Three months. That is the time frame that Bangalore-based Advit Sahdev gave himself to succeed as an entrepreneur or else return to the corporate carousel.“I boasted a 10-year career spanning companies like Intel, Mindtree and Infosys. So my middle-class family was apprehensive about my decision to quit my well-paying job to start a business venture providing online marketing services to companies,” he says. To allay his parents’ fears, this electronic engineering graduate from the National Institute of Technology at Surathkal in Karnataka, promised them a three-month makeor-quit deal. Another reason for settling on this number was that his contingency fund savings totalled three months’ salary. This was all that he could manage by way of seed capital. “My wife, who was working at Intel, was very supportive but I did not want to burden her in case my venture did not take off,” he adds.Three years on, Sahdev heads a Rs 6 crore company called ODigMa , which is an abbreviation for online digital marketing The beginnings were humble. Sahdev started the ground work for his venture in September 2009 while working for Infosys. “I registered my company in March 2010 after putting in my papers,” he says. His seed capital of Rs 2 lakh went into purchasing a laptop and a mobile phone, while the rest was put aside as working capital. To save money, Sahdev started working from home.He then began scouting for clients on the Internet. “Social media was still nascent at that time and the traffic was less than 5% of what it is today. I soon found many potential clients who wanted to market their products online but did not know how,” he says. In May 2010, Sahdev signed his first client, Wildcraft. “As a newbie lacking clients, I told them to try ODigMa for a month and gave them the option of opting out in case they were not satisfied,” he says. The client wanted around 25,000 fans in a month’s time.Sahdev then designed a number of campaigns and delivered on the promise in time. “The client was pleased and not only extended our contract for the whole year but also gave us word-of-mouth publicity. The deal got us Rs 50,000 per month,” he adds.By December 2010, ODigMa had scaled up operations enough to warrant recruitment and a shift into a proper office. “I hired four IT freshers to help me out and we shifted into a small office in Bangalore. By the end of the first financial year, we had managed a turnover of around Rs 35 lakh,” says Sahdev. In February 2011, the team shifted to a 1,500 sq ft office and one year later into their current 3,000 sq ft headquarters in the city.The company now employs 70 people and has expanded its footprint to Mumbai and Delhi in the past one year. To date it has served around 400 top brands in the country, including Marks & Spencer, Make-MyTrip, Hidesign and DoCoMo. “We are hopeful of achieving a target of around Rs 15 crore this fiscal,” he adds.Next on the cards is further business expansion into cities such as Pune, Hyderabad, Chandigarh and Chennai. “Thanks to our tie ups with some smaller digital marketing companies—all signed this year—we also expect business projects from overseas, starting with UK and Dubai,” he adds.