Hi!

Last time we talked, I was launching the beta of the Indian Visa Service. There's a lot to catch you up on!

What I've been up to:

1. House hunting
2. Pausing Visa project
3. Building more products for In Our Image
4. Making progress on Manthrakodi Marketplace

House Hunting

I probably know every property that's available in the Northern Virginia area. I just enjoy seeing what's out there. Plus I'm shopping for different personas:

• A single-family home, with a bedroom on the first floor, for my parents
• A SFH for my brother's growing family
• A condo that can be turned into an investment property for me or my fiancee

Hopefully, by the end of the year, I'll have more information to share about the logistics of a 1031 exchange and how it can save your family a huge amount of money in taxes.

Indian Visa Project Updates

So I had two people fill out the initial interest form for the Indian Visa Project. But then they never completed the full form that required payment.

I could have been more diligent in reaching out to them to set up a call and manually get all the information or even fill out the form myself.

But I found at least 4 different services that did this for people already. There is obviously room in the market to create another service that does this but it's not the automated service I imagined it to be.

There's still potential for this to be a service that my Dad does in his retirement so I'm not giving up on it. But it's taking away time and energy from my other side hustles that are working such as...

In Our Image

This is my personal project where I make resources for the Indian Orthodox Church (the Church I belong to).

I recently launched a physical product and got my first sale. You can read about that journey here.

This is something I see myself doubling up on. I love creating products for this niche.

Manthrakodi Marketplace

I think I left off last time mentioning that I was actively setting up calls with vendors to find out their pain points and discover opportunities for a solution.

I found out that vendors often refer each other to couples. Instead of kickbacks, the referred vendor might pass a discount on to the couple.

I thought I could leverage this type of relationship at scale. Similar to a discount card model, I thought I could create a membership for couples ($200 one time cost) where they get access to pre-negotiated rates from vendors who specialize in the Malayalee Christian wedding space.

The couple will hopefully save thousands of dollars across their vendors and the vendors get more exposure to potential clients.

I'm working on onboarding more vendors right now. I ideally want 3 to 10 vendors for each category in each major metro area.

There's a lot of opportunity to build more onto this membership such as planning and financial resources. And the big whale would be negotiating preferred rates with venues that can accommodate over 350 people.

Excited to see where it goes!

To more creating,

Aswin