social media savvy and a movie buff.
Further, let us hear from him,
Hello and Welcome Mustaqh,
Let’s begin with your unique story, could you please share that with us?
Sure, It begins in Peda Jagarlamudi, a small village in Prakasam Dist., Andhra Pradesh in a Muslim community where higher education was never an option. Your future is literally in your father’s hands. In my case, I consider myself blessed to have a father who placed high importance in ensuring we get the best of knowledge & excel in our life. His understanding and zeal towards quality education in the family decided our future, which has successfully led us here today. Though most of my friends ended up in daily labour, construction works, Etc., I can tell, I could make a difference only because of my father.
My father in his knowhow got the information about Navodaya Schools where they use to provide high standard education for free with all the amenities & requisites with proper food to deserving students. It seemed to be a great opportunity as my parents couldn’t afford to educate their two children in better schools. My father is a tailor & my mom was a daily wage earner in farm fields then.
My parents sent my brother for the coaching of Navodaya exam for a year with all the savings they had of almost two years. But to our dismay, he couldn’t clear it. My brother was devastated with the result as he knew the amount of hard work my parents had put in for him. He somehow made up his mind & took to training me for the exam at home after his regular school in the evenings for one hour.
We are just 1.5 years apart from each other in age but he was quite matured than me & made me understand about the different things that were going on at that time. With a lot of hard work and great difficulty, he trained & prepared me for the exam. And, boom, I was selected by the Navodaya School. Everyone was happy, mostly my brother as he felt relieved of the pain & from then on he has been the one I look up to,
This was the start of my free education & from then on my whole education journey was almost free of cost. Though I was a Telugu medium student, I was able to clear my Xth with 91.4% in CBSE in English medium, which landed me in free XI & XII with IIT coachings and in return, the college offered my parents extra money of 10k to let me join in their college. Everyone had more expectations on me saying, he cracked Navodaya without coaching, but they didn’t know I had better coaches than everyone else, My brother & our poverty.
I couldn’t crack IIT, I had taken the longterm for IIT even then I was unable to clear it, but I ended up achieving a good score in BITS exam. I missed the chance to join BITS as I was unaware of the application and selection procedure of the college. But then I also had appeared for EAMCET, A state-level Btech selection exam where I had secured 5k rank, this was a good score & got me a free seat again for ECE in JNTU.
B.Tech was never a destination for me, but it was a suggested path & I accepted it. I always wanted to do an MBA in marketing. Digital marketing was unknown/unheard. I self-prepared for CAT and was able to merely score a percentile of ~75 & grabbed a seat in National School of Business in Bangalore at low fees that we could afford.
Took educational loan mortgaging our house and joined the college. Here I got introduced to real-life & corporate learning. Digital Marketing was introduced to me as an internship program (in ODigMa) like how you are providing now. The two months of Digital Marketing Internship has been the best thing that happened to my education of 15+ years. Rest is history, my professional path shaped as seen in my LinkedIn profile
Personal: Married to the love of my life & blessed with a baby boy. My wife is an MBA too, working on a few startups where we share ideas & help her build it with zero cost.
According to you, what is the best way to start the day?
It’s always family that is important to me. Begin your day with health in mind, exercise and end your day among your family members. Everything else is secondary, even the career.
Who is or has been your inspiration?
I truly believe, inspiration is based on the characters of the people that we get attracted to. We can’t have inspiration just because we want to succeed like them or make money or live life like others. Along with all this, their character also has an impact on us. If you want me to point one person who can influence people, it would be the former president of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam sir. I don’t think the reason is necessary 🙂
What makes digital marketing different from traditional marketing?
Digital Marketing definition itself makes it different from traditional marketing. If I have to be honest, Digital Marketing is the part of the evolution of Marketing practice just like how people evolve to be their better version. This evolution is more of exponential than a straight line with the improved resources & ways of accessing it. What makes Digital Marketing different from traditional marketing is its era of practice and what keeps it ahead of its time is the growth hacking techniques backed by the unparalleled growth of entrepreneurship culture in the past decade.
What are your three favourite digital marketing tools?
I know that you know, there can’t be limited tools for digital marketing. If we have so, we never have a growth hacking concept. Exploring new tools to outperform the old has been the best tool. So, it starts with
- Product Hunt – I consider this a Digital marketing tool first where it helps find the other tools & promote your brand too. This also provides high page rank for your SEO.
- I mostly use LastPass, it continues to stay in my favourite list – With which I would access any of my tools from anywhere.
- WordPress – to define the face of your brand, i.e., Website without even knowing to code.
How would you define success in your career?
My father feels proud of me & my brother wanted to start an NGO to encourage education in rural areas, starting from the two villages where my father & mother were born. Seeing this happen would be the definition of success for me in my career.
What is your biggest dream in life?
My biggest dream is to establish a fintech company & be in the list of Forbes 40 under 40.
What is worth spending more on to get the best?
I always believe there is an alternative to everything except for Mother. There are two things I always trust that mostly rule the world, Either you need to spend TIME or you should spend MONEY.
PS: of course, this topic is always debatable.
eg: You can start a company either with money (Funding or self invest) or spending time on learning how to start it for free without even spending a penny.
Lastly, would you like to say something to our readers?
You might be an enthusiast, confident & well-versed individual in all means, but always have a mentor. You can only see/know just a half about your self as we don’t have eyes behind us. Have a Mentor.
Thank you, we truly appreciate your valuable time spent with us.
Thank you for this opportunity Deepak, wishing you all the best & luck.
We wish you the best in all your future endeavours.
Cheers,
Deepak Kanakaraju