How Abhishek Vyas serial entrepreneur, podcast host, and community builder went from ₹7,000 in his bank account to building a market-leading empire, and why his most important chapter is still being written.
There is a particular kind of hunger that comes from growing up in a city nobody has heard of. Not hunger as a metaphor but the real, bone-deep restlessness that makes a person leave home and refuse to settle until they have built something that justifies the leaving.
Abhishek Vyas grew up with that hunger in Bhilwara, Rajasthan. And he never let it go.
Today, Abhishek Vyas is the Founder and CEO of My Haul Store (MHS) – India’s leading influencer marketing agency – commanding a team of 200+ professionals, a network of over 1 lakh influencers spanning 10,000 pin codes, and client partnerships with some of India’s most iconic brands. He is simultaneously the creator and host of two popular podcast channels (The Founder’s Dream and The Powerful Humans), a published author, the founder of cloud kitchen brand The Powerful Kitchen. But strip away the numbers and the portfolio, and what you find underneath is something simpler and more powerful: a man from a tier-2 Indian city who refused to believe that geography was destiny.
The Bhilwara Beginning: Failures, a Borrowed ₹1.82 Lakh, and a Big Bet
Long before My Haul Store existed, Abhishek Vyas was learning the hard way. After completing his B.Tech and MBA, he dabbled in corporate jobs and gritty entrepreneurship, trying and failing at over nine different business ideas. He speaks candidly about this period: the wrong markets, the bad timing, and the exhausting grind of building things that simply did not work.
The turning point came in 2018. Vyas had spent years working with influencers in a previous company and grew convinced that the Indian creator economy was wildly underserved. Brands were failing to reach authentic audiences, and creators in small towns and regional markets were being completely ignored by mainstream agencies. He saw a gap so wide you could drive a truck through it.
In 2020, at the height of a global pandemic that had paralyzed most of India, Abhishek Vyas founded My Haul Store. He started with ₹1.82 lakh – most of it borrowed – leaving him with just ₹7,000 in his personal bank account. It was, by any conventional measure, a terrible time to start a business. It turned out to be exactly the right time.
The name My Haul Store itself carries a story. One of the early ideas was to empower women creators – particularly homemakers who had the talent and the audience but no platform or income – to do what they loved and earn from it. The name, rooted in the idea of showing off your ‘haul’ of products, quickly became a brand identity for authenticity over artifice.
My Haul Store: How a Tier-2 Founder Cracked India’s Creator Economy
Most influencer agencies operate from the same predictable playbook: sign metro-based creators with large followings, pitch them to big brands, and collect fees. My Haul Store looked at India through a completely different lens.
Vyas understood something his competitors missed: India is not one single market. It has thousands of micro-markets, each with its own language, preferences, and cultural references.
“In our country, the language changes every 50 kilometers.” Abhishek Vyas
MHS built its competitive edge on this exact insight. Instead of chasing a handful of hyper-saturated metro influencers, it quietly built a network of 50,000 regional creators spread across 10,000 pin code people who spoke Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Gujarati in Gujarat, and understood the buying behavior of their local communities in ways no national agency could replicate. With the vast majority of India’s population residing in rural and semi-urban areas, the real brand opportunity was always in this demographic. MHS simply arrived first.
[Traditional Agencies] —> Focus on Metro Creators —> Saturated Audiences
[My Haul Store (MHS)] —> Focus on Regional Pincodes —> Hyper-Targeted Trust
Amazon was My Haul Store’s first major client, a partnership that speaks to the immediate credibility Vyas built. That first breakthrough campaign proved that regional creators could deliver real, measurable results for the largest e-commerce brand in the world. More giants quickly followed: Myntra, Godrej, Mamaearth, Country Delight, Amazon, and Snapdeal. To date, over 1,500 brands have worked with MHS.
This massive scale places the company firmly in the top tier of India’s marketing ecosystem and validates the hyper-local thesis entirely. The platform has successfully empowered over 1 lakh influencers, many of whom had never previously received a single brand collaboration.
Furthermore, Vyas has been vocal about restoring integrity to the influencer marketing space, an industry that has too often prioritized vanity metrics like inflated follower counts and fake engagement. Under his leadership, MHS built internal systems for creator verification, transparent payment practices, and measurable campaign ROI, making accountability a core pillar of the company’s identity.
An Ecosystem for India’s Invisible Founders
Somewhere in the journey of building My Haul Store, Abhishek Vyas realized that his story of the failures, the borrowed capital, the grind from a tier-2 city was also the story of millions of Indian founders who had no platform and no community. The mainstream startup conversation in India is largely conducted in English, centered in premium hubs like Bangalore and Mumbai, and features founders from legacy institutions. Vyas was none of those things. And neither are most of India’s real entrepreneurs.
That realization led him to build two podcast channels that have since evolved into a genuine movement in India’s creator economy:
- The Founder’s Dream: Recognized as India’s top Hindi business podcast, this channel serves as a raw, real, and deeply human conversation series with founders, creators, and grassroots entrepreneurs. Vyas interviews business builders like a peer who has been through the trenches, rather than a journalist probing for a headline. It has built a fiercely loyal audience of first-generation founders who have finally found a show that speaks business the way they actually think.
- The Powerful Humans: The companion channel takes a broader scope, bringing in individuals from across society who are making an impact through their businesses, startups, or distinct ideas. Featuring entrepreneurs, lawyers, scientists, artists, and change-makers, the unifying thread is authentic storytelling and the courage to build something real.
Distributed across YouTube, Spotify, JioSaavn, and Amazon Audible, these platforms represent a media ecosystem built specifically to fill a gap that English-language startup media never could. They are the initial community infrastructure for India’s tier-2 and tier-3 founders.
Solving Real World Problems
Every venture Abhishek Vyas has built can be traced back to a problem he personally encountered.
- The Powerful Kitchen: operating out of Bangalore, this cloud kitchen brand exists because Vyas understands what it means to leave home young and navigate life in a new city where good, affordable food is hard to come by. The brand focuses on fresh, healthy, and pocket-friendly meals serving corporate clients and events.
Add to this his published book, Your Company Is Going to Shut Down a candid exploration of the challenges of building a sustainable business, drawn directly from his own journey of nine failed ventures and one resounding success – and the picture that emerges is of a founder who doesn’t just build companies, but builds knowledge assets that outlast them.
The 1,000 Person Vision: Building for a Generation
When Abhishek Vyas speaks about the future, he doesn’t reach for conventional startup metrics like valuations, funding rounds, or exits. He speaks about people.
His ultimate goal is to build a company of 1,000 employees – a target focused entirely on job creation and opportunity. For a founder who grew up in a city where entrepreneurial role models were scarce, every new hire is a tangible statement about what is possible when geography stops being a barrier.
His most ambitious project, however, is the community he is actively building for founders from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. These first-generation entrepreneurs have the drive but often lack the networks, mentors, and structural clarity that their metro counterparts inherit by default. This upcoming community is designed to be a genuine peer-to-peer support system for new founders when they get stuck, feel directionless, or simply have no one around them who understands the lonely weight of building a business.
This isn’t about optics; it is the closing of a loop. Vyas built everything he has without the safety net of a wealthy family or a prestigious college network. He is now committed to ensuring that the next generation of founders from places like Bhilwara, Jodhpur, Surat, or Indore don’t have to figure it all out alone.
Why His Journey Matters Right Now
India is currently witnessing the largest entrepreneurial awakening in its history. Millions of young people, the vast majority of them from outside the country’s major metropolitan zones, are starting businesses, launching channels, and building independent brands.
Abhishek Vyas is building the infrastructure to support them. Through My Haul Store, he is creating economic opportunities for over a lakh of creators who would otherwise remain invisible to the mainstream brand economy. Through his podcasts, he is amplifying the stories that mainstream media overlooks.
He arrived in the Indian business conversation not by following a traditional corporate template, but by solving real problems with borrowed money, failing nine times, and building anyway. That isn’t just an inspiring story, it is a realistic blueprint for the next generation of Indian founders.
