Meet The Curry Couple | Cinematic Travel Videos

We had the good fortune of connecting with The Curry Couple and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi The Curry Couple, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
We are passionate about what we do, we value the ability to control our work experience, and we would love to have a legacy when we get old. Amit grew up in a business family. I grew up in a family where income diversification was a top priority. So the things we’re exposed to during our formative years play a significant role in what we become. The first three years of our marriage were spent chasing a stable life. Moving countries, clearing student debts, and finding a profession that made us happy. Once that was in our grasp, we both agreed that we wanted to do something more. Starting a business was the next logical step cause Amit was passionate about it, having experienced it growing up, and I loved the idea of income diversification. We knew we would be spending hours building the business, and for that to happen, we thought of working on something we both like. And that’s how the idea of cinematic travel videos happened – Amit’s strength of creativity and joy for movie making combined with my strength of organization and love for unique travel planning. With our videos, we want the viewer to experience travel with us firsthand. The focus is not on us but on the culture, the food, the surrounding, and everything else. It’s like you visit the place without actually visiting the place. We make sure to share our itinerary, which further helps local businesses.

What’s one piece of conventional advice that you disagree with?
Many believe that a few of us are naturally talented or gifted. We disagree with that. While a few of us may have a slight edge over others, expertise is borne not of any inherent ability but of practice. In other words, we can be good at whatever we want. However, it is much harder than people realize. First, one must become self-aware of their strengths or interests, then spend a ton of time and effort practicing them. It takes time.

When we started making videos, the transitions were terrible. The endings were abrupt. The story lacked flow. But we continued making videos. One year later, we’re proud of how far we have come.

Risk-taking: how do you think about risk, and what role has taking risks played in your life/career?
Without risk, there is no reward. We both have our own definition of risk. Amit defines risk against the outcome, whereas I define risk as insuring oneself against loss. Amit is spontaneous. He dynamically weighs the pros and cons of the decision and does what makes sense to him at the moment. While in University, he and his friends built a professional gaming team where he dropped his major to pursue his ambitions. Later, he joined a hedge fund, moved to the US, got his MBA, and now he creates statistical models to support executive decision-making in Google.

I had a polar opposite approach. While in University, I had the perfect score. Joined Google right after, grew up the corporate ladder, moved countries while working at Google, and now I support building Marketing tech tools for Google. Same destination but two different approaches.

We believe our choices helped us build different intangible characteristics. For example, Amit’s strengths are team building, change management, and working through adversity; my strengths are long-term strategy making, risk management, and execution. We failed and succeeded through our own choices. Without taking any of those risks, we wouldn’t have been in a position to start something of our own that we are so passionate about.

What habits do you feel helped you succeed?
Perseverance is our determination to complete the action. And to be perseverant, we must understand what motivates us. Exploring what motivates us is a habit that helps one succeed. Factors like money, status, competition, etc., could be superficial and may work for the short term, but we must dig deeper and understand our true motivations. It assists us in playing the long game. When intrinsically motivated, we do the work for the fun or challenge entailed rather than for external products, pressures, or rewards. So discovering one’s intrinsic motivation is very important as that will keep one motivated even if things are not going their way. This will also help one be in a mentally safe space and not look for external validation.

Amit loves telling stories. And I enjoy performing in front of the camera. So for us, the intrinsic motivation is to get better at our art of storytelling through a camera.

What is the most important factor behind your success / the success of your brand?
Having the right intention has helped us be successful. We genuinely care about creating high-quality travel movies and taking the viewer on a journey with us. We have spent countless hours improving our skills, which has helped steer us on the right path. We definitely have a long way to go, but we believe we are on the right track. Setting up long-term goals and not being motivated by extrinsic factors have also played a significant role in our journey.

What’s the most important lesson your business/career has taught you?
While setting up a business, one can either adopt a pre-existing business model or become a differentiator. However, businesses that adapt pre-existing models face intense competition and take a lot of time to grow. And for a company to be a differentiator, it needs to build its own competitive advantage and create a market for its product.

One way to be a differentiator is to create products or services for the future. But, if we make something for the ‘present,’ we will always be playing catch up with our competitors. So, working on a long-term strategy and vision for the business is imperative. In our case – the travel vlogging industry – has numerous creators creating short-form video content. So we decided to focus on our strengths – creating long-format videos with a cinematic feel, high production value, and catchy hooks.

Work-life balance: how has your balance changed over time? How do you think about the balance?
The best part of our work is that we do it together. We love planning, traveling, and capturing our trip’s most beautiful moments. That being said, we both have different ways to reset ourselves, and we make sure that we give each other that time. For me, it is watching Netflix, while for Amit, it is going to the gym or a run. It is crucial to recognize what balance means for you and what time you can invest without overdoing it at the cost of your health.

It is not easy in the early phases. You try to put all the time you have, but that can cause burnout, so we realized early that this is a marathon and not a sprint. Since then, we have consciously tried to switch off and take time in whatever way we need.

How did you come up with the idea for your business?
In 2020, we were building our first custom high-performance PC. It was our COVID pet project when we had shelter-at-place orders. It took us about five months to research and procure the parts and another three months to build it. But once we were finished – we were clueless. We had a super-powerful computer sitting on our table at home and were unsure what to do with it. So we explored bitcoin mining for the first few months; the returns were decent, but we knew we could create more value with the computing power.

Fast forward a few weeks, we discussed investing time in setting up a business. While exploring ideas (refer to question 6 above), Amit mentioned being a video editor hobbyist during college. He had worked on a few trailers for his college events but didn’t pursue it further cause his laptop took hours to make a simple edit. That’s when I proposed the travel vlog idea.

I was already planning a trip to Alaska, so I told him if he could capture the beauty of the place and share it with the rest of the world, it’d be awesome. So Amit spent his time learning about cinematography, videography, and editing, and I spent my time researching the places we would visit and rehearsed speaking in front of the mirror. And a few weeks later, we were filming in Alaska.

Millions of people can never travel to Alaska because of physical, financial, or time constraints. So our objective was to take Alaska to them with our videos. We recently released the second part of the video. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwYMg4I7_N4&t=1s

Why did you pursue an artistic or creative career?
We believe careers are not artistic or creative, but people are. Any job you do can be made creative with your ideas. We chose this path as this makes us happy. We were finally in a position to invest in things that motivated us and made us look forward to it, which is why we chose this. It was also a common interest we shared which helped us further bond as a couple.

What are you inspired by?
We are inspired by the diversity of the world. There are so many different perspectives out there to explore. Every time we travel, we meet extraordinary people who open our minds to new thoughts. So we try to imbibe those ideas into our videos and tell a story from our perspective.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_currycouple/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amitramachandran/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CurryCouple

Other: Neha’s Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/neha-kiran-2b977a130/