Three Companies, One Lesson

People look at Niguro and think it appeared in 2026. It did not. Niguro is the third company I have built, and it only exists because the first two taught me what to build and what to avoid.

The timeline on my homepage tells the bare version. 2016, a computer programming programme. 2018, my first venture. 2019, a content platform and a quiet registration under the name Niriv. January 2026, Niguro launches as Nepal’s own search engine. What the timeline does not say is how much each step cost, or how each failure paid for the next one.

This is that story, and the single lesson it left me with.

Company one: YukeshMedia (2018)

YukeshMedia was my first venture, a media and advertising initiative. I had just finished my programming programme at a campus in Morang, and I was full of the usual confidence a young builder has. I believed that if I built a website and put content on it, advertisers would come.

That is not what happened. What happened was my first real lesson in building for a local audience.

Advertisers in Nepal do not buy the way the playbooks say they buy. The market is small, relationships matter more than impressions, and a media business without distribution is just a website with opinions. I learned how traffic actually behaves, how readers actually find things, and how little a pretty homepage counts when nobody is coming back tomorrow.

YukeshMedia never became a big company. It became something more useful: an education. It gave me my first understanding of how Nepali audiences move online, and it taught me that attention is the raw material everything else is made of. I have written about the experiment mindset before in my post on how curiosity turns into projects, and YukeshMedia was where that habit of small experiments first got tested against a real market.

Company two: Scriling News (2019)

In 2019 I launched Scriling News, a digital content delivery platform. If YukeshMedia was my education in attention, Scriling was my education in scale.

I started Scriling without expecting huge results. That sounds like false modesty, but it was strategy: I treated it as an experiment, tested small things, and iterated. COVID arrived and changed how everyone consumed content, and because I was watching the signals, the platform grew with that wave. In early 2021 it was doing 50,000 NPR in revenue, and at its peak it reached 13,000 USD per month. My younger brothers applied the same methods to their own projects and reached 10 lakh per month at times.

Scriling taught me something YukeshMedia never could: how to operate. Running a content platform at that size means dealing with writers, with hosting bills, with ad networks that change their rules without warning, with traffic that can vanish overnight when a search algorithm shifts. It was the first time I felt the ground move under a business I had built, and it taught me the most important question a founder can ask: what part of this do I actually control?

The answer, for a content platform, is almost nothing. You rent your traffic from search engines and social networks. You rent your revenue from ad networks. Scriling made real money, and I am proud of it, but it was a business built on rented land.

That realization is what started Niguro.

The quiet years: Kirib, Manoble, and Niriv

Not everything worked. Along the way I tried The Kirib, a media platform aimed at Gen Z, and I went through partnerships, like an early effort called Manoble, that simply did not work out. I do not dwell on these because there is no glamorous lesson in them. Some things fail because the timing is wrong, some fail because the partnership is wrong, and some fail because you are not yet the person who can make them work. The honest thing is to fold the losses and keep building.

The most important thing I did in those years was the one nobody saw. In 2019, the same year I launched Scriling, I registered Niriv, a homegrown digital portal. While Scriling was public and noisy, Niriv was quiet. I built it slowly, in the background, year after year: search, news, commerce, payments, discussions, a hybrid website and app. A piece at a time, with no launch date announced and no pressure to show growth to anyone.

People ask me how I stayed patient for seven years. The answer is that I was not being patient, I was being busy. Scriling paid the bills and taught me distribution. Niriv absorbed everything I learned and aimed at the layer underneath: the infrastructure itself.

Company three: Niguro (2026)

In January 2026, Niriv rebranded and launched as Niguro: Nepal’s independent search engine, with web, images, videos, news, and products on one platform.

The leap from content to search looks dramatic, but to me it was the most conservative move I have ever made. Every year on Scriling had shown me the same thing: whoever controls the search box controls the traffic, the advertisers, and the rules. Nepal had no native search engine, no sovereign layer of its own on the internet. Everything we read, bought, and found passed through infrastructure built somewhere else, for someone else.

If it matters, build it anyway. That is the line on my homepage, and it is not a slogan, it is how I got through the years when building a search engine in Nepal sounded absurd. A decade of small ventures had given me the pieces: the audience sense from YukeshMedia, the operating discipline from Scriling, the patience from the quiet years. Niguro is all three, assembled.

The one lesson

Here is what three companies in a decade taught me, compressed into one paragraph.

Start small and start publicly, because your first venture is not supposed to win, it is supposed to teach you. Experiment without expecting huge results, because the small tests are what produce the real data. Watch for what you do not control, because rented land eventually gets sold. And keep one quiet project running in the background at all times, because the thing that matters most to you will take longer than you think, and it needs somewhere to grow while you pay the bills with something else.

Most founders treat each venture as a fresh start. I think of them as drafts of the same document. YukeshMedia was the first draft. Scriling was the second. Niguro is the third, and it is better because the first two existed.

If you are on your first draft, do not rush it and do not quit it too early either. Just make sure it teaches you something the next one can use. That is the whole game.