Meet teen Fijian with four businesses to his name
Migrated from Ba to Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. Started his first business at age 13
With four businesses to his name and a ministerial award for innovation, Ashutosh Sharma has already achieved more than your typical 19-year-old.
Those achievements - and the plans he has for future ventures have been spurred by a passion for technology.
With his parents, his brother and his sister, Mr Sharma migrated to Auckland at the beginning of 2013 from the outskirts of Ba, Fiji. After going to Auckland Grammar, he put off tertiary study to focus on his newest venture - online marketplace Sell My Good, which he says he spends “at least” 100 hours a week working on.
If he does go to university, Mr Sharma says he’ll study software engineering.
His family’s move to New Zealand opened up a lot of possibilities, he says.
“When I was in Fiji the internet speed was really, really slow. Here we are in megabytes, but over there it’s in kilobytes.
“When I came to New Zealand it gave me more exposure to the internet market and all of the possibilities.”
Mr Sharma got his first computer when he was a five-year-old, and has had an avid interest in technology ever since. By the time he was 10 he began programming and coding.
“Every day after school I used to come home and polish my skills as much as possible.
“When I was in Form five to Form seven, it just became a routine, I used to spend time on the computer, learning how to code and learning more programming languages.”
At the age of 13, he started his first business.
The online marketplace - the original idea and concept for Sell My Good - gained 60,000 users in Fiji, but was shut down a year later after Mr Sharma ran into legal issues because of his age.
Closing the business was a hard decision to make, he says, but he relaunched it last month, with a new user interface, and it has experienced rapid growth from New Zealand. Mr Sharma spent $6000 to relaunch the business, which he says has more than two million users and has handled transactions worth more than NZ$1 million (FJ$1.46m) in just 31 days. He expects it to hit more than four million page views by the end of next month.
Sell My Good operates in more than 40 countries; that’s the beauty of technology and the internet, Mr Sharma says. “What I like about technology is that you can scale it pretty fast, pretty quickly; everything is built on the internet,” he says. “Nothing is impossible in world of software.”
The site is most popular with people in Vietnam and the US, but is yet to reach its potential in New Zealand, he says.