At 17 he DMed Raj Shamani at 10:41 pm. By 22 he says he had earned ₹1 crore

On 25 August 2026, Aditya Bansal posted on X that a direct message he sent Raj Shamani five years earlier had led him to earn ₹1 crore by the age of 22. Within two days the same account of events appeared in The Economic Times, Mint, Moneycontrol, Hindustan Times, News18, Business Today and Free Press Journal. The sequence is unusually well timestamped. Almost none of the reprint coverage checks the earnings claim.

Bansal was 17 in 2021 and preparing for the Joint Entrance Examination after the paper had been moved to October. He has said he was also watching Shamani’s talks late at night, sleeping around 4 am and waking at noon. Graphic design and website work had already failed him. The plan he could see, JEE then engineering then a job, was one he did not want.

The night of the message

The video that triggered the message was Shamani’s 25 August 2021 YouTube episode, Making money in your 20s - 7 Ways (#AajWithRaj Ep 09). Bansal has said he could not sleep after watching it. He spent a few hours turning the talk into a Twitter thread in a Google Doc and sent it to Shamani with no request attached.

He sent the DM at 10:41 pm. Shamani replied at 3:53 am: “Let me upload this, and if it works out, I will hire you for my twitter threads, cool?”

The thread drew about 1,200 likes. Bansal has been open that the writing was not strong. Shamani told him it could be better and hired him anyway. Bansal’s line, repeated across every outlet that picked the story up, is: “I was 17. With no degree. No experience. Nothing to show. He still bet on me. He hired the 17-year-old kid.”

Gift cards, a testimonial, then retainers

Bansal wrote five or six threads for Shamani. He did not have a bank account, so payment arrived as Amazon gift cards. The arrangement ended when Shamani wanted a full-time team, which a 17-year-old could not join. Shamani left a testimonial. Bansal has said that testimonial won him his first retainer client, and that everything after that came from the same starting point.

He now says he has worked with more than 45 founders and crossed ₹1 crore in earnings by 22. On his X profile he describes his present work as helping growth-stage founders use LinkedIn and email for deal flow, and he lists 250 million impressions, $1.5 million and 200,000 followers generated for more than 40 clients. Those figures, like the ₹1 crore claim, come from Bansal. No outlet that ran the story published invoices, tax filings or client confirmations.

He has also said he went through three stretches with no clients and no revenue. A conventional job was available each time. He did not take it, “because of that one night.”

They have still never spoken on a call

Five years later, Bansal wrote that he has never heard Shamani’s voice except on a podcast. They have never spoken on a phone call. That detail sat in the original thread and in The Economic Times write-up. Most of the other headlines treated the episode as a clean success story about a late-night DM.

Shamani, born 29 July 1997 in Indore, built a public career from a different teenage start: a home-made dishwashing liquid sold door to door after his father fell ill, then speaking work, then the podcast Figuring Out. By 2026 that show was among the most watched business podcasts in India. The 2021 video Bansal turned into a thread already had a large YouTube audience. The hire was a small operational decision for Shamani and a first paid writing job for Bansal.

What the news cycle actually did

Bansal posted the account on 25 August 2026. Hindustan Times carried it on the morning of 26 August. Economic Times, Mint, Moneycontrol, News18 and Free Press Journal followed the same day. Business Today ran a version on 28 August. Asianet News Kannada published a Kannada cut. The phrasing across desks was almost identical: 17, no degree, late-night DM, ₹1 crore by 22.

That clustering is the new fact this week, not the 2021 hire. A first-person career story with clean timestamps and a famous name moves through Indian digital newsrooms as a package. The package rarely adds the source video title, the three zero-revenue periods, or the fact that the two men have never spoken live.

Bansal followed the pickup with a second post on 29 August: the story had landed in major Indian outlets, and he was “onto the next one.” The original 25 August thread is still the primary document. Anyone who wants the sequence, the clock times and the limits of what is verified can read that post and treat the ₹1 crore figure as a claim by the person who made it.