Parul Yadav – Founder of Asian Alliance India, PR & Communication Community for Students & Professionals

At Sugermint Media, our aim is to bring to our women entrepreneurs community some of the inspiring and motivational success stories from the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

As part of this endeavour, we invited yet another passionate startup and women entrepreneur Parul Yadav – Founder of Asian Alliance India for an exclusive interview with us.

Parul Yadav is a startup and young women entrepreneur in India. She is a Founder of Asian Alliance India, PR & Communication Community for Students & Professionals.

Let’s learn more about her inspirational journey and her advice for our growing startup community!

This is the interview of Parul Yadav, women entrepreneur and Founder of Asian Alliance India.

Who is Parul Yadav

Parul, 21, is a recent Gargi College, University of Delhi graduate. Having studied both Philosophy and English Literature; she has been constantly working towards bringing a multi-disciplinary approach in building sustainable international development.

Throughout her undergraduate 3 years – she worked with the public, private and non-profit sector to tackle a variety of social issues with a specific focus on digital literacy, and women empowerment.

She is currently the Founder of an online networking community model called, Asian Alliance India. It’s one of a kind project launched in India and the rest of Asia-Pacific region.

The project aims to initiate a community where online networking can be turned into various prospects for career enhancement.

Asian Alliance India highly values the potential of the Public Relation, and Communications industry, and offers real-world examples of illustrating what can generate a list of skills they believe employers look for.

They offer volunteer, and ambassador leadership positions for college, and university students across Asia-Pacific. Students lead chapters, and significantly influence the level of involvement in various parts of our targeted regions.

These chapters are established as training platforms for students to get real world campaigning, and client exposure. Furthermore, a LinkedIn community is accessible for networking, finding opportunities, and increasing your industry knowledge.

Parul Yadav has also been recently nominated for the Michael Brown Agent award, which would also act as a catalyst for helping her reach out to more youth across the globe and break down more barriers while fighting for equality and diversity.

The more equal and inclusive the world becomes the more others will understand the value of diversity.

She would like everyone to have the same opportunities in the world as everyone deserves the chance to pursue whatever they choose or enjoy without having to face societal barriers.

How she get idea or concept for the business?

Public Relation and Communications is a part of the global corporate system influencing various Asian states and countries.

The problem is that public relations (PR) lacks diversity and inclusion and often has a weak reputation but a plethora of potential waiting to be tapped into Asia-Pacific region.

Often lack of knowledge and misconceptions around this booming industry create lack of opportunities for Asian ethnic minorities, women and men alike in leadership roles.

Parul’s drive to undertake Asian Alliance India’s project was derived from personal experiences.

She always believes that young people can make invaluable contributions through dynamism, entrepreneurialism and innovation.

To provide young Asian people the opportunity to have a real impact in their communities, and participate in the entire process of diagnosing, designing, implementing international programs and projects in Asia-Pacific is the project’s major goal.

Moreover, the initial start was filled with doubts, pitches and creating awareness on the subject matter.

Most of the population have a narrow perspective of the profession. Even if they eventually do, they would just employ them to run soirees or other irrelevant errands.

What service(s) or product(s) Asian Alliance India offer?

Events & Campaigns: Asian Alliance India puts it’s community members as first in every decision made within.

They host various webinars and creates corporate human sustainability resources to show operational functions for sustainability within the community including networking and rewards.

Patreon Membership: They also offer a Patreon platform for conscious audiences who can essentially pay a monthly subscription price (which will start at even $1/month) to access their Patreon services.

Mentorship & Career Growth: Career coaching model ensures that each member has a dedicated mentor who is responsible for their individual career growth.

That’s what is unique about Asian Alliance India – their leaders are passionate about helping their dedicated team to find their role within and in the integrated marketing and PR industry as a whole.

Editorial Assistance: Their team of experienced writers produces content for all platforms, whether online or offline.

With an in-depth experience of across-industry writing articles, opinion pieces, press releases, whitepapers, web copy, sales and marketing collateral, the AAI team will deliver compelling, punchy copy to support your communications.

Uniqueness about her business

The ever increasing technological world represents opportunities for diverse people to consume, however, content is not always accessible to everyone.

As an online networking community, their goal is to be as inclusive as possible. Human society without ethics and personalisation seems hollow.

Asian Alliance India is working to create today’s public relations knowledge, as a far more accessible asset, and the value of it is understood and utilized by a far more spectrum of demographic.

Their purpose driven values are adopted and demonstrated with the true purpose of educating, and guiding students, graduates, and emerging practitioners to exhibit authenticity.

They had recently received funding from the AMEC 360 Virtual Pitch Competition, the world’s largest media intelligence and insights professional organisation, representing organisations and practitioners who provide media evaluation and communication research.

Why this business?

All the recent events around the world point out the continued evidence of reinforcing corporate values beyond diversity, equity and inclusion.

The continued pressure on brands to align their marketing and branding to a larger extent to expressing their values would be essential.

We are becoming a generation where more and bigger is not always better. With the ability to demonstrate pure kindness, to listen with patience, act with compassion and elicit loyalty is ultimately success in businesses.

Solutions that impact culture, reshape industries, evoke emotion and can change human behaviour. That’s why Asian Alliance India call themselves a creative transformation community.

It’s not enough to be great at one skill in this interconnected and overlapping environment. Parul believes, we have to be great at whatever’s needed.

It’s not about traditional job descriptions, legacy systems, industry definitions or what’s worked before.

It’s about unpredictable interests, diverse perspectives and the raw creativity to shape bold ideas and touch emotions.

What was mission at the outset?

Asian Alliance is an online networking platform for PR & Marketing Professionals, working agency or in-house Agency Owners, Freelance Publicists, Entry-Level PR & Marketing Professionals, Company Owners, Brand teams and students.

Organization Size

Asian Alliance India have a dedicated team of 5+ members from Singapore, India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Sri Lanka and they are expanding consistently around the Asia – Pacific region.

Their members are unique as they represent diversity and inclusivity along with a new perspective of Public Relations.

Company’s goals

Currently, to actively convey Asian Alliance India’s ethical and sustainable campaign for change.

The major goal is to establish special scholarships, grants, and bursaries for highly motivated, and passionate students from Asian countries This way, development of effective scholars and leaders is possible within developing countries.

Scholarships will be awarded on a 50% grant : 50% loan basis through a competitive application process once a year in June or July.

The main criteria for selecting award winners would be: l) consistent good academic records, 2) genuine financial need, 3) demonstrating thoughtful and coherent educational and career plans, with extra-curricular interests and achievements. The next application cycle starts on 5th June 2022.

Asian Alliance India hopes to sustain its growth, and a set of strategies to guide towards new program development, and building a solid financial foundation in below ways:

1) Hire Indian entry level professionals, and young graduates who are motivated and inspired by their value proposition and be a rising change in online global market conditions. Both ways they would be creating internships and employment opportunities for the industry.

2) Adapt plan to smooth out communities inefficiency, refine its strengths to better suit market expansion.

3) They would also be offering volunteers, and ambassador leadership positions for colleges, and universities across Asia-Pacific to lead chapters, and significantly influence the level of involvement in various parts of our targeted regions.

4) They would establish and train newly elected officers and hand over materials each spring.

How she build a successful customer base?

Parul has been a woman of many hats who loves taking tasks to the next level by engaging and incorporating appealing content no matter what the project scale.

She has always liked to be associated with people & projects who focus on inspiring and building revolutionary campaigns, creating opportunities for increased exposure, and building strategic relationships.

Through devising and executing numerous communication strategies and campaigns on emerging industries and topics, Parul has accumulated a resourceful, creative and entrepreneurial approach to customers.

Since people are often active on multiple social media platforms, Asian Alliance India now have an expectation and opportunity to connect with their audiences where they are.

From engaging with media via Twitter DM to identifying and working with influencers through social platforms, AAI has become a more integrated part of the overall marketing machine.

They also identify newsworthy stories that are relevant to a target audience and pitch it via email, not over the phone. Often, journalists and editors won’t have the time it takes to listen to someone’s story, so this makes email a better arena to give a pitch.

What have been some of your failures, and what have you learned from them?

Parul states, how she was overwhelmed with all the changes that were happening! The coronavirus pandemic has changed a lot of things about our lives in some pretty obvious ways, changes that you’ve probably heard all about.

Spending more time at home by virtue of its social structure, a variety of personal and social changes took place.

Parul saw drastic changes in her productivity and behavior during the last year. It’s so easy to get caught up in insignificant things that have little value or think too far in advance, she says.

This idea got her thinking about how often we assume different perspectives on things which we shouldn’t even consider in the first place.

She let out that toxicity from her life and focused more on manifesting her goals and dreams. Something that she is currently working on overcoming is Imposter Syndrome and the unreasonable doubt that it creates.

Also, career roles have been a major source of inequality for Parul, and often been personally held back due to perception of not fitting in the managerial roles because, “she was not tough enough for corporate life, were too young or emotional, and simply could not play the game.”

Initially, she had to overcome her own self-doubts. If she was good enough. If she knew enough. If people would listen to her. If things would grow.

The ability to balance her studies and say NO to certain people who wanted her to do stuff for them when she couldn’t really do them was something she struggled with.

So, Parul always felt drained, doing so many things at the same time and feeling dissatisfied with herself and her own plans too.

Also, it may not be fair that people make judgments so quickly, usually within a few seconds of observation, but it’s unrealistic to expect that they won’t.

Hence, she did face backlash from certain people and her own relatives as well. At the very end take in all the feedback; filter out the noise and the naysayers; learn from your mistakes and try not to make them again.

But whatever you do, do not give up. The race of subjugating the weaker and underestimating women is no longer in some other person’s hands, you are your
own inspiration.

Greatest inspiration

“Family is the best support system, it can take you to places”. Parul says, her efforts and work is less than 20% but the peace of mind and motivation offered by the support system is what made the leap.

Both of her parents have always been her biggest supporters, despite all the mistakes she have made. They have pushed her to do what she loves and she thanks them for where she is today.

Also she says, that no single course is innately more valuable than all others. An arts major can go on to be more successful than a business major.

The value that you get out of your studies and what happens after you graduate depends entirely on you.

Today, she is confident and passionate about what she does and wish to pursue in life and she hope every woman reading this finds the strength to believe in their decisions!

Also her mentors throughout, always pushed her and made be nothing less than extraordinary.

Parul would like to thank them for teaching her that one can do great things, despite nerves or lack of courage!

Biggest Mistake

Her saddest moments in life have to be times when she restrained herself feeling that she is not tough enough to speak up and battle the stereotypes. It has been mentally draining but lastly she gathered the courage to seek inspiration and inspire others, says Parul.

One piece of advice to Startups

As young students we have been told that we need to work hard to get where we want to be. This is true but also remind yourself that work doesn’t define you, don’t neglect the rest of your personality, the part your friends and family love you for.

It’s not long before Parul realized that this aspect of her life was taking over, and yes she can’t fix it by clicking my fingers, but the first step is realization.

Education and skills can help you live like a professional if you use both. Plus, it’s perfectly fine, if you haven’t figured out life yet.

Remind yourself that no one really has it all together. People who are business owners or in big, fancy cool jobs are not perfect. From social media it seems that people are doing everything and more, but it is not true.

This can be distracting and put pressure on yourself that you are not doing enough. Don’t let it get you down.

Does your company help the community or society?

Yes! Asian Alliance India is dedicated towards creating a change within diverse communities along with providing free mentorship to youth from minority and indigenous backgrounds within different regions.