He was one of the hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs with dreams to become the next Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg. However, not all dreams are meant to come true. And when they don’t, failure can be harrowing. That is the ugly truth of entrepreneurship.
Hyderabad-based techie Lucky Gupta Agarwal ended his life yesterday after his social networking he’d been working on for over 2 years failed to take off.
Lucky, an engineer from Hyderabad, had launched “KQingdom” in August 2014, a social networking app that let you chat and photo blog on the same app, while earning reward points for content created. It was a feature that he thought was missing on Facebook and other social networking portals.
Gupta had said in an interview that the business model of all social apps is driven by their user base and their active participation where users end up being short-changed and app promoters mint huge money. “We at the KQingdom found there is a need to correct this imbalance by partnering with its users to forge a strong bond with them,” he had said.
Lucky used to tell his parents that his app would be more popular than Whatsapp. His friends echoed the thought.
But users had not responded well to his app, and Lucky had been depressed for three months after his app failed to take off. On Wednesday, when he didn’t wake up at the usual time, his father grew suspicious. When he didn’t open his door in spite of repeated knocking, his family broke his door down, only to find him lying dead wearing a nose mask connected to a nitrogen gas cylinder.
Cops later found a suicide note in the bedroom. “Lucky wrote in the suicide note that he was lucky to die in a painless way. He also wrote that he adopted the suicide method of using nitrogen as it was the easiest and painless way,” the inspector said. The cops also went through his search history, and they found that he’d been researching on ways to “commit suicide without pain”.
Lucky was unmarried and is survived by his parents and a brother.