From Commerce to Microsoft Excellence with Siddharth Vaghasia

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Poon in India. He's an independent consultant and freelancer. He was first awarded his MVP in 2020. He has co-founded and is spearheading the Poon Tech Community, a Poon-based local user group. His experience lies in building solutions around Microsoft 365, sharepoint, teams, power Platform and Azure developments and implementations. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, siddharth.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 1:36
Thank you, mark. Thank you for the nice introduction, looking forward to have a very fruitful conversation here.

Mark Smith: 1:41
Good, good, good. Sid, tell me about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 1:47
So I'm too much of a food lover person. My wife always kind of have one thing which she is worrying about. Is you know what to what to make? You know, because I'm the only one who might be asking her. Okay, I mean, no, I I wanted to have something else. Uh, what I do is I generally, uh, have some homemade food. Also, I do order online, uh, foods, or we went to restaurants. So always, you know, 40 percent, I make sure that I have a very good breakfast in the morning, which are like chapatis which they call it in india, and then I would have my lunch. I sometimes I would have snacks also in the evening, and then the dinner time.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 2:33
So yeah more or less four times food. In terms of fun, uh I what I do is I uh watch uh daily watching basically some tv series, some movies.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 2:47
Uh, I really like to watch. I can just randomly watch any movie if I feel, you know, the description of the movie is good. I see, see some good reviews around that I can just watch it. I also play cricket, we also play cricket, we also play badminton. So I do that and I make sure that I go and burn a book every day just to keep my mind fresh and also being part of a healthy lifestyle my mind fresh and also being part of a healthy lifestyle In family. I have my wife and two twins who are both our boys.

Mark Smith: 3:32
Their names are Ved and Ansh, and they would be turning seven this May.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 3:35
Wow, that's amazing Two twin boys. Eh, how old are?

Mark Smith: 3:37
they, they will be turning seven this May. Wow, wow, that's so cool. That's so cool, very exciting. Tell me, how did you get into IT?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 3:48
What was that path for you?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 3:53
So it was interesting because I was into commerce background, which is basically from the accounts and statistics and that kind of thing, so I did my graduation in Bachelor of Commerce, but I did my master's in computer and I thought of first becoming a chartered accountant, but things didn't work as we planned always. So after my graduation, graduation, my aspiration changed. Uh, I was, um, I was, you know, always attracted by computers, uh, in a way, but at that time I was just uh kind of playing games or watching videos and things like that uh. But then, uh, my roommates who were uh staying me and we were in the hostel life, they were mostly into computer background, so, anyway, when they were talking computer language I was more interested in it and then I thought you know, I might do my master's in computer.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 4:44
It might be a bit difficult, but you know, who knows what will happen.

Mark Smith: 4:48
Because I love computer.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 4:49
It was, I would say, not that easy part, but at least I was able to understand the base of how to use the operating system. I was also using some of the software to record videos, edit photos and things like that. It helped me doing that. I did my masters in computers and that is how I ended up into ITBuild.

Mark Smith: 5:11
Wow, how did you ultimately end up working with Microsoft technologies?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 5:17
That's a funny story. So as a part of my last master's internship, we were pre-placed into a company called MNC company let me not name it, but it was and as an internship what they do is they basically divide the batch of the people into either going into Java development or they're going into NET development. Luckily for me, when I did my master's, my project, which we did we did it on NET, okay. So I was more inclined towards NET rather than Java and luckily I went into the NET stream. So I worked in the NET stream, which was then that's how I connected to the Microsoft technology step stream. So I worked in the dotnet stream. It was then that's how I connected to the microsoft technology step and from that company when I did a jump to another company, then I moved from bangalore to pune. Also they they hired me as a dotnet developer, but then I was been aligned to a microsoft cloud business unit wherein they were doing the sharepoint work and I was been aligned to a sharepoint work, saying that that, okay, in a way you are going to do same NET development which you are going to do, but it's just that rather than using any other libraries, you are going to use SharePoint libraries to do it, and that is the time wherein we had this SharePoint custom solutions which we were building using NET, like the custom web parts and all of that stuff. So it was an easy path for me to move, because eventually the library changed, the classes changed and I was able to grab the concept of SharePoint and from there on it was always SharePoint. And so I worked on SharePoint most 2007, 2010, 2016 and eventually to SharePoint Online, and then also moved to all other areas like, and eventually to SharePoint Online, and then also moved to all other areas like Teams, app development, power Platform, of course, and Azure development, and that's how I ended up in Microsoft 365.

Mark Smith: 7:11
So I find it interesting that you're a freelancer, because I'm keen to know what made you become a freelancer, you know, an independent contractor, what took you on that journey rather than working for a corporation?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 7:29
Yeah, so I had always this thing that might be doing something independently in the near future. So, four years back, when I was working for the MNC and because of my wife was also working she was also a dotnet developer, but she was into banking domain we both were working and we had twins and what we wanted to do is we wanted to have somebody at home who has to take care of them. And she was doing that from long back and it was for me, wherein I took, you know, a sabbatical leave from my job and I thought of start exploring myself in terms of if I can do this, if I cannot do this, will I be able to get the clients or not? And that worked well. And that worked well. And eventually, you know, I thought that, yeah, this might be a good option to explore rather than joining some other company. I might continue this path.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 8:29
Uh, and that's how you know, I've come into independent consult freelancing journey. Uh, I see the linkedin might still say independent consult freelancing, but uh, right now I'm running an agency called Binary Roots here in Pune, india itself, where we have a team of around 21 people who does this kind of provides this Microsoft 365 services. So being from independent consultant to, you know, hmc owner also, it's an interesting journey. I still keep that same for a couple of obvious reasons. Linkedin is a platform where many people are finding this kind of independent consultants and freelancers where they wanted to have something associated with the project rather than somebody who is tagged to a founder or someone that helps me bring business, get the conversation started and eventually be uh transparent to them. That, okay, I'm not an independent person and I can work. I can do the consulting, I can do the development, but I have my team and, depending on what you needed me might uh, involve somebody else or I might get involved okay, this is interesting.

Mark Smith: 9:37
So so binary roots. Is your company, correct your agency? Okay, this is cool. You have 20-odd staff working for you now You've built that up. Has that just been in the last four years? You've built that up. It has been from last three years, three years Less than three years. Okay, that's impressive. Tell me, how do you find your customers, or how do your customers find you? How do you constantly get new work? Is that work coming just from within India or are you getting it from further afield, international work?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 10:10
So most of the customers are outside of India. So we have customer base mostly in the US. We have customer base in Australia and also in US. We have customer base in Australia and also in Canada. Couple of customers in Canada and some few of them are from Dubai and UAE side. So we do have Indian customers also, but more or less eventually it would be a B2B relationship wherein we would be ending up doing some work, you know, for the offshore itself.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 10:43
Now coming to finding the work, um, so I we do use uh, which was basically my primary source of uh, getting the projects. Uh and then linkedin, of course, is a very good platform uh, wherein through which we get business. You know, people approach uh directly on the LinkedIn, considering the involvement we do within the community, blogs which we would have written, or some speaking which we would have done in the conferences where they might have to do something similar. So that is one way of getting the business and, of course, as a part of being you know community and getting involved in the community, being you know community and getting involved in the community, you get these contacts and sometimes word of mouth uh or somebody getting connected with somebody that.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 11:29
Hey, he's this person who is doing that job. That also helps us, you know, getting the clients interesting, interesting, um that that's so intriguing.

Mark Smith: 11:37
Um, do do you find that linked LinkedIn is a better source than Upwork, or do you find Upwork is where you get a lot of your primary work?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 11:49
Upwork is a lot of where we get the primary work, the reason being that is the place wherein I do see, as part of the job posting, I do see people would have actual job requirements which they are posting there right Wherein.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 12:05
I can go and approach them that, okay, you know this is what I can help you with, but since in the LinkedIn, people would have to come to me whenever they had requirement depending on you know right time and right place so there would be many, uh, wherein the project would have come or they would have approached us, but because I might have not replied or I might have replied at the right time, the project would have been converted. But upwork is basically the main source of getting the projects.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 12:36
yeah, and then, of course, once we have that relations in the upper. So we have, you know, like around 10 to 12 clients who are our regular clients, so which keeps on giving us the work. So that makes you know a little bit easier that once you create that rapport, once you build that relationship with your customers, you deliver it good and then you know they just kind of rely on us and they keep on passing the word.

Mark Smith: 13:03
Yeah, nice. I've just looked up your profile on Upwork and I can see you've had 100% job satisfaction and done over. Oh, coming up on 9,000 hours of work on Upwork. That's pretty phenomenal. That's a really good profile. Really stand out. I use Upwork a lot myself. I've used Upwork for maybe 15 years and my biggest project that I did on Upwork I didn't do it, somebody did it for me is that back in the day, before Microsoft Teams, there was a thing called Skype for Business and I had a person I think he might have been in Indonesia or might have been in the Philippines. He might have been in the Philippines and he did my full IVR setup, you know, full professional implementation of that and he went on to grow a massive company just specializing, I think, in Microsoft Teams now but just in doing remote work implementations of Skype for Business back in the day. So it was pretty impressive, pretty impressive. So I use Upwork a lot.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 14:21
Yeah, it's a good platform. It's a very good platform. I mean, eventually, most of the clients I ended up with which had a long relationship, it was via Upwork. Of course, there were a few in the LinkedIn also, but most of them by offer also uh, and it has been a good platform in terms of uh, wherein you get real clients and definitely there are other platforms also then but in here you get the real clients. Who knows the importance of quality of work and they are also paying. You know, uh, you know, rather than you know, just coming for cheap work.

Mark Smith: 14:55
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, as in, I definitely wouldn't say it's cheap work, um, but yeah, as in all my podcast editing um, powerpoint presentations that I have done, uh, video editing um, generally, I outsource it all to Upwork, um, it's, it's, it's, it's so good, um, it all to Upwork, it's so good. Yes, they've been very beneficial over time. So tell me if I've got this right. So, basically, you were getting so much work through that channel that you then started hiring your own people.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 15:26
Exactly. Yes, that's what I do, yeah.

Mark Smith: 15:28
And do they predominantly work remotely, or do you have an office, or what's the story for them?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 15:35
We have. I mean initially we were working remotely. Only From last, almost more like 18 months or 19 months or so we have an office. So we have office in Pune also and we have office in Mysana, gujarat, which is another city. So my brother-in-law is my business partner. He was a PHP developer and he was doing small, small PHP gigs, creating some games around it and everything, and I knew the power of the Power Platform and the way the Power Platform was getting the popularity. So what I did is I trained him, I asked him to start learning Power Apps and everything, and I took his help and then we started. You know, I onboarded him as a business partner itself. So now we have office in Pune and we have office in Mesa now also, where all of them you know are coming. There are a couple of people who are working remotely, but most of them are working from office only yeah, very good.

Mark Smith: 16:39
In the Power Platform side of things, are you doing Power Automate, Power Apps? What's your biggest area of work that you're doing in those spaces?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 16:48
Mostly we do Power Apps and Power Automate-based work, and that too, specifically in the. So we specialize in the canvas app. I mean we do know model driven app and basic of dynamics 365 and everything, but we cannot say that we are expert in that. But canvas app I can definitely say we have a very good team, we have good skills where we do all kind of business process automation for the client, like creating, you know, request management application like CapEx, vendor management, then travel authorization, that kind of thing using PowerEdge and Power Automate.

Mark Smith: 17:23
Yeah, and have you done any work on Dataverse or is all your work on SharePoint lists?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 17:31
No, both. I mean we have worked with Dataverse, we have worked with SharePoint, we have worked with SQL also and have worked with SharePoint. We have worked with SQL also and we have also worked with custom APIs. So, by creating custom connectors and creating APIs and everything For one of our clients, we are mostly, I mean, we build around seven to eight apps, wherein we did all of them with Dataverse for Teams. We know there is a limitation with two gigabytes, but they wanted to just digitalize some of the manual processes they were doing. So when we do it, you know, dataverse for Teams-based Power Apps.

Mark Smith: 18:05
Excellent, excellent. This is not meant to sound like a job interview but, it's good to know what your skills and capabilities are. How did you end up becoming an MVP?

Siddharth Vaghasia: 18:23
So when I was planning I had been active on community, not into all the areas, but mostly I was very much active in the stakeholder flow, in the SharePoint thing when I had an expertise. So at that time I had this kind of obsession or I just like to solve problems, and Stack Overflow was the place wherein, rather than just giving the answers, what you say is you find the real world problems with other people's are, you know, kind of facing it.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 19:00
Right, and sometimes you know the answer, sometimes you don't. Sometimes what you do is you go there, you see any questions being there and you see the answers being given by somebody else. Right, and that is how you improve that. Okay, if you get a real world problem, this might be the solution. These are the things which would be there. So that's how I was active just in this type of workflow.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 19:18
But once I was into symmetrical leave and once I started learning you know, sharepoint online, uh, what I wanted to do? I wanted to do some practical use cases because as part of my job, we were still working on on premises, so I didn't had a chance to work on online. Okay, we did some initiative to bring you know uh, do some pocs or proof of concept to show the capability of online. But eventually it didn't work out. So, as part of learning what I did, I started building some uh solutions around sharepoint using spfx and some sample scripts and all of that, and then I started contributing to Microsoft 365 community, which was called SPNP community previously, and that is where I started my journey.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 20:03
So I started writing blogs and contributed to these repos, like SPFX web part. I started giving demos in the PNP community calls, which has been organized like weekly twice as a part of Power Platform community call and SPFx community call. That's where I started giving all of this and eventually I started attending the conferences because I used to attend conferences, but not that frequent.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 20:32
But I started attending the conferences and that's where I also felt that, looking to the other people who were the speakers, and that's where I felt that I also might have something which I can also share, you know, with the people, and that's when, I started applying for speaking at the conferences and I got some opportunities to speak and everything and eventually, as part of this community initiative, I ended up meeting some community friends.

Siddharth Vaghasia: 21:01
You might know Nandip, he was on your show a couple of months back. We met and we started this Pune Tech community where we started organizing and all of that stuff and that is when. Nandip said that you know that you are doing very good and he nominated me and I was in the world of it.

Mark Smith: 21:24
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash nz365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you you.