Most founder stories have a moment where someone says “I quit my job to start this.”
While many graduates were preparing resumes, applying for jobs, and waiting for interview calls, Ishika made a different decision.
Ishika Mittal’s story doesn’t have that moment, because she never took the job path to begin with.
Straight out of the gate, working from her home in Firozabad, a tier-2 city in Uttar Pradesh, she made a decision that would define the next several years: figure it out herself, on her own terms, rather than go looking for someone to hire her.
There was no funding, no team, no client roster. Just a laptop, consistency, and a willingness to learn in public.
Ishika Mittal is the co-founder of BM Designink, an Amazon account management and performance marketing agency that has worked with 300+ brands across India, the USA, the UK, and Dubai, and Eleveon, a performance marketing education platform teaching Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, Google Ads, and AI-integrated marketing, built on the belief that people should be taught to lead, not just employed.
Building From Nothing
Ishika started the way most bootstrapped founders do: by doing the work no one was watching. She began posting regularly on LinkedIn, sharing what she was learning about Amazon and performance marketing in real time, and using that visibility to find her first clients.
She’d learn a skill, apply it directly to a client’s account, get results, and let those results speak for themselves. The early clients referred the next ones. The next ones referred more.
That loop of learning, applying, delivering, and getting referred became the engine behind what is now BM Designink, an Amazon account management and performance marketing agency co-founded with Himanshu Vimal, who leads SEO and listing optimization.
Over five years, the agency has grown into a team of 12-15 people and worked with 300+ brands in total across India, the USA, the UK, and Dubai. Today, BM Designink runs 15 major brand accounts at a time, with a clear focus on every one of them: driving a 40% increase in sales within 60 days of taking on the account. No inherited network, no metro-city head start. Just a founder in a home office who kept showing up and kept getting better.
What kept Ishika going wasn’t just growing the agency. It was watching what happened because of the work. Brand owners and founders she worked with started seeing real sales growth.
Watching someone else’s business scale because of decisions she made in their ad account turned out to be a different kind of satisfaction than closing a deal. It’s the moment her story quietly shifts from building an agency to building a teaching company.
Learning What She Didn’t Want to Build
Somewhere in the middle of building the agency, Ishika also took up a job for about six months, not to step away from what she was building, but to see what it felt like to work inside a larger, more structured team. What she found was
clarifying in a different way than she expected: she couldn’t sustain herself in an environment where she was boxed into one role and one set of tasks, on someone else’s terms.
Those brief periods taught her exactly what she didn’t want to recreate, for herself or for anyone she eventually built with. Instead of adapting to that kind of environment, she built the opposite of it.
At BM Designink and Eleveon, people aren’t boxed in. They’re given room to bring their own ideas into the work and turn them into something real. Because the real ambition was never to build just one or two well-known brands. It’s to help build a dozen self-made entrepreneurs who can each point to a startup of their own.
Knowledge is available in a hundred places; what’s rarer is the push to build something you can call your own, and someone willing to help you fly without expecting anything back.
Not everything Ishika has built has worked, either, and she doesn’t pretend otherwise.
In 2024, she co-founded Bharat Meditate, a health and fitness app, a space well outside the marketing and e-commerce world she’d spent years mastering. The venture didn’t survive. But she doesn’t count that year as wasted; if anything, it sharpened her conviction about where her real edge is.
It reinforced a principle she now applies deliberately to everything else she builds: go deep where you already have real expertise, rather than chasing every opportunity that looks promising on paper.
Why Eleveon Exists
That shift became Eleveon, built alongside her BM Designink co-founder. The tagline captures the whole idea in four words: “From Learning to Leading.”
Eleveon isn’t built around the promise most marketing courses lean on: “learn this, get placed.” Ishika is direct about why that model doesn’t sit right with her: too many courses charge high fees on the strength of a job guarantee, without genuinely investing in whether the person can actually do the work. Eleveon
was built to be the opposite of that: a place where people are taught to become marketers and brand builders, not just credentialed for a resume line.
The results are already showing up in a way that means more to Ishika than any metric on a dashboard: students are landing their own clients, some are getting hired, and (the part she’s proudest of) people are referring Eleveon to other institutes and other students. That’s not something you can manufacture with ad spend. It happens when people actually get value.
What Eleveon Actually Teaches
Eleveon currently runs structured batch programs covering Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, and Google Ads, with AI integration woven into the workflow rather than treated as a bolt-on. But the curriculum goes beyond platform mechanics.
Eleveon also runs sessions on communication skills and resume building, because Ishika’s view is that a marketer’s career doesn’t just depend on knowing the platforms; it depends on being able to present themselves and their work with confidence, whether they’re pitching a client or interviewing for a role.
The teaching structure runs in batches, with a strong layered team behind everything: Saurav Kumar as Head of Digital Marketing & Client Acquisition, Shivi Sharma as Head of Marketing, Tanya as Amazon Ads Instructor, and Iqrar
Khan instructing Meta and Google Ads. Eleveon has also built a B2B corporate training arm, now training employees from partner companies, a signal that the training holds up for working professionals, not just beginners.
Eleveon is still a small startup by design, not by accident. Ishika is scaling it deliberately, and the response so far, with batches filling and students referring the program onward, tells her the model is working.
Her long-term goal is bigger than one more marketing academy: she wants to build something people eventually think of the way they think of Oxford for business education: a name synonymous with the discipline itself, for digital marketing and brand building in India.
Achievements & Recognition
The numbers behind BM Designink tell their own story: five years in business, 300+ brands worked with across India, the USA, the UK, and Dubai, a current roster of 15 major brand accounts, and a team that’s grown from a single founder to 12-15 people.
On the Eleveon side, the clearest marker of credibility isn’t a certificate or an award. It’s that students and partner companies are referring the program onward to other institutes and other learners, something that only happens when the training genuinely delivers.
The Bigger Mission
Underneath both companies is one consistent goal: Ishika wants to help people become financially independent, not through a single job but through building something of their own, whether that’s a brand, an agency, or a freelance client base that spans borders.
Her own path is the proof of concept: from a single home-based agency with zero clients, she’s now built out 4-5 distinct income streams, none of which existed when she started. That’s the real difference she’s drawing between “getting employed” and “learning to lead”: one depends on someone else’s decision to hire you, the other doesn’t depend on anyone.
She’s candid that she hasn’t figured everything out yet, but she says it with more conviction than doubt. Hard work, focus, and fast decision-making are the things she credits most for how far BM Designink and Eleveon have come.
She doesn’t sit on decisions. In her words, consistency and speed of execution matter more than having a perfect plan before you start.
Her Advice for Anyone Starting From Scratch
Ask Ishika what she’d tell someone with nothing but ambition, and she doesn’t hesitate: patience and speed aren’t opposites; you need both. Be patient with results, but fast with decisions. Don’t sit on a choice hoping it’ll get clearer with time. Make the call, then adjust as you go.
Stay active. Build your network deliberately. Visibility and relationships compound faster than most people expect. And cut distractions, especially social media, ruthlessly. This one, she says, is non-negotiable: if you’re serious about building something, endless scrolling is the first thing that has to go.
Beyond that, her routine is almost stubbornly simple. Write down your tasks every single day, and finish them no matter what. Give yourself the shortest deadline you can and work backwards from it, not because it’s comfortable, but
because you don’t have unlimited time, and pretending otherwise is how years quietly disappear. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Keep feeding the part of you that wants to build.
And underneath all of it, she says, you need a fire that doesn’t blow up and burn out in a week. Something quieter and steadier than motivation, because motivation runs out, and grind is what’s left when it does.
The Person Behind the Business
Ishika still runs both companies from home, managing a team and clients across India, the US, the UK, and Dubai from the same city she started in. As a woman building and leading in a space that isn’t always easy to break into, that’s a detail she doesn’t downplay: the work has been done from home, by choice, while scaling globally.
Outside of work, she reads constantly, mostly books on entrepreneurship, brand building, money and wealth-building, and psychology, and plays guitar when she needs to unplug from client accounts and course batches. It’s a small window into someone who treats learning as a lifestyle, not just a business strategy.
Long-term, Ishika wants two things that are really the same thing: to be recognized as one of the best in her niche, with a feature in Forbes as a goal she’s openly working toward, and to genuinely help as many people as possible get financially independent along the way. For her, those aren’t in tension.
Getting written up is a byproduct. The actual goal is watching students go from taking a course to running their own client roster.
