Coming from a family background, which had an “Employee” tagline, it was hard for him to convince his family and make them understand when he had quit his job to start his entrepreneurial journey. There was no one he could rely on, either for business knowledge or finances. Whatever he had to do, he had to do it all by himself. Recalling it, he said these days’ parents are aware of business and entrepreneurship, and they encourage their children to peruse theirdream but it wasn’t the same 10 years ago.

With his few friends in Bangalore and little earnings he had saved from his previous job, he started his entrepreneurial journey to set-up an infotainment channel inside the moving trains. After working for a year on the start-up, he had drained all his savings, nevertheless, the project did not go well so he had completely given up everything and came back to Chennai at the age of 25.

For the survival, he tried his hands on exports, trading, etc, as years went he did not gain any momentum or success in what he was doing. There are days he had fought with dad and had left home and stayed at his friend’s place for many days because he was not earning any money but his friends and cousins go for the job and make their money. He added, he hates to be compared. He almost disconnected the contact of all his friends and stayed in isolation, fearing to answer or face them.

Constant discouragement and disappointments from all corners, kept falling again and again and again, failure embraced continuously but never left the vision fade away. He became stronger and stronger every time he had fallen down. It developed a strong will power to succeed.

Even though he had tried his hands on other businesses his mind is always inclined towards advertising and media. By winking he said, the failures cost a lot of money, time, and effort but it teaches you lessons that you can’t learn from a B School. At an earlier age you get exposed to it, the sooner you are ready to face the world. Failure is always there at all stages of life, once you learn the trick on how to handle it, you will maneuver it, you will learn from it, you will deal with it, and finally, you will pay attention not to make the same misinformed mistake again.

In 2012, after a long struggle, he was successful to raise angel funding to start running the Infotainment Channel inside the moving trains. He said, initial 2 years the business was good, post which due to many mistakes, the project failed, which pushed him into much deeper trouble and into a huge financial liability, something which he could never raise ever again. He said, it took almost 4 years to settle, recover the loss and come out of it. One grave mistake will cost you 6 years of your time and you are back to square one, again you have to start everything from the scratch.

Not letting the hope fade away, he formed Ninja Media Creations, where he used to participate in small railway tenders. Some stations would not even fetch the revenue that is required to pay even the governments license fees. keeping his confidence high he started to focus only on audio-based advertising in railway stations. He started with one station, then to a few stations in Tamil Nadu, after gaining certain momentum in the business, he took the risk of acquiring media asserts in Chhattisgarh, Central India, the land which he had never visited in his life until then, nor he had any market knowledge or experience. It took some time to stabilize the business, the initialfew months were full of struggle and was not getting well, almost thought to shut operation but changed his mind to keep it running for few more months, over this period the business stated to slowly stabilize, more advertisers liked the medium and started to advertise and the revenues started to clock positively, this gave him the confidence to expand his media toany state, in India.

Within the next few months, Ninja acquired media asserts in Kerala, Andhra, Telangana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, etc. He expanded his full-fledged business operations across 8 States in India changed the landscape of transit advertising by creating innovations in audio based advertising. During the lockdown, Ninja Media had launched RACE “RealTime Data Monitoring “, software wherein clients and partners can have real-time data access to the campaigns. Ninja Media Creations an RA OOH (Railway Audio Out of Home) company operates across 50 stations, and is eying a turnover of 50 Crs in the next three years.

In his own words (Ranjith Chakkath): There is no short cut to success, you do, you keep doing it and keep on doing it until the success embrace you. There may be many sleepless nights, wet eyes, fear, insult, humiliations, disappointment but never get distracted, stay firm and focus on what you are doing, believe in what you are doing, and keep doing it, You will definitely achieve what you want one day, and it will look like a miracle.

Over the last few years, Ranjith Chakkath has expanded his RA-OOH business to such a great extent, that the media has changed the landscape of railway audio advertising in India.

Ninja Media Creations a Railway Audio Out of Home (RA-OOH) media company based in Chennai having branches across 6 cities in India focusing on voice dialogue / audio Jingle marketing. Ninja Media Creations connect the brands with the commuter emotionally by using the mix of audio advertising via Public Announcement system and full train wrapping, PA Systems are strategically placed across many railway transit points in India across 8 states.