[100 Emerging Women Leaders] How Ambika Sharma, Digital Marketing Entrepreneur, SaaS Innovator and Boss of Bikers

Discover the many facets Ambika Sharma running Dough Strategy—an award-winning integrated marketing consultancy.

Attesting to one’s entrepreneurial spirit is Instappy, a B2B (business-to-business) “mobility activation” platform under the Pulp Strategy brand. The forward-thinking innovator is also an avid motorcyclist.

But how did a science student – who later studied Shakespeare – take the plunge into entrepreneurship?

“After my 12th grade, my parents advised me to take a part-time job while preparing for the entrance exams,” recalls Ambika, who comes from a family of army veterans.

At that time, his father’s friend was working with Mudra Communications. After completing a three-month internship there, she decided to go into advertising to earn a living. “I still had to follow my parents’ directive; I studied software programming, but later I continued my studies in English, then I got a degree in mass communication,” she shares.

The fresh college grad came up with the idea of ​​starting an integrated digital marketing business at a time when it was still a new concept. So, in 2011, she founded Pulp Strategy and began to scale rapidly as a digital marketing consulting agency.

The branded company began by consolidating shared computing retail space in 30 cities and launched an augmented reality app in 2012.

He consolidated more than 3,000 top campuses for an intellect-based youth marketing initiative in 2012, and also launched its own web-based animation and video content studio in 2013. Pulp Strategy gained traction in 2013 with the launch of solutions based on near field communication (NFC) for their digital services, such as business intelligence (BI), object-relational mapping (ORM), and analytics capabilities.

In 2015, Ambika entered the growing world of mobile marketing with Instappy. A business-to-business software-as-a-service (SaaS) product platform, the company says it enables easy customization, reduces time to market, and updates technology for high-quality applications that include custom APIs (application program interface) and advanced features, at a fraction of the usual cost. Instappy helps build mobile apps in about 100 languages globally.

One of the biggest challenges of running an independent agency is dealing with skepticism if your agency isn’t part of a larger group.

The biggest problem, of course, is running an organization and a business as a woman. “I’m sure in any country, including India, you need a bit more conviction (if you’re a woman); you need to be a bit more vocal and flamboyant about what you do,” Ambika asserts.

Advising future female leaders, she says, “I would say be very strong physically and mentally if you do what you love and what you believe in, you shouldn’t care what other people think. And work really hard,” she says.