The Indian Dream - SoundSage

Make In India.

The three words that will define the future of the country.

We have a trade deficit of close to $100 Bn with China. That's Rs. 83,000 Crores that leaves the country and isn't used for our own development.

Virtuoso Optoelectronics is a manufacturing company that started in 2015 with the idea of making electronic products in India. Started with circuit boards, then manufactured LEDs and now for the last three years, they've been manufacturing Air Conditioners.

I talk to Sukrit about this fantastic journey of scaling to Rs. 330 Cr in Revenue in 8 years!

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Movie Production. It's something that most of us don't know much about. I host Ashi Dua, Founder of Flying Unicorn Entertainment to talk about her work in producing movies like Lust Stories, Bombay Talkies, Paava Kadhaigal and More!

Episode Timeline:
(01:09) - Introduction of Ashi Dua

(03:39) - Why did Ashi move to Bombay?

(07:12) - Ashi’s introduction to movie production

(10:10) - Anurag’s role in Ashi’s career

(11:53) - Anurag’s style of making movies

(14:42) - What does production entail?

(17:23) - Producer’s involvement in the finances

(18:27) - Producer’s compensation

(19:15) - Bombay Talkies and bringing 4 directors together

(22:17) - How do producers put projects together?

(24:20) - Skills needed to be a producer

(28:37) - Is the industry segregated for producers?

(31:05) - Predicting Bollywood’s trends

(35:17) - Choosing the right platform for a movie

(38:01) - How does someone find their footing in the industry?

(39:45) - The Dhoom Dhaam Company

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India has 64 Million Micro, Small & Mid Sized Businesses (MSMEs) in India. However, only 12% of them have access to formal credit. There's a massive $530 Billion Credit Gap in this market. In simpler terms, the total demand for formal loans by MSMEs in $819 Billion, out of which $530 Billion is unmet.

The problem is that banks don't have the right products and the right business model to serve the MSMEs. That's where Indifi is revolutionizing the market with its Digital Loans made based on Alternative Sources of Data.

I host Mr. Alok Mittal, Founder of Indifi Technologies on understanding the problems in the market and how they are solving it.

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Influencer Marketing. A rapidly growing Industry. I sit down with Pranav, Founder of OpraahFx, one of the first Influencer Marketing Agencies in the country to talk about the rise and evolution of Influencer Marketing. We talk about how Influencer Marketing campaigns get executed, how much do creators get paid, his decision to focus on Gaming Creators and the future of creator led brands!

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Episode Timeline:

(00:00) Influencers and sponsorship deals

(03:15) How did Pranav identify the Influencer Marketing opportunity in 2016-17

(07:22) Why the Legacy Marketing Agencies failed to identify Influencer Marketing Opportunity

(10:02) First Bollywood x Influencer Marketing Campaign - Fukrey Returns

(11:45) The Evolution of Influencer Marketing, How do Agencies win new business

(19:29) How is ROI calculated for Influencer Marketing

(24:13) Shein & MamaEarth Case Study

(28:08) How do Creators charge for Campaign

(31:04) Influencers becoming celebrities

(33:42) Disrupting the micro influencer space

(39:22) Why did Pranav double down on Gaming Creators?

(45:50) Different Opportunities for Gaming Creators

(50:09) Creator-led brands in India

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About time that Indian Direct to Consumer Brands make a global impact...

I talk to Akshay Ghulati - Co-Founder of Shiprocket, who is currently working with many Indian D2C Brands to help them go global!

Episode Timeline:

(00:00) - Introduction to ShiprocketX & Indian D2C brands going global
(03:01) - Why should Indian brands go global now?
(07:21) - Experience of taking a Indian brand global.
(19:13) - The product market fit on successful Indian brands in the global market
(24:08) - How to select the marketplaces or which market you want to sell in?
(27:45) - What’s the mindset with the pricing?
(30:01) - Possibilities with the upside of global selling
(33:04) - Pushback from the entrepreneurs
(36:49) - Compliance laws of selling oversees
(41:52) - The segments who will want to take the brand global
(42:56) - High potential categories to get high global success
(48:22) - What are the opportunities to build agency type of businesses in this ecosystem?
(52:18) - What are the steps I need to take to run an experiment of taking my brand global?

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Artificial Intelligence will change the way our food is grown. Want to know how?

In this fascinating conversation with Dr. Pratik Desai, a Computer Scientist and Artificial Intelligence Expert, we talk about his startup KissanAI and how it's helping the farmers in India get much needed information about all aspects of farming - from fertilisers to crop diseases to ideal crop to grow given soil conditions.

If you want to know about the future of humanity powered by AI, this episode is a must listen!

Episode Timeline:
(00:37) Introduction to KissanAI and AI in Agriculture
(03:05) How did KissanAI start?
(04:26) What kind of problems do the farmers face?
(06:25) Traditional ways a farmer can seek help
(09:42) How KissanAI help the farmers?
(11:40) The backend of KissanAI
(15:17) How did KissanAI get the attraction?
(25:25) Possible ways to monetize it
(33:54) Product market fit of KissanAI
(40:25) Possibilities of how AI will impact Agriculture
(46:58) Success story of a farmer

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Artificial Intelligence will change the way how we live.

In this episode, I host Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Venture Capital firm Accel, who invests in AI startups in India. We talk about how AI will have a massive impact on Agriculture, Education, Healthcare, Infrastructure Development and more and fuel India's journey towards a $10 Trillion GDP.

This isn't a technical episode, it's an episode focus on the use cases and about the startups that are being built in India.

Episode Timeline:
3:12 - What is Artificial Intelligence?
5:43 - AI for Bharat
6:40 - AI in Agriculture
8:38 - WhatsApp help for Indian Farmers through AI
9:59 - Impact of AI In Agriculture
10:51 - Use case of AI in Agriculture - Image Identification
11:19 - Attention is all you Need- Paper written by Mr.Vaswani
11:38 - Evolution of AI
13:33 - AI in Education
15:29 - Use case of Khan Academy
17:15 - AI in Creative Fields
18:58 - Use Case of Descript
19:58 - Impact of AI on Productivity
20:16 - Use case of Wokeio
21:40 - AI in Healthcare
23:08 - Use Case of AI in Healthcare in helping a man walk who had never walked before
25:25 - AI as an assistant to a doctor
26:00 - AI for Mental Health
29:10 - The Negative impact of AI
30:26 - AI for Infrastructure Development
31:13 - Use case of AI for Infrastructure
33:06 - Use case of AIDash
34:26 - How can satellite images can be useful
35:15 - AI for Renewable Energy
37:42 - How can India make sure that we don’t miss the boat for AI?
39:32 - Who should invest in R&D of AI?
41:39 - Can AI function on Regional languages present in India?
45:25 - AI for Defence
48:20 - AI for Businesses
1:03:50 - Where will be India in the AI race, 15 years from now

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Learn how DrinkPrime, an innovative water purifier company in India, is tackling the country's water crisis. With millions suffering from waterborne diseases, DrinkPrime offers IoT-enabled purifiers that adapt to varying water quality. Trusted by over 200,000 households in three cities, they are scaling profitably with support from leading investors Alteria Capital, Surge, and Omidyar Network India.

Timestamps for Easy Listening:
1
(00:30) - Intro to DrinkPrime and Water Purifier Market
(02:54) - Why DrinkPrime was started?
(07:00) - Decision to build new Water Purifier rather add Subscription to existing ones
(11:05) - How water quality in India changes across regions and in different seasons
(14:43) - The Current Landscape & History of Water Purifier Market
(17:33) - Why Celebrities market water purifiers and how DrinkPrime took a different approach
(23:40) - The challenges with doing Hardware Innovation
(28:34) - Cost Structure of the traditional Water Purifier Industry
(34:19) - STOP over-purifying your water
(37:58) - Why the traditional water purifier companies are too big to change
(40:49) - How DrinkPrime is supplying free water to government schools
(47:29) - If you're buying Water Purifier, here's how you should go about it?

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If you're building a D2C Brand or want to build one, do NOT miss this episode! Take my word for it, this will be time well spent!

In the last 5-7 Years, we've seen some great D2C Brands scale up to become large profitable businesses. One such brand is Pilgrim, that operates in the Beauty and Personal Care segment, which is estimated to be $25 Billion Dollar Market in India.

I speak to Anurag Kedia, Co-Founder at Pilgrim, to talk about how the scaled to Rs. 180 Cr Annual Revenue Run-rate in 3 Years.

Anurag shares his insights very candidly and goes deep in topics such as Core Pillars to build D2C brand, Brand vs Performance Marketing, Retention, Scaling up a D2C Brand.

Episode Chapters:
00:00 - Intro to India's Beauty and Personal Care Market and Anurag
03:25 - Core Pillars to Build a D2C Brand
06:40 - Growth Hacking for D2C brands, Optimizing Different Marketplaces
12:34 - Finding a white space in Beauty and Personal Care segment in 2019, Brand Positioning
20:45 - Understanding Customer Preferences using Research
26:15 - Brand Positioning for D2C Brands
36:30 - Performance Marketing vs Brand Marketing for D2C Brands, how to evaluate Brand Marketing invesment
44:35 - How Pilgrim looks at Retention
53:47 - Working with Contract Manufacturers as a D2C Brand
58:25 - How D2C Brands have to change between 0 to 1, 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 Journey.
1:08:00 - Entering Offline - Omnichannel Strategy
1:12:00 - What kind of investments are right for D2C Brands

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The Pet Care Industry in India...

It is estimated to be a Rs. 4000 Crores Market in India, growing annually at about 20% which makes it a great industry to start a new business as there is double digit growth!

The industry can be roughly broken down into Pet Foods which is about 60% of the market, Pet HealthCare (20% of the market), Pet Toys and Accessories (15%) and Pet Day Cares and Hostels about 5%

Currently there are about 30 million pets in the country, which growing at 10-11% annually.

And that's why, Varun, Aman, and Vineet Started Supertails in early 2021.

Supertails is on track to achieve Rs. 100 Crores in Annual Revenue Run-Rate in the next few months and have raised $10 million last year in a tough fundraising environment.

Deepika Padukone is also an investor in Supertails!

On this episode, I talk to Varun about:
- The Pet Care Industry & it's Value Chain
- The Export Potential of Pet Care Products out of India
- The focus on Customer Experience at Supertails
- How Supertails leverages Content & Community to build Brand Awareness
- Why it's important to embrace failure as a founder

Timestamps for quick viewing:

(00:00) - Overview of the Pet Care Industry in India & Intro to Varun Sadana, Founder of Supertails

(2:55) - Why Varun Quit as the Founder of Licious and the thesis behind Supertails

(8:54) - How Supertails was able to raise $10 Mn in a tough environment and why fundamentally good business often find the capital needed to scale

(21:47) - The Import & Exports of Pet Care Products in India

(26:53) - How Supertails focuses on Customer Experience and how they've made it part of their culture

(34:56) - The Importance of Embracing Failure as a Founder

(48:38) - How Supertails leverages Content & Community to build a Brand

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On this episode, we talk to Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO at Masai School

Prateek is an IIT Kanpur Graduate, a Teach for India Alum and Ex-Founder of Grabhouse, a real-estate tech startup that was acquired by Commonfloor and subsequently by Quikr. He’s a second time entrepreneur who is picking up his first love of teaching.

India has 444 Million People that are in the 0-18 Years Age Bracket. That’s 400 Million people coming into the workforce over the next 15 to 20 years. For them to be contribute to India’s economic growth, we have a mammoth task of giving them the right skills.

We have over 45000 College and Institutes in the country and you would think we are slowly but surely building capacity to educate and train the 400 million people over the next 2 decades.

But, the grim reality on the ground that a large majority of students graduating from these institutions have NO employable skills. For example, of the 1.5 Million engineers that graduate, only 3% secure high paying technology jobs. The situation is even worst in Business and Humanities courses. The education industry is a money-making, recession proof business that’s being run purely on the fact that every parent wants their kid to hold a ‘degree’. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not, the societal shame from not having one is good enough reason to pour money into getting your child through college for 3 to 4 years.

The lack of employable talent coming out of college is HUGE problem to solve if we want to achieve The Indian Dream of becoming a large developed economy with a high per capita income. And to solve this problem, whatever we done so far isn’t working. The core reason why colleges suck in India is because there’s no incentive alignment. The college gets their fees regardless of the fact that the student might not even get a decent job after graduating. But, what if colleges got paid only after the graduating students earned.

And that’s where I find the model of Outcome driven education or Income Share Agreements very very interesting. It’s a model where the institute only gets paid after students start earning a baseline salary. What this also does is it opens up education to talented students who previously who couldn’t afford high fees of these colleges.

On the episode today, we have Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO of Masai School who is pioneering the Income Share Agreement or outcome driven model of education India. Masai is a 3 year old startup that helps students learn coding for free in a 6 months, military style coding bootcamp. They work with students with no coding or computer science background, and train them through their rigouros program. They have an income share agreement where they can make up to 3 Lakhs as a cost for the education, only and only if the students get a salary of more than 5 Lakhs per annum.

There’s no doubt Vocational Training is key to make large sections of society employment ready and productive. Only on the back of skilled talent, can you build large industries that contribute significantly to the GDP of the country. We’ve seen this play out in China where they used skilled labor and technology to build the world’s Manufacturing hub.

For India, a similar opportunity lies in being the Software hub of the world. And for that to happen, we need to train millions of students every year. Over the next 50 minutes, I talk to Prateek about the thesis behind Masai School, how they teach students, what are the execution challenges of training 7000 Students, and about their partnership with National Skill Development Coloration.

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Mysore Deep Perfumery House (MDPH), popularly known for their brand Zed Black has built an Rs. 800 Crore+ Agarbatti Business from India.

We talk to Ankit Agarwal, Partner at MDPH about how he has scaled the business profitably over the last 17 years on this episode of The Indian Dream Podcast.

We talk about the following things on the Podcast:

(00:22) - Agarbatti or Incense Sticks Market in India & Policy Changes of 2019
(05:05) - Start of MDPH in 1992 after 7 Failed Businesses
(08:26) - How Zed Black Brand Started and why it became a hit across India
(10:09) - Three most important things about the business: Packaging, Distribution and Fragrance.
(16:28) - How Zed Black moved to Advanced Payments with Distributors to Unlock Growth
(26:20) - Why Zed Black kept uniform pricing in a business that's dominated by Regional Players with different pricing per region
(28:52) - Export Market for Agarbattis
(30:39) - The Technology and R&D Investment in Manufacturing. World's Largest Manufacturing Plant of Agarbattis
(34:18) - Why Zed Black decided to get Mahendra Singh Dhoni & Hrithik Roshan to Endorse the Brand
(40:20) - How should Entrepreneurs take advice from experienced people
(45:59) - Why Zed Black's Deodrant Business Failed

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In this episode, we talk to Mathew Joseph. He's a 3rd Generation Entrepreneur who was the Marketing Director at Duroflex before he started a D2C Mattress Brand called Sleepyhead.

So, mattresses. It’s one of those ‘boring’ and ‘unsexy’ industries and as we’ve often discussed on the podcast, it’s perfect for building a large, profitable business. The mattress industry in India is estimated to be 12,000 Crores Industry of which 60% is still Unorganized. Traditionally, 3 players dominated the industry, Kurl-on, Duroflex and Sleepwell. All legacy companies built over decades.

Then between 2016-2018, atleast 10 new D2C Mattress brands popped up. Some of which have survived and grown to more than 200 Crores in revenue in the last 5 years! Talk about Disruption!

What makes today’s episode interesting is that we got a chance to talk to Matthew Joseph who not only is the 3rd generation entrepreneur of the family run Duroflex but he’s also the founder of a D2C Mattress brand called Sleepyhead! What makes his journey fascinating is that he saw the upcoming disruption from the online players and instead of fighting to defend the legacy brand of duroflex, he set up a completely new brand and business entity to start Sleepyhead!

In the conversation today, we talk about the Mattress industry, the value chain and manufacturing process of mattresses, the different types of mattresses, the reason D2C Mattress Industry scaled so well over the last 3 years, how he has built Sleepyhead’s brand and most importantly, which is his favorite mattress!

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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We have open positions in Content Writing, Content Research, Video Editing - Please reach out to me on 8886248842 or sidbetala@gmail.com if you'd like to collaborate on building The Indian Dream!

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In this episode, we host Kavita & Anand (Co-Founders at Voiro) to talk about Ad-Tech Industry.

Technology has fundamentally changed how we can consume and interact with Sports Content. And that has resulted in a meteoric rise in the value of Sports Leagues and Sports Celebrities.

IPL, Formula 1, NBA, NFL, all these leagues have seen tremendous growth in their revenues over the last decade thanks to rising media rights, new ways of monetisation and fan connects!

All of this comes down to the evolution of Technology. Smartphones, high-speed internet, social media - everything has snowballed into positive tailwinds for Sports Content and that's the reason why the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix are bidding to get media rights for these sports leagues.

In this episode with Kavita and Anand, we'll talk about the trends that have resulted in the rise of the value of sports leagues and sports celebrities.

If you haven't, check out the Voiro Podcast! They talk about the world of Ad-Tech, Marketing, and Social Media on their weekly podcast series!

As I've mentioned in the last couple of episodes, there's a lot going on at The Indian Dream - some good, some bad. I talk about it all towards the end of the episode.

If you want to tune into that directly, skip to (35:11).

We have open positions in Content Writing, Content Research, Video Editing - Please reach out to me on 8886248842 or sidbetala@gmail.com if you'd like to collaborate on building The Indian Dream!

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In this episode, we host Kavita & Anand (Co-Founders at Voiro) to talk about Ad-Tech Industry.

We’re all familiar with how big the Digital Ads market has grown over the last decade. To put some numbers, in 2012, the Global Digital Ad spend was close to $100 Billion. Today, that stands at more than 600 Billion dollars - a healthy 20% growth every year. In the next few years, $1 Trillion dollars will be spent on Digital Ads globally.

With the rise of Ad Spends, the technology that supports that industry, often called as Ad-Tech has seen an exponential rise. As we’ve often discussed on the podcast, selling shovels during a gold rush is a great way to build a large, profitable business.

Today, Voiro is a SaaS Platform that helps media companies run their Ads business, and in the last 9 years, they’ve had a ring-side view of this meteoric rise of the Ad-Tech market. What makes their journey even more interesting is that they’ve part of the team that runs the Indian Premier League’s Ad’s business! Practically from Day 1 of Hotstar, in fact it wasn’t even called hotstar back then.

We’ll first talk about how they went from build a service business to build a software product, then we’ll talk about the landscape shift that’s happened from broadcast to digital technology, then we talk about how the entire world of Ad-Tech come together to form a value chain and lastly we talk about the emerging trends of privacy, regulation and content creation.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.
PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce businesses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!

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This is Part 2 of the series where we discuss India's Digital Infrastructure.

Here are our Research Notes for the episode.

Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC has been in the news lately.

Currently, online marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal) follow a platform model. In this model, they have end-to-end control over the entire e-commerce transaction process, right from seller on-boarding, customer acquisition, order fulfilment, complaint redressal, and managing payments. Right now, all these processes are being controlled by a single entity.

ONDC's open network will 'unbundle' or break down this complex system of small activities into separate micro-services that can be addressed separately by any entity. These organisations can chooses to perform one or more of these activities. As a result, the proponents of ONDC say that if it is successful, ONDC will democratize e-commerce, increase competition and accelerate growth.

If it is democratised, one big change through ONDC will be that it caps referral commissions for platforms that send shoppers to a seller at just 3% – much less than the roughly 30% cut charged by Amazon, Flipkart and others.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.
PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce busiensses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!

Here are some research notes that we compiled or referred to for this episode:

Jefferies Report about ONDC - tonne of details not available elsewhere.
Twitter Thread by Aditya Kondawar - helped us structure our thoughts.

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The Indian Education System needs an overhaul, especially college education. The current system produces students that barely have the necessary employable skills.

In this episode, we talk to Aditya and Raj of Stoa School to talk about the Indian Education System, the problems that exist, how they can be solved and their insights from building Stoa over the last two years.

If you haven't already, do subscribe to Stoa Daily. This is one of the best newsletters if you're interested in business and management.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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The business of Drones is one of the most exciting themes to look out for in the next 5-10 Years. With wide ranging applications, Drones are set to be a Rs. 15,000 Crore industry by 2026.

We have with us, Vipul Singh, Founder of Aarav Unmanned Systems. They manufacture drones and provides integrated services for Geo Surveys. They recently bagged a Rs. 15 Crore contract from Survey of India to map out entire Haryana.

Vipul is also the founding member of the Drone Federation of India and has had a very interesting journey working with the central government and various regulators to create the Drone Rules of 2021 that were the key to unlock this market.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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On this episode of Quick Takes, we talk about the USD 100 Bn B2B E-Commerce Market in India and the recent entry of Grasim into this market.

This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.
PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce busiensses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!

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This is Part 2 of two part episode on Wine Industry in India and Sula's impending IPO.

In the previous episode, we discuss about the Business of Wines in India and a brief history about Sula. In this episode, we take a deeper look at the business of Sula Wines based on the IPO prospectus that they filed.

Sula is a ~Rs. 450 Crore business with ~Rs. 52 Crore in Profits. It's been built over the last 20+ years by Mr. Rajeev Samant and the stellar team. We discuss how Sula has been able to dominate the market through a mix of great marketing, product and distribution strategy along with retaining key talent with generous compensation.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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(01:40) - What will it take to build Sula
(06:28) - Sula's People Strategy and Executive Org Structure
(10:51) - Sula's Investments in Property, Plant and Equipment is their Moat
(17:35) - Analysis of Sula's Working Capital Cycle
(24:51) - Sula's Strategy of moving away from Imports/Distribution of Foreign Brands to focus on building their own domestic brands
(29:23) - Sula's Brand Strategy - House of Brands
(33:52) - Sula's Distribution Strategy
(36:24) - Alternative Marketing, Sula Fest, Wine Tourism
(44:13) - Closing Comments on Business of Sula

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This is Part 1 of two part episode on Wine Industry in India and Sula's impending IPO.

Wine is a Rs. 1500 Cr ($200 Million) market in India that's growing fast. Sula's DRHP filings are a great read to understand about this market and what it takes to operate in complex alco-beverage sector in India.

In this episode, we focus on the market as it stands today, talk about the global trends that might shape trends within India and what the future could look like.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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(02:12) - Overview of Wine Market in India
(06:00) - Why Maharashtra and Karnataka are major wine producers (Hint: Policies)
(08:43) - Why winemaking is a capital intensive business, thanks to the large land holding required
(11:13) - Global Wine Market, special focus on chinese market
(17:44) - A Case for why the wine market in India will grow
(19:11) - History of Sula

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This is Part 1 of the series where we discuss India's Digital Infrastructure.

Over the last few years, the Indian Government along with the support of iSpirt, have build India Stack. We're now close to seeing the full potential of India Stack with the recent launch of Account Aggregator, which will soon be followed by Open Credit Enablement Network.

In today's episode, we deep-dive into the world of OCEN and discuss how it has the potential to unlock the $300 Billion MSME Lending market.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

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Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)

Episode Timeline:
(02:02) - What is India Stack and how it's been the foundation for India's Digital Infrastructure
(04:49) - The $300 Billion Credit Gap in India's MSME Sector
(07:26) - The current models of BNPL are NOT the lending market that we need to develop the country
(08:46) - The Challenges with MSME Lending - High Costs
(10:04) - Why MSME's prefer to take Loans from Informal sources
(17:07) - What are Account Aggregators?
(22:07) - Why we've not seen a true Loan marketplace and why API Standardization is important to unlock the lending market
(28:54) - What will the lifecycle of loan look like when its powered by India Stack
(33:14) - 'Lending as a Feature'
(40:26) - Lend & Forget model vs. Lend, Monitor, Collect Model (Balance Sheet vs Cash Flow Lending)

Here are some research notes that we compiled or referred to for this episode:

ISPIRT - First Open House on OCEN
Loan Service Providers & Cashflow Lending
The Indian Dream's Research on India's Fintech Infrastructure

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On this episode of Quick Takes, we talk about the ban on Single Use Plastic by the Indian Government and the investments that are happening in the alternatives of these products.

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On the episode today, we have with us Amit Khatri, Co-Founder of Noise

Checkout our Youtube Channel and Subscribe!

A couple of themes I’ve tried to focus on in the discussion:

Ofcourse, we speak at length about bootstrapping. The decision to bootstrap, and how it impacted the journey of Noise
We also talk about Product Differentiation and how important it is to focus on Customer Needs to launch products
Lastly, we talk about Manufacturing of Electronic Goods within in India

This is a fun episode with a company that’s not been covered by the traditional media houses, coz they haven’t raised any funding.

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In this episode of Business Munchies, we talk about Battery Swapping & The Business of Petrol Pumps .

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)
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Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)

Episode Outline:
(00:48) - Battery Swapping - The Policy, Importance, Future
(26:54) - The Business of Petrol Pumps

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Very excited to launch the first episode of a new segment that we'll be experimenting with on the podcast.

These Quick Takes are going to be less than 15 minutes where we discuss all the interesting market trends, government policies or anything that we believe could be interesting for people who are interested in all things business!

In this episode, we discuss the Resurgence of the Toy Industry in India.

Here's the link previous episode where we predicted the resurgence of the Toy Industry:

Feb 2021 - Predicting the resurgence in Toy Industry in India

You can also check out the newsletter where we talk about the Toy Industry. Link Here.

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In this episode of Business Munchies, we talk about the Sneaker Reselling Market in India and the state of the Mental Health market in India. We also do a quick take on the Ethanol Market in India.

If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.

Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)
Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)
Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)

Episode Outline:
(08:36) - The Rise of Sneaker Reselling in India
(32:33) - The State Of Mental Health Market in India & Opportunities
(58:00) - Content Recommendation for the Week

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In this episode of Business Munchies, we talk about the recent Drone Mohatsav and about the Make in India push for the Indian Defence Industry.

Episode Outline:
(02:11) - Update on Drone Mahotsav - Government Organized Event for Drones
(21:35) - Why India needs to manufacture its own defence equipments
(55:27) - Content Recommendation for this week

Reference Links:
Link to the announcements on Drones Mohatsav

Link to the Drones Episode on The Indian Dream

Link to Drones for Agriculture Research

Link to Research on Make in India for Defence Equipment.

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On the episode today, we have with us Ankit Agarwal, Founder of Phool.Co

Checkout our Youtube Channel and Subscribe!

Did you know India produces 8 Million tonnes of Flower Waste that comes from Temples, Events and various other sources. And a lot of this waste lands up in rivers like Ganga, Yamuna and adds to the pollution.

This problem led to the birth of Phool, a brand that’s known for its natural agarbattis.

A D2C Brand on the face of it, a bio materials company underneath, this was a fascinating conversation with Ankit Agarwal, Co-Founder of Phool.Co.

Episode Outline:
(03:01) - What led to identifying the problem of Temple Waste and birth of Phool
(07:26) - Initial Journey of Phool
(15:54) - Going ahead with the idea despite advice from Industry Experts
(32:08) - How the World Economic Forum Video came about. Lessons on Bootstrapping
(37:55) - Creating Fleather (Floral Leather)
(47:38) - Solving Waste Management by building sustainable businesses
(50:12) - Value Chain of Temple Waste Recycling
(01:01:36) - How did Alia Bhatt become Phool's Brand Ambassador

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In this episode of Business Munchies, we talk about the fast growing world of Healthy Snacks and talk about Sahil's experience with Mushroom Coffee and Fully Automated Hotels in US.

**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.

PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce businesses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!**

Episode Outline:
(01:44) - Sahil's Experience in a US Business Exhibition
(03:09) - Four Sigmatic Mushroom Coffee, Mushroom derived products in India
(05:27) - A peak into the future - Fully Automated Hotels in US.
(11:29) - Start to the Discussion on Healthy Snacks
(14:13) - Why this industry is set for good growth
(19:59) - Government's focus on Food processing Industry
(22:13) - Startups in the space of Health Snacks
(26:05) - Different Segments within Healthy Snack Market
(33:50) - What does it take to start a Healthy Snack brand
(38:15) - Target Market for Healthy Snacks
(41:23) - Opportunities in the Health Snack Industry
(45:21) - Infrastructure Businesses
(53:40) - Independent Certification Body that does testing for various products?
(59:44) - Content Marketing - The differentiator in D2C Health Snack Brands
(01:01:56) - Our Movie picks for the week

Relevant Links:

Mushroom Farming Episode
Jiwa foods
Soulfull Foods Episode on The Indian Dream
Food Processing Episode
Food Processing Market Size and Growth in India
Link to newsletter comparing how Snack manufacturers game the ingredients to call products healthier!

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**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.

In this episode, we host Verne Harnish, the author of the bestselling book 'Scaling Up: Why some companies make it and why other's don't'

As an entrepreneur, there are 3 key phases of business building. The first is the the Zero to One journey. Where you take an idea and test it in the markets and build a small business around it. Then comes the 1 to 10 Journey Where you to convert the initial success to product market fit, build a team and scale it to a few more customers. And then comes the 10 to 100 Journey where you press the pedal and build large business.

The Scaling Up book is one of the best books that helps you understand what it takes to scale for 10 to 100 journey. It is a must-read if you’re an entrepreneur with a small to mid sized business. On the episode, we deep dive into two key topics that are important in a Scale Up Journey - Pricing & Compensation. Verne discusses some frameworks and examples to help entrepreneurs think through these topics.

Episode Timeline:
(02:38) - How did Verne Start Entrepreneur's Organization (EO) with Steve Jobs
(07:36) - Four Levers of Scale Up
(09:47) - Deep Dive into how Founders should think about Pricing
(14:32) - B2B Pricing
(19:35) - Interesting Story about Pricing
(25:36) - How to think about Compensation during Scale Up
(35:29) - How to implement Profit Sharing Compensation Scheme
(43:04) - Two Important Habits for Entrepreneurs

Relevant Links
Good Better Best Pricing - HBR Article
Confessions of the Pricing Man: How Price Affects Everything

Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)

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Hello Hello Hello! Another Business Munchies Segment and this time we talk about the upcoming Venture Capital Winter, Startups we'd like to take a bet on and why Siddharth has stopped Angel Investing.

Hosted by Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala). We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter, reels on Instagram and Clips on Youtube.

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On this episode, we discuss the path for India's economy to be a $10 Trillion Dollar economy. To talk to us about this, we have Mr. Subhash Chandra Garg on the episode.

Mr. Garg has served the country as ex-Finance Secretary and Economic Affairs secretary between 2017 and 2019. He’s an IAS Officer who has served in various key positions across the Central Government and the Govt. of Rajasthan. He has also served as the Executive Director at the World Bank. He has recently written a fantastic book called The $10 Trillion Dream where he talks about the State of the Indian Economy and the Policy Reforms we need as a country. It’s very detailed account of where we stand across sectors like Agriculture, Infrastructure, Technology etc and how we can set up the right policies to grow these sectors and achieve the $10 Trillion Dollar Dream.

Show Note Soon!

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On this episode, we host Sajith Pai to talk about the brilliant report he and Amal Vats published called the Indus Valley Annual Report 2022.

The Indus Valley Report is a report that captures the beauty of the Indian Startup Ecosystem with relevant data points and helps you make sense of what's happened already and the massive opportunity that is in front of us.

The podcast is hosted by Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala). If you like our content, join our No Spam Whatsapp Group to get summaries of the content we create.

In today's episode, we discuss:

(02:19) - Why India is a country of contradictions?
(06:10) - How India is a combination of different markets - India 1, India 2, India 3
(10:42) - Bunking the myth that Indians don't like to pay. What it takes to make middle class India pay.
(13:07) - The impact of Jio in India & how India's consumption story is still driven by a small % of the population
(16:38) - Has India achieve Wang Trifecta? (Cheap Internet, Smartphone Penetration, Digital Payment Ecosystem)
(19:45) - Why India's Per Capita Income is a cause for concern.
(25:21) - India's emerging Manufacturing story and how are Venture Capitalists looking to invest in this sector
(32:54) - Understand the state of SaaS, Fintech & E-Commerce
(40:46) - Is India an over ventured market? As in too much venture capital flowing in and thus too many startups for the size of the Market?
(45:05) - The Rise of Porn in India (Things that were left out of the report!)
(50:17) - How does a report like this help a VC make investment decisions
(54:42) - Will India see a new set of Founders who can target the Bharat market?
(1:00:00) - How should founders think about their Content Consumption?
(1:04:00) - How can one break into the Venture Capital world if they want to build a career there?
(1:09:49) - How has Sajith's relationship with money evolved over time?

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On the episode today, we have with us Shashank Kumar, Founder of PushOwl

If you like the content we create, please drop us a review on Spotify & Apple.

And join our No Spam Whatsapp Group to get summaries of the content we create.

On this episode, we talk to Shashank about his journey of building, scaling and selling Pushowl.

We discuss the following topics:

(01:41) - Shashank's Thesis that led to quitting Microsoft, and the initial failures
(09:25) - Financial Survival for a Bootstrapped Business & the Entrepreneur in the initial years
(13:13) - Fighting the psychological battle of quitting when the times are tough
(15:19) - Finding the idea of PushOwl and hiring the first team member
(17:45) - How should Indie hackers decide what's a good time to quit?
(20:19) - Finding Product Market Fit on Shopify
(26:51) - How to Interact with Customers without asking leading questions
(29:22) - Hiring for Bootstrapped Businesses
(33:14) - Choosing to stay bootstrapped even when there was Venture Capital interest
(39:30) - Decision to Sell the Business to SendinBlue
(41:00) - Risk of Building on someone else's platform - Platform Risk
(44:32) - Headless Commerce - The new wave in E-commerce
(47:38) - Advice for young Indie Hackers

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated!

Click here to help TID part time with content creation and distribution.

On this episode, we talk about Warehouse, Cold Storage, Virtual Influencers & Portfolio of Small Bets.

(00:19) - Update on Portfolio of Small Bets Approach to Building a Career
(04:47) - India's First Virtual Influencer, Kaira
(09:03) - Why is there a boom in Warehousing in India?
(15:08) - Opportunities in Robotics & Automation of Warehouses
(19:22) - What it takes to build warehouses and what are the opportunities
(25:50) - Aggregation of Warehouses
(29:25) - Cloud Warehousing
(32:53) - Cold Storage & Warehousing
(37:54) - Subsidies for Cold Storage Warehousing
(39:15) - Micro Cold Warehouses
(46:09) - Problem Areas and Opportunities in Cold Warehousing
(47:41) - Portable Cold Storage

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On this episode, we have with us Vinay Singhal, Co-Founder of Stage.in

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On this episode, we talk about Vinay's current startup - Stage.

Stage is building the Netflix for Bharat, starting with a platform dedicated for premium video content in Harayanvi Dialect.

This is an amazing story of an entrepreneur and a team who has seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Before Stage, this team was behind WittyFeed.

Wittyfeed became the world's second largest media biz in terms of views, right behind Buzzfeed. One fine day, Facebook decided to ban WittyFeed and effectively kill its business overnight.

Since then Vinay and team have gone back to the drawing board and built a startup that's building premium video content OTT platform for Bharat.

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On the show today, we do a dive deep on the Circular Economy, specifically Plastic Recycling and E-Waste recycling.

(00:23) - Plastic Recycling in India
(20:54) - E-Waste Recycling in India

Research for Plastic Recycling
Research for E-Waste Recycling

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On the episode today, we have with us Ankit Gupta, Co-Founder of Burma Burma

If you like the content we create, please drop us a review on Spotify & Apple.

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On the episode, we talk to Ankit about the business of restaurants, how food entrepreneurs can do market research, how restaurants are conceptualized and the painful processes that restaurant founders have to go through to get a concept to life! Burma Burma is one of my favorite restaurants, and what makes this even more unique is that its a vegetarian restaurants with no alcohol. A brave counter-positioning in the tough business of restaurants.

Episode Outline:
(02:41) - Thesis Behind Burma Burma
(06:02) - Validating the idea of Burmese Cuisine in India
(07:53) - What does it take to start a restaurant?
(12:16) - Ankit's advice to people who want to start a restaurant
(14:30) - Challenges in the Restaurant Industry
(15:12) - The issue with Alcohol license in India
(17:00) - Economics of Restaurant Business
(20:00) - The Value and Supply Chain of Restaurants
(25:10) - How to market a new restaurant?
(27:20) - Burma Burma's scale up journey
(28:23) - Challenges with growing through franchising
(29:38) - How Burma Burma built its processes and talent pipeline to scale to 6 cities?
(32:42) - The Backend team to required to build a chain of restaurants?
(35:28) - Decision to enter the D2C Phase with Pantry
(37:55) - Surviving the pandemic
(41:05) - Scaling up the Burma Burma Brand beyond food
(42:55) - What kind of investors invest in restaurant businesses?
(44:40) - How has Ankit's relationship with money evolved over a period of time?

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On the episode today, we have with us Gaurav Sekhri, Co-Founder of Fratelli Wines.

If you like the content we create, please drop us a review on Spotify & Apple.

We talk to Gaurav about the journey of building Fratelli and how they went about building the brand, distribution and more importantly, awareness for wines in India.

(01:27) - How did the Fratelli journey start in 2006?
(02:51) - How did the Sekhri family attain the knowledge of wine making?
(05:46) - How did they manage the long gestation period and how marketing of wine became a bigger challenge in the early years
(08:28) - How is wine distributed across the country?
(12:00) - Why wine marketing and distribution is a slow game?
(15:37) - The process of making wine
(19:07) - Why Fratelli launched wine in a can?
(21:40) - How are different types of wine made?
(27:00) - How Gaurav identifies and manages new businesses?

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(0:55) - Update on Altigreen, that raised $40 million in Funding. We've had the founder of Altigreen on the episode in 2020 where he spoke about the work they were doing in the 3-Wheeler EV Market

(05:00) - Update on Government's ban of Drones. Sahil's visit to a Drone Manufacturing & R&D Facility and conversation with Drone Labs.

(13:34) - Rise of Disease specific health-tech solutions like platforms for Diabetes, Cancer, PCOS etc and the opportunities in this space.

(26:42) - Platform to help D2C Brands partner up with Production houses and do collaborations for shows and movies.

(36:23) - Content Repurposing Agency - A global business being built out of India.

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On the episode today, we have with us Dr. Ritesh Malik, Founder of Innov8 Coworking (Sold to OYO) and Founder & Trustee of Plaksha University and an active angel investor who has backed 75+ startups.

If you like the content we create, please drop us a review on Spotify & Apple.

In this conversation, we touch about three broad topics: The Education Sector in India, The Real-Estate Market, and Angel Investing.

Here's an outline of the conversation:

(02:29) - The Problem with the Education System in India
(10:21) - Why Edtech (in its current form) is just a pill and not the solution to the education system in India? Why we need hybrid infrastructure (Physical + Virtual) rather than just virtual education.
(16:15) - How the Real Estate Market has evolved in India and why Shared Economy (Co-working, Co-living, Co-retail, shared warehousing) are the future?
(30:24) - Why Dr. Malik has invested in 75+ companies and his thoughts on Angel Investing
(35:09) - The Importance of Community Building in Angel Investing

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Hey everyone, welcome to the Budget 2022 special of the Indian Dream Podcast with Sarthak Ahuja. In this episode, we do a complete Indian Dream-style breakdown of the 2022 Indian Budget speech to find the biggest opportunities for entrepreneurs to build new businesses. We discuss every business opportunity from the Budget including Drones training & manufacturing, Electronics & Wearables Manufacturing, Battery Swapping for Electric Vehicles, Ethanol production for fuel blending and so much more! Also, the last 20 minutes of the episode are a complete breakdown on the impact of the new 30% tax on Crypto in India. Listen in if you want to listen to our take on budget 2022.

Sarthak's Instagram
All our Research Notes from this Episode
TID Episode about Drones

Timeline
(0:00) - Introduction
(2:00) - Predictions we got right last year.
(4:55) - Electric Vehicles and Ethanol Production & Fuel Blending
(12:55) - Electronics Manufacturing
(17:50) - Manufacturing Tax Incentive Extension
(18:45) - Why were umbrellas mentioned in the Budget?
(22:00) - Skill Development
(25:23) - What are Surety Bonds?
(28:30) - Animation, Visual Effects, Gaming and Comics
(32:40) - Drones in Budget 2022
(35:40) - Land Bank Digitisation
(39:10) - Drones Production Linked Incentives
(41:15) - Infrastructure development and Ropeways
(43:15) - Multi-model infrastructure open API’s
(45:55) - Vande Bharat Trains
(48:30) - Miscellaneous items from the Budget
(58:30) - 30% Crypto tax in Budget 2022 and its implications
(1:10:15) - Digital Rupee

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Today, we have with us Manish Pandey (Twitter), Co-Author of the book Booming Digital Stars to talk about the rise of creator economy and what it takes to be a creator in this day and age.

Manish has been the force behind some of India's biggest creators and has helped them with content and distribution strategy. In his new book, Booming Digital Stars, he explores the life's of India's biggest creators and talks about the learnings from their journeys.

We're giving away 10 copies of the Booming Digital Stars book to aspiring content creators. All you need to do is follow us on Twitter and tag us in a tweet about the kind of content you want to create!

Booming Digital Stars: 11 Inspiring Journeys from India's Creator Economy (Black And White Inner Pages)

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(4:00) - The Fertility (IVF) Market in India
(24:43) - Disrupting Family Managed Business MBA
(40:44) - Rural Influencer Network

👉🏽 Fertility Care Market in India
The fertility care market in India is estimated to be Rs. 3000 Cr market growing at a fast clip thanks to the rising infertility rates amongst couples for variety of lifestyle reasons.

One of the most common solutions to this is In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). It is estimated that 30 million couples of fertility issues and just 1% of them go for an IVF treatment.

And that’s where the opportunity is. From aggregating IVF chains to build content first brands targeting this segment, this market is ripe for some action in the next decade!

👉🏼 Family Managed Business MBA
Colleges typically charge 10-15L for family managed business (FMB) MBA programs. And from our conversations, the quality of education is sub-par as the curriculum hasn’t been updated as fast as the business dynamics have changed.

Is there an opportunity to build a new age FMB MBA program that’s tech first, focuses on digitization and builds a connect directly with professors and students/businesses? We think so!

👉🏼 Rural Influencer Network
By 2025, India will have more internet users in rural part of the country than urban.

We’re already seeing the rise of influencers that hail from villages with followers and subscriber counts of a few million!

To look for growth, companies will have no option but to tap into rural markets. What if there was a rural influencer network that helped match brands with rural influencers & facilitate the campaigns?

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We speak to John Mullins, Professor of Marketing & Entrepreneurship at the London School of Business and author of the fantastic book, ‘The Customer Funded Business’.

Timeline:
(3:20) - What is a Customer Funded Business?
(6:10) - How do Business Authors find the stories for their books?
(11:00) - What’s the difference between Cash Flow & Profits?
(15:30) - How do you change the processes and business mindset from just Profit to think about Cash Flow as well?
(22:00) - What is Float? How can Float help you grow your business faster?
(27:50) - What is the danger of startups raising capital too early?
(39:45) - The Pay in Advance Model
(46:40) - The Subscription Model
(50:15) - The Scarcity Model
(56:15) - The Service to Product Model
(58:20) - The Marketplace or Matchmaker Model
(1:02:20) - John’s thoughts on Ed Tech
(1:04:00) - How difficult was it to record his Course?

Why do we love this book? Because it shows us how any business can generate more cash in the bank. Most businesses don’t fail to grow because they’re not making profits - they fail to grow because they don’t have enough Working Capital. This means that even if they’re making profits, there’s not enough cash in the bank that allows them to buy raw materials, pay salaries and all the other expenses to run a business. And that’s when they run to VC’s to get more Working Capital to grow. The Customer Funded Business provides 5 different frameworks on how businesses can have more working capital in the system and thus more money in the bank to grow! We discuss all 5 frameworks in the episode.

Professor Mullins calls these Customer Funded Business Models where you’re using your customers to help grow the business instead of just selling tonnes of equity and raising Venture Capital funding. Why give away big chunks of your business when you can find ways to grow without VC money? The best entrepreneurs we’ve had on our Podcast were those that scaled without venture funding. Then these entrepreneurs had all the leverage in negotiations when they raised money to scale even further. We thought this conversation was especially relevant in today’s environment where Venture Capital funding has become ubiquitous.

If you want to learn more about how to build your own Customer Funded Business, you can also check out Professor Mullins course on Coursera - How to Finance and Grow Your Startup Without VC.

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Timeline(01:54) - Senior Citizen Market in India
(33:27) - Using Drones for Agriculture

Senior Citizen Market

Market Size
- Currently, India has more than 138 Million Senior Citizens. 67 Million Male, 71 Million Female. By 2030, this number is expected to be 200 Million.
- Estimated to be a Rs. 73,000 Cr market or $10 Billion
- The report noted a significant increase in the old-age dependency ratio, which rose from 10.9 per cent in 1961 to 14.2 per cent in 2011 and is projected to increase to 15.7 per cent and 20.1 per cent in 2021 and 2031, respectively. The old-age dependency ratio is defined as the number of persons aged 60+ per 100 persons relative to the age group 15-59.
Why this market is ripe for opportunities?
- Empty Nest Syndrome
- Higher Spending Power AND Willingness to Spend
- Higher Education Levels
  - The report said literacy levels among elderly males and females have improved over time in both rural and urban areas, but it noted a huge gender gap, with only 28 per cent female elderly literate as against 59 per cent males (Population Census 2011)
- Life Expectancy on the Rise
- Needs that can’t be catered by the startups focused on Gen Z and Millenials
What are the main needs for this segment?
- Health Related - Physical & Mental
- Safety System
- Financing Security
- Effective use of Time
Is the Govt of India focused on this segment?
- Ofcourse. In Jun 2021, they launched SAGE program. SAGE is Senior Ageing Growth Engine. Launched by Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerement.
- 100 Cr fund. To invest 1 Cr as equity investment as a startup.
- The ministry has developed a 9-by-9 grid defining the elder care focus areas for evaluating start-ups and business ideas under this scheme.
What are some of the interesting companies in this field in India?
- Seniority - 31 Cr Income, 65 Cr Expenses
- Portea
- Goodfellows
- Khyaal
- Samarth Eldercare - 67 Lakhs Revenue
- Emoha - 4 Cr Revenue
What are some of the interesting companies internationally?
- Papa - On-demand Young Pals for Elderly - $241 funding. Maybe $30-40 million in revenue. $15/hr or $15 memberships with additional features.
- Deveoted Health - $2B in Funding - Medicare Advantage Plans
- Caring Wire - Content Platform
- Kuvu - Elder People Renting rooms to younger folks at more affordable rates
- GetSetup - $20m in funding, community based courses for elderly.
- Chirp - Non invasive sensors for elderly care

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On this founder journey, we speak to Rohit MA, co-founder and CEO of Cloudnine Hospitals. It is a chain of maternity hospitals that's spread across 9 cities and has 20+ hospitals. We speak to Rohit about his journey, how he raised capital for the business, how he scaled and the focus on customer experience.

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Here's an episode outline:

(03:39) - The Thesis behind starting a Speciality Maternity Hospital
(10:05) - The Pros & Cons of having experience in the industry you start your business.
(14:29) - The Business & Economics of running a hospital
(22:24) - The Genesis of the idea of building a chain
(30:24) - The Investment required to setup hospitals and how Cloudnine raised capital for it
(43:21) - The Journey of Scaling Up & Building Processes
(01:07:09) - Rohit's relationship with Money and how that's evolved

Hello and Happy New Year! Hope 2022 is 100x better than 2021 for each one of us! At The Indian Dream, we’re excited to bring you business content that’s worth your time. And we’re kicking off 2022 with an amazing founder! We have Rohit on the show today, the Co-Founder of Cloud Nine Hospitals.

For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Nine is a chain of Maternity hospitals. In fact, they were the pioneers of dedicated pregnancy hospital when they first launched in 2007. Since then, they’ve expanded to 9 cities and built more than 20 hospitals. Along the way, they’ve raised close to 500 Crores from investors like Matrix Partners, Sequoia, and True North!

We speak to Rohit about how they came up with the idea to build a speciality hospital when Multi-speciality hospitals were the norm, the economics of a hospital, their customer focus and the innovations that have come out of that.

Here’s an example of one such innovation: If you’ve been a parent, you would know that back in the day, the cost of delivering a child through natural birth process vs a C-section were different with the latter being more expensive. This resulted in mis-aligned incentives where hospitals often pushed for C-Section, if when not needed, because they made more revenue. Cloudnine was the first hospital to standardize rates and improve the experience for the to-be parents.

Just like this, they’ve done a bunch of innovations across the process of pregnancy as well as scaling operations. We talk to Rohit about his entire journey, inflection points and the learnings from building a large business in the healthcare industry!

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This episode is a look back of 2021. This is our first full calendar year of creating podcasts and newsletters for The Indian Dream. Just this year, we've produced ~80 podcasts and written ~30 newsletter talking about Founder Journeys, Market Trends and various opportunities.

In this episode, we look back and make sense of the year that's gone by:

Top Episodes (01:19)
a) Space-tech episodes
b) Blockchain with Nischal Shetty from WazirX
c) Mushroom & Seaweed Farming
d) OfBusiness
e) Business of Hotels & Restaurants
f) Abhishek Goel

Biggest learnings (12:02)
a) Focus on doing less but doing that better
b) Don't monetise too early in your content journey - it's a labour of love that will monetise eventually
c) Courses are really hard to do even if you know the subject really well.
d) Collabs and inviting people to munchies was harder than I thought.
e) It's really tough to motivate people in this kind of setting - got a lot of people who wanted to contribute for free but it just didn't work.
f) Follow your curiosity - will lead to great episodes

Personal Lives (26:04)
a) Portfolio of small bets
b) Siddharth having a baby
c) Rollercoaster of habit building
d) Change in my worldview on entrepreneurship and life in general

Plan for next year (33:59)
a) Do less but more
b) focus on distribution for the podcast.
c) Keep experimenting with stuff on the podcast and in personal life.
d) Keep trying to build it into an asynchronous organisation like AJVC

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Click here to help TID part time with LinkedIn & Twitter

Job Description for the Content Associate Job at Blume Ventures
Click here to apply for the Content Associate Job at Blume Ventures

Timeline(00:00) - Introduction with two Job Announcements
(02:30) - Defence Indigenisation in India
(24:00) - DAO to fund Scientific Research
(36:00) - Teaching Taxation to Founders

Business Ideas

Defence Indigenisation in India

Here's a link to our Notion Page with a bunch of research that we did about defence indigenisation.
Defence manufacturing and anciallary services is a complete white ocean at the moment - there is huge growth potential for businesses that enter this market right now.
The Indian government has done a great job over the past 20 years to shift procurement of defence from imports to domestic manufactuers and this trend is going to continue over the next decade as the government focuses even more on improving its domestic manufacturing.
Part of this is exports, from FY17 to FY19, in just 2 years, India was able to increase its defence exports from just 1,500crores to 8,300crores. That is an insanely fast growth rate and the benchmark for FY24 is to reach 35,000crores of exports. India cannot reach these crazy numbers without some really good incentives by the government to first build a thriving domestic manufacturing base but also one that can stand against the international market.
There are a bunch of schemes by the Indian government to promote defence manufacturing in India.
MSME's also have a big part to play in this indigenisation. They can manufacture for the big PSU's like HAL, Bharat Forge and all the others. There is a lot of manufacturing capacity in India such as composites, precision manufacturing, sheet metal work, naval work and others that can be used by the armed forces.
However, this is a complicated network to get into. You either need capital or contacts.

DAO to fund Scientific Research

DAO's are Decentralised Autonomous Organisations that are operated based on the votes of the members who own the tokens.
A big problem in the scientific world is the funding of research by large companies that then biases the results that come out of that.
DAO's could be a solution that help fund scientific research without any biases.

Teaching Taxation to Founders

Understanding taxation is critical to a founder's success, especially in the complicated tax structures of India.
However, there are few to no courses to help teach tax at a founder level - MBA's don't teach enough and founders can't become CA's - we need something in between.
Social Media can be great to teach stuff like this - Miss Excel makes $100,000/day by teaching excel on TikTok.

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We're doing a Book Give Away!

We'll be sending copies of 'The Minimalist Entrepreneur' to folks interested in building a profitable internet business. Just follow us on Twitter or Instagram & tell us about what you want to building using the framework laid out in The Minimalist Entrepreneur book.

On the episode, we host Sahil Lavingia, Founder of Gumroad and the author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur. We talk to him about the roller-coaster ride of building Gumroad to a profitable internet business with $10 m in revenue and $1m in profit, and some concepts from the book.

Timeline:(00:00) - An Introduction to Sahil & Gumroad's journey(02:52) - Why the name 'The Minimalist Entrepreneur' and the intended audience
(05:34) - Differences between a VC backed startup and a small profitable internet business
(14:09) - Sahil's journey of coming out of the Silicon Valley/Unicorn bubble
(20:55) - Leveraging Communities to discover problems
(28:55) - Framework to identify ideas within a community
(35:06) - Starting with Manual Valuable Process even before building a product
(40:45) - How to start a business without worrying about all the skills you need
(47:52) - Sahil's 20 Yr plan to becoming a Sci-Fi Writer
(53:23) - Gumroad's recent Crowdfunding round of $5m and how is it different from VC
(58:51) - Sahil's Experience of being an Angel Investor
(01:03:44) - Sahil's relationship with Money

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On this founder journey, we speak to Abhishek Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cactus Communications. Abhishek & his brother Anurag have built a culture of excellence into Cactus. They have an on-time delivery of 99.63%! How many other Indian businesses can boast of numbers like that?

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On this podcast, we've often spoken about how the best place to build a business is where everyone else avoids. Abhishek and Cactus' journey is a testament to that. Cactus communication is in the business of helping science researchers and PhD candidates have greater impact through scientific services and various products and tools. For example, you're a researcher in Japan and your English isn't great so you can just use Cactus's services to improve your paper and get it ready for publication.

This is as niche as it gets! All of this was made in India, but for the world.

Now, you'll probably think, sure, it's niche, but I doubt there's enough demand to build a big business in this market. It seems like a small market on the face of it and hard to build a differentiated product. Well, let me tell you some numbers. Abhishek and his brother started Cactus in 2002. In the first decade of being in business, Cactus was doing $15 million or Rs. 100 Cr in revenue! In the next 10 years, they've grown exponentially and will soon be 10x of that with a team of 1200 people.

Our jaws dropped when we understood the scale of this niche that looks tiny from the outside. That's the power of niche businesses, they can be outside limelight and build a large, profitable business without the madness of the large consumer markets where VC subsidises the market and makes it into a discounting race!

And throughout the years, they've also been leaders in tech in their industry. Through the story you'll hear how they used tech scaling and D2C before those words even existed in our vocabulary. Now, they've been leading the AI/ML/NLP race globally through acquisitions and organic growth.

In addition to the usual discussions on the episode on how Abhishek and his brother built Cactus over the past 20 years, we also speak in depth about the emotional journeys that entrepreneurs go through. Despite building this behemoth of a company, Abhishek talks about how we went through his own insecurities and the imposter syndrome he faced even after he had built a business doing more than $10m in revenue. Abhishek speaks very openly about his own experience, the emotional challenges and how we worked through them to build this large organisation!

Before jumping into the conversation, we'd like to invite you to join our WhatsApp group where we already have 3000+ other likeminded entrepreneurs and knowledge seekers. We promise a no-spam group so that you can stay up to do date with our latest episodes.

Now, onto the episode!

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Timeline:
(00:58) - Revenue Based Financing
(22:56) - Translation Services for Movies, TV Shows on Netflix, Prime Video
(33:54) - Life Skill Courses for Teenagers

Business Ideas

Revenue Based FinancingCapital is an essential commodity to grow a business. The traditional way of growing companies was Debt & Equity Investments. Debt generally comes from Banks, but they obviously don't like to take risks with unproven or unprofitable businesses. Plus putting up collateral, personal guarantees and what not.

The other option is equity. In the recent years, Early stage/Growth equity has become popular thanks to the various Venture capital firms. However, you end up giving up too much equity and it prevents you from building a sustainable/profitable business. This type of equity works for ideas that don't really exist, and if they're successful, they can capture or create LARGE new markets for themselves.

But, this leaves behind businesses that are profitable, but maybe not that can grow exponentially. Think D2C Brands, or SaaS businesses. How do you give them access to capital that prevents them from diluting too much equity?

Enter Revenue Based Financing -This is where you get access to non-dilutive capital that can be used to grow your business and you pay a fixed fee as well as a share from the revenues to pay off your credit line. It's an interesting new lending product and we discuss the various opportunities around this.
Translation Services for Netflix, Prime VideoLast week, we spoke to Abhishek Goyal, Co-founder of Cactus Communications about the large business he has built in the niche of research paper translation. We then applied the same model in the content industry where Netflix, Prime Video and other OTTs are producing so much foreign content that needs to be translated in English and also to other languages. Last year, Netflix had a shortage of agencies who could help them with this and hence had to rely on freelancers. This is an industry growing in double digits, year of year, and hence an interesting place to build a niche business.

Life Skills for TeenagersOur education system is messed up and it ends up teaching A LOT of stuff that's never going to be relevant in your life and skips teaching essential life skills like Personal Finance, Health & Nutrition, Sex Ed. The idea is simple, can you build a gamified product that teaches teenagers these essential skills?

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In this fascinating conversation about the journey of building a Rs. 100 Cr business from a seed capital of Rs. 64,000, we talk to Suveer Bajaj, Co-founder of FoxyMoron & Zoo Media.

FoxyMoron is one of India's premier Digital Marketing & Advertising agency. Suveer started FoxyMoron in 2008, when he was just 19. 13 years later, he has been able to scale up the business to 500+ people and built an Advertising Network (Zoo Media) which is 7 agencies under it.

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If you like what we do, please consider following us on Spotify, rating us on Apple, checking us out on Twitter and Instagram.

Here's what we speak about in the episode:
(03:52) - How was FoxyMoron born and what was the thesis?
(08:28) - What was the concept of Digital Marketing back in 2008-09?
(11:51) - How do young kids, aged 19-20, go present themselves to win contracts from Cadbury, L'Oreal, Force India Racing?
(16:44) - How has the hiring journey evolved over time and how important was Culture?
(21:46) - Importance of Knowledge Management and the Digital Marketing course at Symbiosis Institute.
(30:03) - How is the advertising industry structured globally?
(38:36) - Getting a term sheet from a large Advertising Network, the decision to not take it, and the inflection point after that?
(42:10) - The Birth of Zoo Media and building/acquiring specialised Agencies
(49:45) - The various Business Models of an Advertising Agency
(57:57) - The Future of Zoo Media
(01:01:54) - How has Suveer's role evolved as the business grew?
(01:07:00) - How Suveer's relationship with Money evolved over a period of time?

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Timeline:(2:15) - Environmental, Social & Governance standards for big businesses
(24:30) - Fractionalization of Real Estate
(35:40) - Influencers working with State Tourism Boards
(41:50) - Review Website for Cohort Based Courses

Business Ideas

ESG Investing & Business ideas - ESG stands for Environemtal, Social & Governance standards that the biggest companies in the world need to follow. More and more large fund houses are directing the flow of their investments based on businesses meeting ESG standards. There have also been big shifts in the rules in India that are forcing the 1000 biggest businesses in India, as per market cap, to publish annual ESG reports. As a result, the largest auditing firms in the world - PWC, KPMG, etc. - are predicting that the ESG reports will be as big as their financial audits in the next few years. Hence, there is a huge money making opportunity for these huge auditors but also for small businesses that want to enter this field.

Interesting links
Mckinsey Report
Indian ESG Rules
Full Document on Indian ESG Guidelines
ESG Smallcase

ESG Ideas:

Boutique ESG Consulting or Auditing firm that helps businesses with the Auditing and also meeting ESG requirements that have been missed.
Content website that lists all the ESG standards and benchmarks that have been set by different businesses so that people can track progress.
Countless B2B and B2C opportunities based on different industries. For example, one our previous podcast guests has built a full supply chain with traceability for recycled plastics so that his customers have full traceability on their plastics' origin.

Fractionalization of Real EstateReal Estate is a great hedge against inflation and is also a great low risk investment for someone's barbell investment strategy. However, the ticket size to enter Real Estate investment is too high for the average retail investor. Is there a way to democratise this so that smaller investors can also add real estate to their portfolio? Some businesses who are already doing this:

Property Share
Strata Prop
Myre Capital

Intern Army for Tourism BoardsState Tourism boards, on average, are terrible at building User Generated Content. Authentic UGC will drive social media growth in the long run. State Tourism Boards can think of hiring an intern army for a month and send them on a tour of the entire state with the sole job of creating as many instagram reels as possible.

Review Website for CBC'sCohort Based Courses, at the moment, are being sold by influencers who are themselves reviewing their own course. A website that's generating User Generated Reviews would help sort the wheat from the chaff in their crowded but fast growing market.

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Welcome to a really exciting episode of the Indian Dream - we've wanted to talk to this founder for the past 1 year at least. In this episode, we speak to Vivek Sahni, co-founder and CEO of Kama Ayurveda. For the few listeners who haven't heard of Kama, they are an Ayurveda based Hair & Beauty brand that now has 59 retail stores across the country.

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The reason we love Kama Ayurveda so much is that they started in 2002 at a time when nobody spoke about Ayurveda or even cared about it. They are pioneers who saw the early signals of the clean beauty movement and the resurgence of Ayurveda in India and staked a claim. This 20 year journey has culminated in Kama becoming one of the best known beauty brands to come out of India with a reported 100cr investment by a Spanish Luxury brand.

I'll give you a quick history about Kama and Vivek before we jump right into the conversation with him.

The journey to Kama started in 1993 when Vivek moved back to India after studying Design at the Parson's School of Design in New York. After coming back, he started a design studio called Vivek Sahni designs with his partner David Chang. Fun fact - Vivek and Dave ran this design studio all the way to 2013. For the first 10 years of Kama Ayurveda's existence, it was just a side hustle.

In 1998 - Vivek worked on a 2 year project to design gift packaging for Khadi India, a government organisation set up to promote the development of Khadi and village industries in rural areas. During this project, they helped create a range of products, protocols, worked with manufacturers, and helped train people to source the best products

This experience with Khadi India drove the founding of Kama Ayurveda in 2002 as an authentically Indian brand that was steeped in the traditions of Ayurveda. Kama had 4 founders, Vivek Sahni, Dave Change, interior designer Vikram Goyal and Padma Shri awardee Rajshree Pathy. It was Rajshree's connection with Ayurvedic doctors in Coimbatore that led them down the path of Ayurveda.

The actual product development took them nearly 2 years and in the end, they started with a range hair and skin products that were authentically Ayurvedic. From 2002 to 2012, Vivek spent about 30% of his time on Kama while the rest was spent on his design studio. The brand grew organically increasing its distribution across pharmacies and hotels in Delhi.

We now jump into the conversation with Vivek around 2005 2006, when they got distribution as in-room amenities at Oberoi and The Park hotels and how that impact the brand.

Before getting into the episode - please join our No Spam WhatsApp group where we post information about the latest episodes. We already have more than 2500 members in our groups and we'd love to see you there.

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Timeline:
(00:0) - Introduction
(1:59) - Video & Livestream E-commerce
(21:43) - Tiger 21 - Peer Network for High net worth individuals
(36:54) - No-Code & Low Code Automation Teams at Enterprises & SMEs
(41:12) - Indian wear but for Office

Idea Details:
1. Video & Livestream E-Commerce: Two streamers in China sold $3B worth of products over 24 hours on their livestream. China is seeing a surge of products being sold through Video/Livestream E-commerce. Taobao, the largest e-commerce player in China, saw $65 billion worth of products being sold in 2020 using Video e-commerce. We talk about the opportunities to build around this emerging trend in India.

Tiger 21: A peer network of high net worth individuals (HNI) where a group of 15 HNIs come together and transparently share their portfolios and defend the same in front of the other members. The goal is to collectively make good investment decisions. We talk about the opportunities to build this in India and how Social Investing could be done by current Investment platforms.
No-Code, Low Code Automation Teams: Software is truly eating the world, thanks to no-code tools that have led to democratisation of technology. In 10 years, every company will be a software company, in that it'll be operated by a combination of different software tools. We talk about how training at enterprises & SMEs for No-code tools, or building an agency to help implement these no-code tools at businesses.
Indian wear but for Office: Office wear is primarily dominated by formal wear that's part of western culture. What if there was a dedicated line of Indian clothes for office wear? We discuss this business crazies!

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) host Piyush Kumar, Founder of Rooter to talk about Game Streaming & E-Sports in India. Gaming is a $160B market globally, and game streaming is one of the fastest growing segments within that.

Youtube and Twitch are the most popular global game streaming platforms! Youtube has over 40 million active gaming channels. Twitch, on the other hand, has 9 million active game channels, and On an average, there are 2.8 Million people watching a game stream on twitch, at the same time. Twitch had a revenue of $2.3 Billion in 2020.

We talk to Piyush about what's happening in Game Streaming in India and talk about the phenomenal rise of Rooter (8.5 Million monthly active users in 2021). We talk about why they decided to pivot, why is game streaming getting popular, and Rooter's monetisation experiments!

Episode Timestamp:
(4:00) - The thesis behind Rooter 1.0 - A fan engagement platform for live sports
(10:13) - The decision to pivot from fan engagement to game streaming platform
(17:08) - Why has game streaming gotten popular? Why do people watch other people play video games?
(24:43) - Why compete with Youtube and Twitch
(30:56) - How did Rooter scale to 8.5 Million Monthly Active Users (MAU)
(36:58) - The business model behind game streaming and Rooter's monetisation experiments
(50:16) - E-Sports as a career option
(1:06:00) - Why IPL teams should buy E-sports team and create streaming content

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In today's episode we speak to Prashant Sharma, founder of Build by Skip the Line - a combination of a Cohort Based Course and Bootcamp course that takes people from ideation to launching a side-project that can make them financially independent. One of the most popular side projects launched during the Build Cohort is called LetterHunt which generated more than $2000 in revenue in the first 10 days.

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Obviously, you can see why we invited Prashant to join us on this episode of Business Munchies. At The Indian Dream, we're all about building side projects and that's our goal with Business Munchies - to help people find Side Project ideas.

Since Prashant is passionate about side projects, this episode is a hybrid - the first 15 minutes are about his journey to creating Build and the community around it. After that we discuss 3 side project ideas including:

A resource website to help Indian D2C Brands go abroad including regulations for different niches, CA's & lawyers who specialise in international expansion, etc.
Another resource website which just lists which TV Shows and Movies are available on the various OTT platforms in India. A sub-idea that came out of this is to make a content website that just provides summaries of the events of popular daily soaps in India.
A platform which connects data from your Smartwatch, Computer and other sources to provide a performance dashboard for your personal life.

The 2nd Cohort has just graduated with an incredible bunch of side projects - if you want to join the 3rd Cohort, you can click on this link and sign up.

Lastly - our WhatsApp group, has more than 2500+ other founders & entrepreneurs where we share the latest episodes, newsletters and other content we create. We promise you won't get more than 2 or 3 messages each week. The link is in the show notes.

Timeline:

(00:00) - Introduction

(01:55) - What was your career journey that led you to creating Build?

(05:25) - What is the difference between a Bootcamp vs. Cohort Based Course?

(07:52) - What is the secret sauce for building a highly engaged community?

(12:45) - Why do you take Coders & non-Coders in the Cohort?

(15:42) - How to think about Side Project ideas

(16:39) - Idea: Resource Website to help D2C brands go international

(22:56) - Idea: Resource Website to find OTT shows

(29:20) - Idea: Performance Dashboard for Self-Improvement

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) host Gajendra Jangid, Co-founder of Cars24 to talk about the disruption in the Used Car Market.

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Today, we're talking about Cars24 and the $20B Pre-owned or Used Car market in India.
In Financial Year 19-20, 4.4 Million pre-owned cars were sold compared to 2.8 Million new cars. This makes the pre-owned car market about 1.5 times the new car market.

Started in 2015, Cars24 is now valued at $1.8B. We talk to Gajendra Jangid, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Office at Cars24 about the challenges in the used car market, how they solved for it and scaled so big and Cars24's brand journey.

Show timeline:
(01:49) - The thesis behind Cars24
(08:49) - How did Cars24 build the execution model to address the used car market?
(16:42) - Used car market value chain
(24:44) - How did they enter the buyer side of the transaction and what challenges did they run into?
(31:01) - Ideal state of how used car markets should function from a buyer's perspective
(36:15) - Cars24's Brand Journey
(42:57) - How Cars24's ambition grew as they went deeper into solving the problem
(45:16) - Gajendra's relationship with Money

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. Support us and show us your love by buying us a some beer/chai on this link.

Timeline:
(00:0) - Introduction
(2:00) - Detailed account on how we bought a US based e-commerce business from India
(25:43) - What are NFT's?
(40:00) - Sales Processes for B2B SaaS

Business Ideas:

How to Buy a US Business from India - our personal story -
- Buying a small business in the US has become a lot easier for Indians than a few decades ago.
- Deal sourcing has become easier with websites like MicroAcquire, Flippa, and others.
- Sending capital to the US has also become easier with the Liberalised Remmitance Scheme.
- However, the process of buying a US business is still quite complicated and we lay down the entire process in the first 20 minutes of this episode. We will probably write a detailed article on this entire process as well.
What are NFT's?
- NFT's or Non-Fungible Tokens are the hottest asset class on the internet right now. Along with different crypto coins, they're both misunderstood technlogies that are seeing huge increases in value over the past few months.
- Learn more about Blockchains from our previous episode with Nischal Shetty, founder of WazirX.
- Siddharth delves deep into the world of NFT's, he himself has bought a bunch, and the future opportunities that lie in this area of the crypto world.
Sales Processes for B2B SaaS to Legacy Businesses
- Sahil discusses a person who met who was not able to sell his CRM/SaaS product to the biggest Pharma companies in India and then had to completely pivot in order to scale the business.
- We talk about different sales models that he could have used in order to sell his SaaS products to Legacy Businesses.

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In this episode, we host Ryan Valles, Co-founder of Interview Kickstart to talk about Marketplace Businesses & Ed-Tech Roundup.

(00:51) - Ryan's Professional Journey as an Entrepreneur, Operator, Investor
(10:27) - Different Kinds of Marketplace Businesses
(18:00) - The Marketplace Cold Start problem & scaling marketplaces
(24:40) - Growing Marketplace using performance marketing
(30:13) - Product & Founder Market Fit
(35:47) - The role of Venture Capital in building Marketplaces
(39:20) - Wholesale or B2B Marketplaces
(43:08) - The State of the Edtech market in India and the commonalities with E-commerce
(51:09) - Taking Edtech businesses from India to the world

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We talk to Bharat Goenka, Founder of Tally Solutions, maker of ERP and Accounting Software for SMBs since 1986. We cover the journey of building Tally, go deeper into their unique point of views on Customer Empathy, Distribution, Piracy and some philosophy across the entire episode :)

We also go through the ups and downs that the business has gone through in the last 30 years and how it weathered the different storms to build a business that's thriving today.

Tally's Website
Tally's Twitter
The Indian Dream WhatsApp Group

We have a long and a fantastic episode lined up today. One that details the journey of a company that was founded more than 3 decades ago and is still going strong. If you run your own business or if you've studied accounting, chances are, you would've heard of Tally Solutions already. Tally is the OG when it comes to homegrown Software Products. For those who are not aware, Tally is an Enterprise Resource Planning & Account Software that's used by 2 million customers across more than 100 countries. They've a strong presence in India, Middle East and Certain parts of Africa. Supported by a distribution network of 28000 Partners, Tally has really cracked distribution like no other software company has been able to.

Founded in 1986, by Late Shyam Sunder Goenka and his son Bharat Goenka, Tally has had a roller-coaster ride full of ups and downs. But, the strong culture and value system that's been put in place has helped the organization steer through multiple storms along the way. In the episode today, we discuss a wide range of topics from distribution, customer empathy, pricing and some philosophy too! This was one of the most interesting conversations for me because I'd seen my dad use Tally more than 2 decades! It's hard to think of many software products that stand the test of time like Tally has been able to do.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. Support us and show us your love by buying us a some beer/chai on this link.

Timeline:
(00:0) - Introduction
(1:28) - Drone Market in India
(25:43) - Account Aggregator Framework of India Stack
(37:42) - How to get rid of Annoying Cold Calls for Loans and Real Estate
(42:34) - Business Digitisation Course Update

Business Ideas:

Drone Market in India - The regulations around Drones have changed and I have not been more optimistic about any other market in a long time. The drone market is on the brink of explosion.
- "During the next six months we expect at least a 40-time expansion in the number of drones." - Aarav Unmanned Systems CEO Vipul Singh
- The Drone Rules, 2021 came out in July 2021 superseded the previous rules from March 2021, Unmanned Aircraft System Rules (UAS Rules), 2021.
- Global drone market seen exceeding $24 billion by 2022 - banned in 2014 after an entrepreneur attempted to deliver pizzas using a drone.
- The Drone Rules 2021, which deal with drones of up to 500 kg, has introduced clarity to the industry - Number of permissions have been dropped from 25 to 5
- Endless Opportunities
  - Checking electric lines, gas pipelines, etc. for leaks or faults. Give example of reliance using helicopter for this work.
  - Mapping - will make mapping of tough terrain much easier.
  - Installation of equipment in tough terrain.
  - Defence applications.
  - Content about Drones!
  - 3,000 drones will be needed to implement government mega-projects like SVAMVITVA, which involves creating and digitising land records for India’s 6.6 lakh villages.
  - huge numbers of drones will be needed for schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bhima Yojana, the government-sponsored crop insurance scheme.
  - You’ll see the first drone prototype air-taxi being built out of India in less than 12 months
  - drones delivering medicines to rural areas and ferrying 200-300 kg of cargo between adjacent cities like Mumbai and Pune
  - new rules could also result in India becoming a drone manufacturing hub. Says Singh: “The government’s saying you can use India as a manufacturing location. If you’re manufacturing a drone that’s not meant to be operated in India, you don’t need any permission or certification to do it.”
  - Airspace map - interactive map where they can and cannot go. Red, yellow and green zones. This is going to be accessible through API's - business opportunity to build stuff using these API's.
    - These maps will keep changing as per government requirements.
    - Business Ideas -
      - use the api to build the backend for a drone delivery service, will be needed in the future.
      - simple community project - use the API to send push notifications if a place close to them has opened up for flying.
  - Drone pilot licenses will be required to fly drones -
    - start a drone training school - there will be a huge demand for getting drone pilot licenses in the future.
    - Get a drone license for the higher levels and become a high level drone pilot.
    - service business - Corner the market on the people with drone pilot licenses in India and start a service to rent out their time for whatever is required.
  - Get into Drone Insurance. This is going to be a brand new market where traditional players will be confused and you could have a first mover advantage
- Drone manufacturers in India: https://tropogo.com/india-guide/drone-ecosystem-india

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While preparing for this episode, I kept wondering - How do you even think about bootstraping a video production business? Equipment rental by itself is almost unaffordable in this industry - you have to rent video cameras, lenses, lights and much more. Despite this, Advait and Akshat still managed to bootstrap Supari Studios from a seed capital of just Rs. 75,000 to ride the wave of content production in India to become one of India's largest content production houses.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn how to build and scale your own creative agency from scratch or you just want to know how it's done.

Timeline:
(1:15) - Supari studios helps brands to reach their audience through video content
(01:50) - Supari studios has got the brand covered from script to screen
(03:45) - Advait left his Trading Derivatives job to join his brother Akshat to start the Supari studios
(06:23) - Advait shares his first inflexion point in this business journey
(09:02) - Supari studios differentiated themselves by solving brands' problems with high quality content and not prices
(10:32) - How did Supari studios fetched their ideal clients
(13:00) - How directly approaching brands benefitted Supari studios rather than the agency system
(16:02) - Understanding of Value Chain has led to Supari studios' evolution
(17:55) - To acquire good employees, sell a vision and not the monetary output
(21:05) Sahil on how TID is just a passion project without any monetary expectation
(23:17) - Advait on how to manage CashFlow by working with bigger companies
(27:53) - Advait on how he named Supari Studios as Supari studios
(27:27) - Advait on why did they start Post Office: A motion graphic studio
(33:27) - Advait explains the functioning of Keeda : A youtube production house
(37:12) - Supari studios uses willingness to pay, time and effort value to ascertain their service price
(39:15) - Advait explains how the content industry is becoming commodotised
(41:42 )- How Advait transformed from a Finance Wizard to a Creative Artist
(44:05) - Online influencers are an essential part of the ecosystem and Supari studios have turned that weakness into a strength

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A journey that started 6 years ago has resulted in one of the few Profitable Unicorn startups in India.

In the episode today, we speak to Asish Mohapatra, Co-Founder & CEO of Ofbusiness, a B2B Commerce & Lending startup focused on serving the Small & Medium Businesses of India.

Episode Outline:

(00:00) - Introduction
(03:32) - Decision to quit a career as a Venture Capitalist to become an Entreprenuer
(06:10) - Deciding to do B2B Commerce + Lending
(08:45) - Framework for early iterations to find Product Market Fit
(13:00) - Creating a new market vs disrupting an existing market
(19:09) - Convincing Investors about a India Specific business that had no global parallels
(22:32) - How the team built a Lending business without any prior experience
(27:28) - How Ofbusiness built an incredible Sales Engine
(36:04) - Scaling Culture across different offices and business verticals
(40:19) - Focus on profitability from Day 1
(42:24) - Depth vs Width while evaluating new opportunities
(47:00) - Difference between Tech Enabled & Tech Led Businesses
(51:33) - The Future of SME Ecosystem in India
(57:46) - The Future of Ofbusiness
(1:00:00) - Excellent breakdown of how evaluate value chains
(1:02:30) - Work-Life Balance
(1:04:46) - Relationship with Money (Professional as well as personal)

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Heads Up For Tails is India's leading Pet Care ecommerce business and we're super excited to share their story on The Indian Dream. Whoever has heard enough episodes of this show will know that I'm a huge animal lover and have an adopted street dog named Lola. That's why Heads Up For Tails has been on our target list for a long time and we're super excited to speak to its founder Rashi Narang in today's episode.

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Just a week ago, Heads Up For Tails received $37 million in series A funding. Before you guys get up in arms and send us angry emails that we're now covering venture funded startups instead of bootstrapped businesses - let me explain why HUFT is an exception. Rashi actually started HUFT as a single store in Delhi in 2008, along with an e-commerce website, and ran it completely bootstrapped for 8 years until she merged with another pet store in 2016. We've realised that some of the best Direct to Consumer founders are the ones that stay bootstrapped for several years as they figure out customers and product market fit.

Listen in if you want to learn how can build your own Pet or D2C business.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to look back at the 100 Episode journey of The Indian Dream.

Yes, we've now release 100 Episodes of content around profitable businesses. Support us and show us your love by buying us a some beer/chai on this link.

Timeline:
(00:18) - Discussing the learnings from 100 Episodes of TID
(10:00) - Update on Business Digitisation Course
(21:00) - Brand Stickers to hide Stains on Clothes
(26:58) - Aggregator of Govt Service Agents
(32:05) - Sustainable Textile Certification Body in India

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In this episode, we talk to Shrey Badhani to talk about the journey of Building Kapiva.

Kapiva is an Ayurveda 2.0 Brand that combines the two trends that we've written about previously: Ayurveda & Direct to Consumer.

We talk to Shrey about the initial thesis behind Kapiva, the pivot to becoming a consumer brand, their process in creating products and how they've scaled up the brand using a combination of D2C + Marketplace approach.

Do check out the episode if you're interested in D2C, Ayurveda or Consumer Brands.

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A journey that started 33 years ago has resulted in a company that does over Rs. 1250 Cr in revenue and has a public market cap of more than 10,000 Crs. This is the story of Mr. Dinesh Thakkar, CMD of Angel Broking.

Before we start, let;s define a stock broker. These are entities that act as the middlemen between stock buyers and the stock exchange. And that's how Mr. Dinesh Thakkar started his career back in 1998. This was a time that the stock market was extremely small and so were the number of players participating in it. As popularized by the show Scam 1992, the market was also open to being rigged by a few powerful players. For 9 years, he learnt the ropes as a stock broker and saw the industry go through the tough phase of early 1990's. As the market was getting bigger, so were its participants, and in order to serve the new market participants, Mr. Thakkar set up Angel Broking in 1996.

Leveraging new age technology and the ability to take long term strategic bets have been a key reason for the success that Angel Broking has had. The company has seen major transformations from introduction of real-time trading over computers to trading over mobile apps. The company has evolved with the times and continued to expand into new business verticals to create this behemoth today.

As the company reaches it's 25th Anniversary, it's laying the foundation for next decade's growth. Considering that only 5% of Indians invest in Equity, the headroom for growth is still quite huge. And to capture this market, Angel Broking is being rebranded to Angel One with a bigger focus on customer education and helping them end to end.

We talk to Mr. Thakkar about his journey of building Angel Broking, his thoughts on technology, customer centricity and building a sustainable organisation.

Before we jump into the episode, please take a moment to drop us a review on Apple! We're reaching 100 episodes and if you like what we've done so far, please drop us a review!

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to discuss some business ideas.

Timeline:
(00:40) - Latest regulations surrounding Bill Discounting
(6:11) - Vitamin D & B12 Deficiency Epidemic
(16:40) - Disrupting Water Purifier Market
(27:30) - Prediction Gambling
(34:00) - Unbundling of Upwork

Business Ideas from the episode

Regulations in Bill Discounting Market: Recently, the Lok Sabha passed a Factoring Regulation Amendment Bill that allows NBFCs to participate in the bill discounting marketing without any minimum % of business committed to Bill discounting. The earlier bill required Bill Discounting NBFCs to have 75% of their business dedicated to Bill Discounting and therefore there were just 7 NBFCs that had this license. This should inject much needed liquidity in the market and we expect huge growth in this segment in the next few years.
Vitamin D & B12: 90% of Indians suffer from Vit D Deficiency. And more than 40% suffer from Vit B12 deficiency. Both these result in various day to day energy and mental health challenges amongst other things. There is an opportunity to build an education/content led business around creating awareness of these deficiencies and then building a business around it.
Disrupting Water Purifier Market: The water purifier market in India is ~$400 Million (Rs. 3000 Cr) and is expected to be ~$1 Billion (Rs. 7500 Cr) in the next 5 years. The current market is dominated by a few players (Eureka Forbes, Tata Chemical, Kent RO) and they tend to rely on information asymmetry to confuse the customers and make them buy products they might not need. Add to this, the after service market for this Industry is huge and currently filled of scams. There is a great opportunity to build a D2C Subscription service around Water Purifiers.
Prediction Gambling - In the absurd idea for the week, we discussed how there could be gambling service built on top of Shaadi.Com to predict how the matches fair in the overall journey to get married. We also discuss the blockchain platforms that are coming up around prediction gambling (Polywork, Augur).
Unbundling of Upwork: Upwork is a marketplace to connect freelancers to end customers. It's a horizontal marketplace, i.e it targets freelancers across different skill sets. Last few years has seen the unbundling of Upwork into individual niche marketplaces like TopTal ($200 mill in Revenue) and the homegrown, Flexiple. We talk about the various opportunities in unbundling Upwork.

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We have Angad Soni from Sepoy & Co. - a manufacturer of high end tonic water and carbonated beverages.

The very idea of of a high quality tonic water did not exist in India before 2017 or 18. It's only in these last few years that we've seen the simultaneous explosion of domestic gin and then tonic right along with them as a great pairing. Now, Sepoy & Co is leading the charge in a fast growing industry. However, to see such a trend entering the country and making a bet on it is no easy feat.

That's where we focus the start of our discussion - how did Angad see this trend and why did he decide to bet on it? We then move onto the operational aspects of starting a brand new D2C business - how do you get packaging & product made, why did he decide to go Direct 2 consumer and how do you get your first 100 customers? We even have a quick chat at the end on why Angad bootstrapped his business with money from friends and family for so long. Consumer startups generally need a lot of money to grow across the country and most founders prefer to take VC money early on.

Before moving on to the episode, we're looking for an intern to handle our LinkedIn marketing. Our previous intern got a job and is moving on to the real world and we're looking for someone new to take over that role! If you enjoy writing content about business ideas, trends and SME founders, shoot us an email!

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to discuss some business ideas.

Timeline:
(00:00) - Intro and some updates
(1:30) - No Code WhatsApp Automation
(11:15) - Marketplace & Funding for Franchises
(24:05) - Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies

Links from the Episode:

Sanjeev Jain YouTube Video
Sanjeev Jain's website to buy the WhatsApp Automation Template
How to Send WhatsApp Messages from Google Sheets with JavaScript and Node.js
Hubspot WhatsApp Integration
Chat.api
YouTube video on Connecting Google sheets with WhatsApp using Chat.api and Pabbly
Soulful/Rasika Episode Link
Software SuggestAnkit Dudhwewala episode link
Frog Ideas/Jatin Modi Episode

Business Ideas from the episode

No Code WhatsApp Marketing Automation: While we were researching for our No Code course, we realised that there is no affordable and No Code tool that can easily automate WhatsApp marketing and lead prospecting. We found Sanjeev Jain's template but the website and tool can be improved upon with better UI/UX and design. A few roadblocks for this business model are that WhatsApp charges $0.05-0.20 per message that is sent automatically and also that WhatsApp has a very strong Spamming filter. However, threads that are initiated by the user are of cost for the business. We both think that this tool can be very useful for marketers and there will be a quick uptake for this tool if built well.
Marketplace & Funding for Franchises: Taking a franchise is one of the quickest way for someone to become an entrepreneur for themself. All they need is the capital to get started. However, banks don't really provide that capital to start a franchise, even if the franchise is a pretty solid brand like McDonald's or Domino's.
- Idea #1 - start a financial services company that focuses on giving loans to people taking on a franchise.
- Idea #2 - Marketplace for franchises so that brands can find new entrepreneurs and also so that these businesses can find new franchises.
- The key to success to idea #2 would be to start in a niche where there aren't too many players and dominate in that niche before spreading to other niches.
Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Digital Marketing agencies don't need to be generalists anymore, there is enough of a demand for their services that they acn now start specialising in niches that they couldn't when this entire industry started 10 years ago. Specialising in a niche will allow agencies to become well known for their services and focus on their strengths instead of spreading themselves thin.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Chinmay Bhogle and Patanjali Pahwa who are currently building The Signal

Timeline

(00:20) - Introduction to Newsletters & The Signal
(03:00) - The Zomato IPO
(11:30) - Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Focused on Newsletter Growth
(18:15) - Bundling Subscriptions
(28:50) - D2C Brands Collaborating to share cusotmers.
(33:30) - What is Kabuki Studios?

Business Ideas in this Episode

The Zomato IPO: This IPO is one of the biggest events in the startup ecosystem in 2021. It will provide exits to a lot of investors and early employees and show the rest of the startup ecosystem the route to make money in the long run. However, Zomato is still a loss making entity and retail investors may not be the best investors for this kind of entity. We provide our take on the Zomato IPO in this episiode. None of us are accredited investment advisors so please make your own judgement on what you believe you should do with these securities.
Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Focused on Newslettter Growth - There has been a proliferation of Newsletters in the past few years. Many journalists have left top newspapers to start their own newsletters and a few of them have done incredibly well for themselves with this model. However, a great writer and journalist might not be great at promoting and distributing their newsletter. Why not unbundle newsletter growth from Digital Marketing agencies and have an agency completely focused on growing newsletters for writers. Everybody hates this idea, I was very sad.
Bundling Subscriptions - Bundling all of your OTT, Music and Newspaper subscriptions in one place so that you have full visibility of all your subscriptions and so that they're easier to handle. Every.to has bundled some fantastic creators in a newsletter subscription, allowing them to grow their audience by collaborating with others.
D2C Brands Collaborating to share cusotmers

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We speak to Rasika Prashant, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Soulfull Foods which is now a part of Tata Consumer Products. We've also changed the format of the episode a bit - the last 10 or 15 minutes are a Business Munchies discussion where we discuss an idea with Rasika.

So what is Soulfull? It's a food brand that's build entire around Millets, aka Ragi or Nachni - they have cereal, instant dosa mix, and other products that are all made from Ragi. The discussion with Rasika starts from a realisation that Millets or Ragi are a healthier alternative than wheat and rice and ends with Soulfull's acquisition by Tata Consumer Products for 150 crores.

We also discuss how they got their initial set of customers, how they thought about offline distribution before the pandemic and how they quickly pivoted to an online focused model after the pandemic. One incredible story in this discussion was how Rasika and her co-founders personally interviewed 300 customers for 2 hours each to gain more consumer insights. That's 60 days of interviews if they did 10 hours of interviews everyday. No wonder Tata wanted to buy them.

Big Announcement!

We've just launched the first batch of our course on Digitisation of Business Processes using No Code tools. We interviewed more than 30 entrepreneurs to figure out why digitisation and automation is so difficult for SME's today and we've used that to build a course focused on automating your business using super easy to use and easy to learn tools. If you're interested in automating your business to get more time to focus on long term growth - click here to learn more.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) take a trip down the SME Business Landscape rabbit hole. And they discuss the state of SMEs, the opportunities and what the modern day SME will look like.

We've also launched 'Digitise your business using No-Code Tools' course with the launch of our first cohort. Only 10 spots for the first cohort. You can read more and apply here.

Join The Indian Dream WhatsApp group here.
The Indian Dream Website

Ideas Discussed:
1. SME Landscape and Opportunities: We go deep in the SME ecosystem to understand the different types of SMEs that exist. Some numbers: 6.34 Cr MSME's in India. 6.3 of those are Micro Enterprises with turnover less than 5 Cr, 3 Lakh Small Businesses (Turnover: 5 to 75 Cr) and ~10,000 Medium sized businesses. Most of the venture capital funding has gone to focus on the Micro Segment with helping these businesses digitize. However, there are profitable, niche opportunities in serving the Small and Mid-sized businesses. We discuss all these opportunities and what a modern day SME should look like.

Compliance Services for US Businesses: Recently, Sahil received a message from someone who runs a small podcast hosting website that has a lot of Indian listeners. He wanted Sahil to become the Chief Grievance Officer for India. This was due to the recent law that was passed. We discuss how there be might be a niche opportunity here to build a profitable business.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Tanay who has built interesting and profitable side hustles: Neog.camp, Rock8.

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The Indian Dream Website

Timestamps:
(2:00) - Tanay's Journey of Building Two Profitable Side Hustles - Roc8 & Neog.camp
(5:27) - The Opportunity in Cohort Based Courses
(15:32) - The Business of Religion
(25:10) - Meditation App built around Religion
(28:16) - The Rise of Formula F1 Racing and the opportunities around it

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Today's episode is with Vaibhav Chhabra and Richa Shrivastava from Maker's Asylum.

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For those of you who haven't heard of Maker's Asylum, it is a community space where anybody can go and build their dream project with their own hands. For ex, you always wanted to build a table from scratch but don't have the tools or expertise. You can just head over to Maker's Asylum and use the woodworking tools they have available and ask the community for help with your project. If you're a hardware entrepreneurs, you can get easy access to tools, technology and talent so that you can easily prototype your ideas.

Maker's Asylum shot to national fame during the pandemic because they quickly produced face shields at a mass scale. They even designed and built large numbers of oxygen concentrators and then open sourced those designs so that anyone could use it. All of this was only possible because of the passion of the community members of Maker's Asylum.

Maker's Asylum is a great example of how one can build a physical community around a simple idea. Vaibhav wanted to make things with own hands so he built a space and other people joined him.

The first half of this episode is all about Maker's Asylum and the work that they do. The second half of the episode gets really interesting as we speak about distributed manufacturing - it is an idea where the designs for a product are open sourced and anyone who has access to the tools and machineries can build it. This is an interesting idea and Maker's Asylum are at the forefront of bring it to India through their partnerships with companies and governments.

Lastly, Siddharth and I have an exciting announcement to make. We're building a product of our own and we hope to have it ready in a few weeks. Hint - it's going to be a course. While we're tinkering in the background, why don't you join our WhatsApp group where we have 2000+ other founders & entrepreneurs. The link is in the show notes.

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Aditya Rao of Kaapi (@adityarao310), Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various business ideas.

Send us your feedback at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Timeline
(1:02) - Aditya's journey with Local Oye and Kaapi
(08:45) - Goodreads 2.0
(12:30) - Micro-SaaS Aggregation (Micro Private Equity)
(25:45) - Hot Sauces in India

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various business ideas. Send us an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Timeline
(1:15) - Thras.io Model for India
(25:00) - Smart Bartending
(28:00) - Ideas for the $50B Indian Wedding Industry

Business Ideas

Thrasio Model for India: Thrasio is a company in the US that started in 2018 and started acquiring Amazon third party merchants that were doing $3-5 Million in revenue. They went on to raise $1.7B and have been able to scale this business profitably. The same model is now being replicated in India with close to 10 companies getting $300 million in funding . Companies like Mensa Brands (Started by Ananth, ex-CEO Myntra) or Global Bees (First Cry subsidiary) are leading the pack in terms of fundraising with $50m+ raised. However, this model isn't very straightforward to replicate in India. We look at what it takes to make this work and the potential challenges.
Smart Bartending: Indian Weddings have a common problem. The friends of bride and groom often party too hard and miss the functions the next day. We talk about how this could be solved by having 'smart' bartenders.
Wedding Industry Ideas: Weddings are a $50B industry in India and have multiple niches that can be converted into profitable businesses. We talk about the existing Wedding startups and a niche idea around wedding planning for different religious weddings.
Warehousing in India: Huge topic that we want to discuss in detail on our next munchies episode. If you're a warehousing expert - please email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com or WhatsApp Us.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various business ideas. Send us an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Timeline
(0:36) - No Code Courses
(9:05) - Sexual Wellness Industry
(20:30) - Eco Friendly Personal Care Products
(26:05) - Table Tennis to replace Golf for Networking
(28:00) - Warehousing in India

Business Ideas

No Code Courses: We've started doing a series of lectures on how SME's can start implementing automations in their businesses using various No Code tools. We plan to build a course around this aimed at SME businesses to help them automate and improve their business processes. A few other ideas:
- No Code Agency
- No Code Freelancing
- No Code Courses
- No Code Expert for your own business.
Sexual Wellness Industry: Here are Siddharth's notes from this industry
- Im Besharam - Raj Armani - Custom Made Toys for India
- 95% of the sex toys are imported
- 2000 Cr Industry
- $7B in US, $25B Global Market
- 65% increase in sales posts lockdown
- Thatspersonal, IMBesharam, Lovetreats
- China Manufactures 70% of World's Sex Toys
- Sexual Wellness - Which includes adult toys, games and health supplements
- 48 per cent for tier-I cities, 40 per cent for tier-II cities and 12 per cent for tier-III cities.
- Archaic laws, such as Section 292 of the Indian Penal Code, which talk about obscenity are still in place and pose yet another hurdle
- 83K Users on ThatsPersonal.com - Was 300k Jan 21.
- 129k Users on LoveTreats
- 120k Users on Kaamstra
- 188k Users on ImBesharam
Eco Friendly Personal Care Products:
- Sell a heavy duty glass container with large refill packs (2L or bigger) of body washed with different scents to reduce the amount of waste generated from small body wash packs
- Sell soaps in giant batches (2kg/4kg) with a special tool for cutting. So every time your soap is over, you just cut a new piece for yourself. Reduces the amount of waste from having to buy a new soap bar each time.
Table Tennis to replace Golf for Networking: The best idea we've ever had on this show. Can't get better than this.
Warehousing in India: Huge topic that we want to discuss in detail on our next munchies episode. If you're a warehousing expert - please email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com or WhatsApp Us.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various business ideas. Send us an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Timeline:
(1:20) - Liquid teams and the Cooperation Economy
(5:20) - Food Processing Industry
(17:15) - Fitness Content Creation & Curation for Teenagers
(24:30) - Notion Apps

Business Ideas that were discussed:

Liquid Super Teams and the Cooperation Economy - Read this essay on The Cooperation Economy by Not Boring - we never realised that The Indian Dream is actually a Liquid Super Team but this article really opened our eyes. In the future, people will not have to work full time at a job anymore - they can decide to work part time at various projects or businesses and thus have their expertise and their bets spread over various projects. At The Indian Dream, we have several intelligent people who are helping us build our project turn into something bigger than what it would be with just Siddharth and I.
- Email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com if you want to join our Liquid Super Team.
Food Processing Industry - This industry is already one of the largest in India with lots of potential for new businesses to be built. Huge opportunity in
- harnessing the potential of processed fruits and vegetables in the form of frozen (IQF), canned, pulp, puree, paste, sauces, snacks, dressings, flakes, dices, dehydration, pickles, juices, slices, chips, jams, jelly, etc.
- Processing levels of marine food in India are currently at 23%. Processing of fish into canned and frozen forms is carried out mostly for exports. Poultry is a highly vertically integrated industry in India but the current processing levels in poultry are 6%, while for meat it stands at 21%.
- The packaged food segment has been reporting double digit growth in 2018 with edible oils and dairy products accounting for a major share. Packed dessert mixes and other premium packaged bakery goods (croissants, filled muffins, etc.).
- Consumer preference trends show an increasing focus on nutritious food, and the convenience of long-term storage. eanwhile, naturally healthy beverages and Ayurveda-based juices continued to witness significant value growth in 2018. Organic packaged food witnessed a double-digit growth in retail volume and current value sales in 2018. Other food segments which are showing high growth include sauces, soups, noodles & pasta, Chocolate confectionary, specialized cheese (Mozzarella, Cheddar and Parmesan), etc.
- Export Potential: The food processing Industry in India is largely domestic oriented, with exports accounting for only 12 per cent of its total output. Nevertheless, it is a net foreign exchange earner with a positive trade balance in recent years.Agricultural Export Policy, 2018 has been formulated with a focused plan to boost India's agricultural exports to USD 60 billion.
- Kombucha Dave:
  - Forbes Video about Kombucha Dave.
  - Some comedians talking abotu Kombucha Dave.
Fitness Content Creation & Curation for Teenagers - Fitness content aimed at Teenagers is doing a terrible job and someone needs to clean it up. Lots of opportunities in this space.
Notion Apps - Notion just came out with its Public API. Lots of oppurtunities to build apps for Notion - Siddharth would love to collaborate with someone to build these apps. You can send him an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com.

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In this episode we talk to Karthik Sridharan, co-founder of Flexiple which is a network of the top freelance developers and designers.

Karthik's Twitter
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The story of Flexiple is a great example of building a bootstrapped tech enabled internet business from scratch and the sacrifices and key decisions that you have to make along the way. Karthik & his co-founders chose not to take any funding from outsiders and this decision has shaped their company culture - for example, the first few years they took a salary of only 30,000 rupees a month and they don't spend any money on marketing their services. Instead they invested their limited resources in long run projects such as SEO and now they're doing a million dollars in revenue and expecting to hit $2 million this year.

I recommend this episode for anyone who wants to build their own tech enabled internet business or is curious about how they're built. We talk to Karthik about everything from SEO for new businesses to the difficulties of hiring.

Lastly, Siddharth and I have been producing these podcasts ourselves for the past 10 months and this should be episode number 85. Right from ideation, guest sourcing, editing - we do everything ourselves and it takes up a lot of time. We'd like to hire some more interns and outsource editing so that we can get you better ideas, trends & business opportunities. Here's the Razorpay link to contribute. We're going to put all the money back into The Indian Dream and try and get you more high quality content.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Rishabh, Co-founder of Pepper Content.

Join The Indian Dream WhatsApp group here.
The Indian Dream Website

Timestamps:
(0:40) - Evolution of Dating Apps
(8:45) - Course Creators + Colleges
(17:55) - Craft Beer Subscription
(23:00) - Cult Gyms but for Kids' Extra-curricular activities

Business Ideas:

Evolution of Dating Apps - We discuss how the current set of dating apps aren't working on what the next evolution could be. We discuss various ideas around verified blind dating service, and how Thursday, a startup in UK, is disrupting this space.
Course Creators + Colleges - The skills and areas that are relevant for students is changing at a fast pace. Colleges are still touching the old curriculum and most of the innovation in teaching these cutting edge course is being done by independent course creators. We discuss how colleges could look to acquire course creators who are touching this new age courses like Blockchain, IoT, Space Tech, etc.
Craft Beer Subscription - About time that various states open the regulations surrounding alcohol delivery. Bombay has led the way during the pandemic and interesting delivery businesses have popped up. We discuss how there should be a subscription for Tap Beer.
Cult Gyms for Kids' Extra-Curricular Activities: Cult Gyms allow you to select between a variety of physical workouts, ensure that you don't get bored. Similarly, there should be a Cult Gym like setup for Kids' extra curricular activities. All activities under one roof, with the ability to pick and choose the different classes a kid wants to explore.
Bonus Idea: Siddharth goes extreme and talks about the schools of the future. Check it out!

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We do a deep dive into the Hotel Industry with Siddharth Goenka, the founder of Octave Hotels and Aiosell.

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Siddharth started his career as a software engineer for Microsoft in the US and now runs a chain of 30+ hotels across Bangalore. He even used his previous software development knowledge to build Aiosell, a product specifically built to help hotels increase their revenue.

This episode will be super interesting for anyone who wants to know more about the economics of the hotel industry, how they run, how to build a micro SaaS product or just anyone who loves learning about new businesses.

Lastly, Siddharth and I have been producing these podcasts ourselves for the past 10 months and this should be episode number 80. Right from ideation, guest sourcing, editing - we do everything ourselves and it takes up a lot of time. We'd like to hire some more interns and outsource editing so that we can get you better ideas, trends & business opportunities. Here's the Razorpay link to contribute. We're going to put all the money back into The Indian Dream and try and get you more high quality content.

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We go even deeper into Space Tech with Awais Ahmed from Pixxel Space. Pixxel was just founded in 2019 and is on a mission to build a health monitor for the planet through a constellation of cutting edge hyperspectral small satellites.

Our Space Tech Newsletter
Contribute to The Indian DreamQuestions:
(2:30) - Why did you decide to start Pixxel?
(8:45) - Have you already launched a satellite?
(11:00) - What kind of help do startups receive from ISRO?
(13:30) - Isn't it difficult for a startup to work with the government and ISRO?
(16:15) - How do you convince businesses and governments for the use case of selling Earth Observation data?
(18:15) - What is the Space Tech value chain?
(22:15) - What happened with the privatisation of space in India? What did it mean for the startup industry?
(28:00) - What are the economics of a space business?
(33:10) - What is the space infrastructure that is already present in india? And what is still left to be built?
(36:45) - What is the supply chain for Pixxel and other space startups?
(39:15) - What are the lowest hanging opportunities to build a space statrtup in India?
(43:15) - How should someone approach a space company to build space components for a space startup?
(46:00) - How should a young person look to enter the space industry?

In this conversation with Awais, we ask him how he come up with the idea and ambition to build a space business since it's so difficult, hint: it involves meeting Elon Musk. What has changed in the last couple of years for the space industry in India to mature? What help do startups get from ISRO & its scientists? Lastly, we discuss the lowest hanging opportunities for people who want to build a space start. Hint: it involves data analytics and component manufacturing.

By the way, the week after we approached Awais for this interview, he and his co-founder were announced in the Forbes 30 under 30 list for 2021. Please remember, we got to him before Forbes. Our Business Munchies episode this week will also have someone from the Forbes 30 under 30 list - I'm keeping it a surprise.

Now onto the episode.

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Karn Nahata, former Swiggy employee.

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Timestamps:
(0:35) - Social Stock Trading Apps
(9:50) - The Pet Care Industry in India
(20:40) - Interstate food delivery
(28:03) - Building habits through social accountability

Business Ideas:

Social Stock Trading Apps - People in India loving trading stocks and there are a bunch of WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have popped up that just give advice on what stocks to buy and when. Stallion Asset has built their PMS purely on the back of their founder, Amit Jeswani, being a financial influencer. There is a clear demand and supply of this market - how can you organise it and make it more professional? The idea is to get all the influencers giving these stock trading tips onto one platform and incentivise them by adding a transaction layer which easily allows them to monetise their following.
The Pet Care Industry in India - This industry is already 3,000 crores and divided into Pet Food (2000 crores), Pet Pharma (700 crores), Pet Toys (500 crores) and other stuff. The main driver for this industry is the fast growth in the number of pet dogs and cats being adopted by families across India - there were 30 million pet dogs in India in 2019! That was up from 20 million pet dogs just a few years ago. The way to enter this industry would be either in a niche of Pet Food (vegan, healthy, raw meat, etc.) or with high quality pet toys since everything is currently imported from China. You could also start a doggy day care or get into pet sitting because people need to send their dogs somewhere when they go on vacation - but kennels are quite low quality.
Interstate Food Delivery - Who wouldn't love some fresh Rasgulas from Calcutta or Hyderabadi Biryani? This idea is definitely targeted at the premium customer who can pay the high transport cost to get fresh food from one state to another. One go to market strategy for this idea would be to target high end parties where people may want to show off the fancy food that they have. Just my Roots is already doing this in India but the quality of the website clearly shows that they're not able to target the right audience. GoldBelly is a succesful US startup that has figured out this niche - they sell gourmet food with a very upmarket branding. I would love if someone built this interstate food delivery business - I want daily Sondesh delivery from Calcutta.
Building Habits through Social Accountability - This is an idea that Siddharth actually tried to build. Changing habits is really tough - we're generally very easy on ourself and let our bad habits slide even though we know its bad for us. Can you build accountability for yourself either through social or financial accountability where you're socially shamed or lose money if you break your promises of improving your habits? This platform would have some kind of system where you are actually held accountable for the promises that you make to improve yourself.

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Hey everyone! Welcome to another episode of The Indian Dream. This is where we explore markets and ideas that are set to explode in the next 3-5 years.

This week, we did a deep diver into the word of Space Technology.

Before we talk about the episode, let me give you a high level understanding of Space Tech. For years, the various government organizations have been sending satellites in space for various use cases ranging from Communication, Navigation, Television and Remote Imaging & Sensing. Organizations like NASA and ISRO have been doing this work. Over the last few years, private players have entered and new use cases have emerged. We've written a detailed newsletter about the landscape of Space Tech in India, the current players and the opportunities. Link to the newsletter is in the show notes.

In this week's episode, we talk to Narayan Prasad, co-founder & COO of satsearch. satsearch is a global marketplace for Space Products & Services. Narayan also runs his own space podcast and community called New Space India.

Space Technology has been dominated in India by ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organisation, since its founding in the early 70's. During these past 50 years, ISRO subcontracted all manufacturing to Indian companies but all intellectual property rested with ISRO or the Department of Space. Also, there was no clear legal framework for space companies to be built in India. As a result, the private Indian Space technology industry in India languished and is barely 1-3% of the Global Space industry.

However, all of this started changing over the past few years. A private marketing arm of ISRO called New Space India Limited was set up in 2019 and IN-SPACe was set up in 2020 as the regulator for the Space Industry. The stage has been set for the explosion of the private space industry in India.

This conversation with Narayan is a primer on the space industry and the entire value chain along with the opportunities in this space. Narayan is passionate about the Space industry and you can really hear it in this conversation.

Lastly, Sahil and I have been producing these podcasts ourselves for the past 10 months and this should be episode number 80. Right from ideation, guest sourcing, editing - we do everything ourselves and it takes up a lot of time. We'd like to hire some more interns and outsource editing so that we can get you better ideas, trends & business opportunities. Here's the razorpay link to support us. We're going to put all the money back into The Indian Dream and try and get you more high quality content.

Oh, and if you're a young person looking for an internship - we're hiring! Send us an email - we're hiring for research and content distribution at the moment.

Email us at: theindiandream20@gmail.com

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We've launched a new show in Hindi in an Exclusive Partnership with Gaana.com. Checkout Founder Journeys on our new show 'Yeh Hai Dhande ki Baat'. The first three episodes with an Export Manufacturer- LNM Auto, Ferns & Petals, and Jiva Ayurveda are out. Check out the show here.

In this episode of Business Munchies, Sahil and Sid are back with their usual banter and some interesting ideas. Here's what we discuss:

The Business of Rare Plants & Evolution of Gardening in India (1:47)
The $1.5 Bn Expert Networks Industry (13:04)
Subscription of Gourmet Meal Boxes (22:12)

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Hey everyone - welcome to The Indian Dream podcast. In this episode we dig deeper into the trend of Plant Based Meats with Abhinav Sinha, co-Founder of GoodDot and GoodDo. Good Dot is a food tech start-up and was one of the first companies to bring plant-based proteins to India - Good do is their Quick Service Restaurant arm that's bringing plant based foot to airports & many other locations.
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Before this conversation, I didn't think plant based meats would work in India. A vast number of people are vegetarian and even the non-vegetarians eat meat only occasionally - why would Indians care about meat alternatives? This conversation changed my mind on the industry. We speak to Abhinav about how Indians view plant based meats and the different market segments that are buying this product. We also go into detail on the pillars for any food business that wants to enter the consumer segment. Overall, our belief is that the plant based meat industry is going to grow fast especially amongst younger folks who're getting more environmentally conscious.

We've put a timeline in the show notes so you can skip directly to the questions that interest you.

Timeline

(02:33) - What was the thesis and story behind Good Dot? It is a story of compassion by reducing animal cruelty by providing an alternative to meat.

(7:20) - Did you do the R&D and build the product development yourself? What did it entail? All proteins are based on just 20 Amino Acids and the sequence of these Amino Acids determines how the proteins fold, etc. If you take the same Amino Acids from plant proteins - shouldn't it give you the same bite as animal proteins - you can denature the protein and then align it similar to animal proteins.

(9:56) - What is your target demographic? Conservative vegetarians, moderate vegetarians, adventurous vegetarians (non-veg curious), borderline non-vegetarians (most of India, eat only occasionally), mainstream non-vegetarians (probably once a week because of cost), hardcore non-vegetarians (daily). Leave the two extremes on either side - focus efforts on the middle 4 sections.

(13:54) - How did you figure out which products do go after? Focus their efforts and make their decisions on 5 pillars:

Taste
Price - sometimes price is more important in India
Nutrition
Quality
Convenience

(17:25) - What was your Go to Market strategy? and how did you build awareness? RCM - direct selling agents with more than 2 million agents. Cater to the lower middle income market - which is the key market to target.

(20:17) - How are you marketing towards the lower middle income? How do you manage pricing?

(25:31) - How did you build awareness to get people to give it a shot?

(28:23) - Tell us about GoodDo - your Quick Service Restaurant.

(32:22) - What are the opportunities in this space?

(35:11) - What is the entire value chain for Plant Based Meats in India? What are the raw materials and who is manufacturing these in India?

(36:35) - Are you seeing enthusiasm in other kinds of plants based food as you are seeing in plant based meats?

(40:38) - Some large chains like McDonald's and Burger King are adding plant based options to their offerings - what is your experience with it?

(42:01) - Are you still changing the base product?

(43:15) - What are the barriers to entry for a newcomer to get into this field?

(45:27) - What is the implication of the level of processing required for these products?

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Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) talk to Sajal Khanter, former investment banker and current founder of The Boring News Co - a newsletter that brings you daily news without any sensationalism. Check them out!

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Timestamps:
(0:36) - How do you create trust in SME's using a Social Media or Marketplace model?
(11:04) - Creating Bronze Busts of business leaders like Ratan Tata or other super famous people like Narendra Modi
(20:54) - Discussion about the surprising profitibality of Food Delivery Apps
(24:55) - Food Business Called 50/50 with Unhealthy and Healthy variant of dishes sold through carts.
(33:14) - Course Clubs as replacements for Book Clubs

Business Ideas we Discussed:

Creating Trust in SME's: There is a major trust deficit in the SME space when it comes to dealing with new customers and vendors. You can find them on Trade India but you often don't know whether the company actually exists or if its a random middleman who's popped up with manufacturer contacts. This is especially prevalent in the textile industry which has many different layers. Sajal wants to create some kind of social media or marketplace model which can help create a database of trusted SME's with the information displayed on the platform that is needed to build trust.
Creating Bronze Busts of Ratan Tata: Inspired by Berkshire Nerds which is a simple store that has bronze busts of Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger. This could be done for other leaders in India who've achieved cult like status such as Ratan Tata, Narendra Modi, Aamir Khan, Sachin Tendulkar or more.
Food Business Called 50/50: Restaurants are either healthy or unhealthy with very few mixing both the concepts in one location. Sajal's idea is to have a food cart with both healthy and unhealthy options in one place so that friends can enjoy it together. This cart could also keep a track of people's behaviour and if they've eaten well for a long period of them - they could then be incentivised to eat unhealthy with a coupon. Sajal's long term goal is to automate these carts so that they could roam around business areas by themselves and cook and serve people healthy/unhealthy food.
Course Clubs as replacements for Book Clubs: Cohort Based Courses or other online courses are replacing books as the primary place for people to learn new skills. This is especially true for high performing individuals, entrepreneurs and freelancers who are constantly trying to upskill themselves and reach the next level of productivity.

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We host Varun and Nicole from Good Food Institute (GFI) to talk about the Plant Based Meat sector in India.

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Plant Based Meat products are made out of processing Plants in a way that it resembles the taste, texture and nutrition of real meats. Animal Meat has significant environmental impact and is a big contributor for Climate Change. These products are highly inefficient - 9 calories of food fed to a chicken gets 1 calorie back out in the form of animal flesh, the ratio is 34:1 in the case of beef!

Then there's the health impact of these Animal Meats on Humans. Zootonic diseases like Covid, Avian flu originate from people consuming animal Meat.

Plant Based Meats provide a healthier alternative - both for the environment and humans. Research has been going on for more than a decade around processing plants in a certain way to create products that resemble Animal Meats.

We're seeing a rise of startups in this space creating interesting products for the Indian preferences. One common thread behind all these startups in India is the work that GFI is doing in enabling them and giving them a platform.

We speak to Varun and Nicole about the Business, Science & Policy around Plant Based Meat in India.

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) are joined by Raj Kunkolienkar (aka @Kunksed), Co-Founder of Stoa School with us for this episode of Business Munchies.

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We discuss the following ideas:

Data Pooling of Recruiting Data
- Recruitment is consistently rated as one of the toughest parts of entrepreneurship - finding the right people for the right job can make or break a business. However, recruitment faces many issues from both sides of the desk - the candidate and the business. On the business side, there is an issue of information assymettry where they don't know much about the quality of a candidate except for a few interviews they may conduct. Additionally, a candidate may take an offer letter from a business and use that to shop around for jobs. We discuss various ideas for how recruitment data can be pooled across various businesses to solve this information assymettry and how companies can be incentivised to provide that data.
Meesho for Matchmaking
- The Meesho business model uses people's networks to help sell products to wider audience. One person sells to their network and gets commissions on those products - this model has been popular amongst homemakers in India who want to earn extra income. Can we use the same model for Matchmaking? Older relatives tend to annoy their younger family with questions about marriage anyway so why not incentivise them and provide them with a platform to make their matchmaking profitable?
Economies within Communities
- Large Communities are currently being built across various domains in India - Business, Stock Picking, Gardening and a host of other topics. These communities can have more than 10,000 members who are constantly asking for help or helping out of their own desire to help. But can we find a way to provide value to these acts of kindness? An in-community economy - imagine points for helping people with their problems - that can be exchanged for other help that's required within the community.

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Welcome to the 75th Episode of The Indian Dream! Our Diamond Jubilee!

But sadly, India is currently going through a massive covid crisis - if you haven't already, please consider donating to a Covid Relief effort that can help save lives.

Links to Donate for Covid Relief: https://donate.indiacovidresources.in

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In this episode, we speak to Sridhar Gadhi, the founder & Executive Chairman at Quantela Inc. Quantela provides Smart City solutions to more than 60% of the Smart Cities in India - this was a conversation I've wanted to have for a long time to understand how the Smart City initiative actually works and what the opportunities are for new entrepreneurs entering this space. We have a detailed discussion going into the Go to Market strategy for Smart City startups, the entire value chain of the business and even whether new companies should first focus on the Indian market or export.

Sridhar is also a Member of the Global Internet of Things (IoT) Council at the World Economics Forum and thus at the end he also gives us a perspective on the Global opportunities that exist in IoT and Smart Cities.

For the first time, we've put a detailed timeline in the show notes so that you can skip to exactly the question that interests you.

Lastly, if you haven't already, please join our No Spam WhatsApp group for the latest updates on everything about The Indian Dream - we have more than 1600 founders & entrepreneurs learning new business ideas & opportunities on our group every week and we'd love to have you too!

(0:00) - What is Quantela, what inspired you to start Quantela?
(3:55) - What is a Smart City?
(7:00) - What is the Go to Market Strategy to introduce a Smart City product and how did you get 60% of Smart Cities in India as clients?
(11:15) - How do Smart Cities fund their project and measure ROI of the project?
(16:15) - What are the new Funding Models that cities are using to fund their Smart City projects?
(23:30) - What is the value chain of Smart City Projects - Software vs. Hardware?
(25:45) - What are the focus areas by the Government for the Smart City Programme?
(29:00) - How do you identify the problems that need to be solved and enter the Smart City Space?
(32:20) - What are the profit margins in the Smart City space?
(33:10) - What are the infrastructural requirements for the Smart City Programme to really take off in India?
(35:05) - Should you focus on exports or domestic supply if you're a new business in the Smart City space?
(36:20) - What insights have you derived from being part of the World Economic Forum for Smart IoT and Smart Cities?
(37:50) - What are the necessary skills and minimum readings for new entrepreneurs entering the Smart City space?

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Harish Uthayakumar, YouTuber at Curious Harish and co-founder of Clinify, for a special episode of Business Munchies - we look at College Side Hustles.

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Timestamps:
(0:45) - Start a YouTube channel as a College Side Hustle.
(7:45) - Cookie delivery service
(13:45) - One stop shop for all college information
(19:00) - Hyper local Omegle for College Campuses
(20:00) - Modernising alumni relations
(25:00) - Learn No-Code and Freelance
(34:15) - The story of Anirudh Singla and Pepper Content

The College Side Hustles/Business Ideas we discussed

Start a YouTube channel or any type of Content Creation - Content creation is the lowest hanging fruit in terms of building a skill or building a business. Anyone can start a YouTube channel or a blog - it doesn't require too many resources. However, you can learn a lot of lessons from these endeavours and it can even open doors for your future career as you gain social capital.
Cookie delivery service - In fact, any kind of food delivery service could work in college. It teaches your the entrepreneurial skills necessarily to succeed later in life. Sahil took part in such a business in college and his friend later went on to build a succesful million dollar business with the skills she learnt in college.
Modernising Alumni Relations - BITS Pilani & ISB have fantastic alumni networks in India but that's not true of all the top schools and colleges in the country. Improving alumni touchpoints can significantly increase the donations to colleges and also the value that alumni derive over a long period of time. It's a win-win for everyone involved.
Freelancing & Learning No-Code: Freelancing is the classice college side hustle. College students should learn a useful skill that they deploy while freelancing - such as learning No Code. If a student can learn Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, etc., those skills will be useful to them for the rest of their lives.
Anirudh Singla & Pepper Content: Anirudh Singla, the co-founder of Pepper Content, first started off by just freelance writing for businesses around the world. Freelancing showed him the larger world of content writing that desperately needed a solution and that's when he founded Pepper Content and recently got him a place in the Forbes 30 Under 30 List.

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In this episode, we talk to Vinay Chhajlani about his 3 decade long journey as an Entrepreneur building multiple profitable businesses.

We talk to him about the following businesses:
1. Webdunia - India's first Vernacular platform with products and services in Hindi and other regional languages. They were the creators of World's first Hindi Email Service and went on to raise VC funding back in 1999. Post the dot com bubble, they pivoted to being a services company and served the likes of Reliance to build a profitable businesses.

Naidunia - The Newspaper publishing business that he took over and turned around after it was struggling in mid 2000's. He scaled it to multiple cities and states and eventually had a successful exit.
Other Ventures - Cable television, Jewelery E-com, and Convention Center. All of this didn't turn out to be successful and we talk to him about his learnings from these businesses.

We also talk about the principles/values that he has used across these businesses, the role of spirituality in business, and how has he navigated his son's introduction in the family business, given the challenges that he faced when he entered the family business back in late 80's.

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We're joined by a special guest today, Saurav Arya. Saurav is the founder of Small World, WorkStays and Impressive Infographics. He's a digital nomad and has travelled to 90+ Countries.

Timestamps:
(0:35) - Hacker House in Tier II/III Cities
(12:00) - Airbnb for services targeted towards Digital Nomads
(20:45) - Building Global Media Properties out of India
(28:00) - A Service to Settle in a new city

Business Ideas:
Hacker House in Tier II/III Cities: There is a lot of untapped potential in Tier II/III cities of India. Often, the young kids don't get the same opportunities and exposure due to limited resources. What if you could setup Hacker House where you bring talented folks, teach them necessary skills and give them a platform to participate in Gig/Creator economy. This could be applied to Gaming, Content, Coding and various other skills. The way to make money would be take a certain share of the earnings they make once they are trained (Income Share Agreements) and ready to monetize their skills. The Soul Gaming Clan has done this with a Gaming house. Check it out.

Airbnb for Digital Nomads: The Pandemic has resulted in the rise of Digital Nomads, people who work remotely and travel. These people generally stay in one location for a few weeks/months and then move to another place. They have specific requirements in terms of Internet speeds, Cafes in walking distance, Gym etc. What if you build a curation service where you list out these places basis crowdsourcing this information from other digital nomads.

Building Global Media Properties out of India: India has all the resources and Infrastructure to become a global media hub. We have the talent to create content, animators, and a large section of English speaking population that could be leveraged to build Global Media Properties. If American Media is about Glitzy Shit, what if India could be about Aspirational content that is relatable to other developing countries? Around uplifting sections of society, career progression, entrepreneurial ecosystems etc.

Service to settle in a new city: Relocating to new cities is hard. It's hard to meet the right set of folks, understand how the city functions, and can be a difficult experience overall. What if you had a service where you could have an assigned person helping you settle into a new city. A website where you can choose the right person basis their profile and interests. This could be a way for Airbnb Hosts or Couch surfers to earn additional revenue while a great way for new people to settle in a new city.

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Welcome to The Indian Dream podcast! Our goal is to help entrepreneurs build profitable businesses. We've spoken to more than a hundred founders & investors - our biggest lesson is that we should focus on niche markets to find profitable opportunities.

Here's how we do it - we have Trends episodes where each week, we do a deep dive into a business trend that is exploding in India and find the opportunities for you to build profitable businesses. We've dug deep into the hemp industry, seaweed farming, blockchain, and many more niches to help YOU find your next big business.

Every week, we also host Business Munchies where we discuss business ideas across domains and how they can be profitable businesses. We've gone deep on opportunities in the helicopter rental business, the toy industry, virtual exhibitions and many more.

Lastly, on our Founder Journey episodes we showcase playbooks that were used successfully to build profitable businesses. We've hosted the founders of Tally Solutions, Naturals Ice Creams, and several other succesful entrepreneurs to learn their secrets!

So click on that play button if you want to learn the latest business ideas, trends and playbooks.

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Second episode in our series about Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain - I highly recommend that you listen to the previous episode first to get the understandings of the basics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

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Blockchain Newsletter
McKinsey Report on Blockchain including a graph showing the ease of implementation and impact of Blockchain on various industries.

We have Abhishek Singh with us in this episode - Abhishek is the CTO of Comdex - a trade financing and trade settlement platform that's based on the blockchain technology. They've used blockchain to finance millions of dollars of commodity trading the South East Asian market over the past few years.

My biggest takeaway from this episode is that blockchain can disrupt any industry where a middle man is used to build trust. Blockchain takes out the trust equation by using Smart Contracts which automatically execute when certain conditions are met. You can read our newsletter about Blockchain to learn more about Smart Contracts and how they can be used - the link will be in the show notes.

The first 10-15 minutes of the conversation are an introduction on some basics of blockchain including the difference between private and public networks, the difference between proof of work and proof of stake and other blockchain basics.

After these first 15 minutes, we get into how the current supply chain for global commodity trading works and how Comdex is reimagining this global system using blockchain. Around the 30 minute mark, we discuss the gaps in the industry and how a new entrepreneur can enter the blockchain industry.

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We're joined by a special guest today, Alexander Hogeveen Rutter. Alex works at the IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank, where he specialises in increasing renewable energy penetration in Indian power grids.

Timestamps:

Agriculture Crowdfunding & Community Supported Agriculture (01:26)
Solar & Battery Powered Mobile Gensets (15:18)
Thrift Store positioned for Sustainability (21:42)
Fractional Ownership of High Value Assets (31:30)

Business Ideas:

Agriculture Crowdfunding & Community Supported Agriculture - Most farmers in India today live hand to mouth - they do not have enough capital to increase their standard of living by planting high yield or higher value crops like mangoes, etc. The idea of agricultural crowdfunding would bring in funding from a variety of sources to provide the capital for the farmer to plant new crops and then split the profits amongst the investors. This same idea can be extended to buying large plots of land, subdividing them and selling them to individuals who can then decide what they'd like grown on that plot for them with the produce sent to their home - Farmizen does something like this in Bangalore.
Solar & Battery Powered Mobile Gensets - Replacing diesel gensets used in weddings & other events with a combination of solar and batteries. With the fall in battery prices and the rise of diesel prices, this model is commercially viable - you'll just be replacing the operational expenses of buying diesel with the capital expense of buying the batteries & solar panels. If anyone wants to actually implement this - Alex is happy to help with his expertise.
Thrift Store positioned for Sustainability - Nowadays, most people just sell their old clothes to the raddiwala - this idea is to collect those old, used clothes and sell them from an angle of sustainability. The profits of this organisation would be used for environmental causes. And this doesn't need to be only for used clothes, it could even be used board games, books, or anything else that can benefit from being sold one more time.
Fractional Ownership of High Value Assets - The conversation started with Masterworks, a US based company that sells small parts of really expensive paintings. However, this idea can be taken forward with any high value asset - for example, a Croation Tennis player recently sold part of her arm as an NFT and as ad space for anyone to advertise. HumanIPO lets you invest in people (starting to get creepy) and a portion of their time (I don't fully understand the dynamics of this one).

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If you want to support us, you can contribute here.

In the episode today, we host Nishchal Shetty of WazirX to talk about the world of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. We avoid speculating on bitcoin prices and instead focus on the fundamentals of blockchain.

Blockchain and Crypto are often misunderstood. In order to understand it better, Nishchal broke down the four primary blockchain use cases:

Asset: These are store of values, deflationary in nature. Bitcoin is the perfect example for this.
Currencies: These are equivalent to digital currencies, inflationary in nature. A Digital INR will fit into this category.
Utility: These are blockchains that are used to run various different programs and smart contracts. For example: Ethereum is a blockchain used to run different blockchain programs and Ether is the token used to run these programs.
Security: This is when the blockchain is used to back real world securities like stocks and properties.

We also discuss the various applications of Blockchain from Decentralised Finance, NFTs, and Supply Chain Traceability.

And we touch upon the regulatory environment of Crypto and Blockchain in India and the future of this technology.

If you're curious about the world of blockchain, highly recommend you listen to the episode. If you're not curious, well, this IS the future, might help learning about it now!

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with the folks from Dine With Data, Vedika & Armaan, to discuss some great new ideas that we wouldn't have thought up on our own.

Dine with Data is an amazing daily WhatsApp newsletter that introduces you to a new startup everyday so that you're always aware of the latest business trends.

Join Dine with Data WhatsApp newsletter here.

While you're at it, join The Indian Dream WhatsApp newsletter as well!

(00:00) - Introduction
(00:33) - Swiggy + Tinder
(08:07) - Personal Stylists
(20:19) - "Vibe Curation" - Service business to make your cafe more instagrammable
(27:15) - Micro Private Equity
(37:45) - Memes as a Service

The Business Ideas we discussed

Swiggy + Tinder - Ordering on food delivery apps these days is a chore - the Paradox of Choice makes it so difficult to choose a restaurant or an item, especially when you're in a group setting. The idea is to make Tinder like tiles where people can just swipe right or left on pictures of food that they find attractive or unattractive. If you're not able to get API access from Swiggy or Zomato - you can create a UI layer getting data from other sources and then linking the backend to Dunzo.
Tinder + Swiggy - Swiggy has so much data on our eating habits - why not make a dating service which uses this data on eating habits to make predictions on possible matches?
AI Personal Stylists - Today, only the rich and famous can afford personal stylists - why can't we democratise this service? You can build an AI powered recommendation engine which looks at your closet of clothes and makes recommendations on clothes matches that you would've otherwise never thought of. This plays into the same long tail game that Netflix uses to always keep content fresh.
- You could also build this as a B2B service which integrates with existing ecommerce store and makes it easier for them to recommend clothing to existing customers based on past buying trends.
- A Lenskart like model which scans your body would be able to show you how different clothes would fit your body and give you exact size recommendations as well.
"Vibe Curation" - Whether we like it or, the Instagrammability of café's & restaurants determines their success these days. You can build a service which helps make the physical spaces and the individual dishes more instagrammable to drive the social virality of the space. It could even be a monthly subscription where the decor is changed each month.
Micro Private Equity - A new movement led by companies like Thras.io & Tiny Capital where you build a portfolio of small internet business - SaaS products, Amazon FBA, DTC brands - in a particular niche and use economies of scale on marketing knowledge, etc. to help scale up your portfolio.
Memes as a Service - Inspired by a listener building Marque Berry (the website is incomplete). He has built a Meme Influencer marketing business where he'll help you make your product 'viral' on various instgram meme pages. A great marketing tool for D2C brands & anyone who's looking to reach Gen Z audiences. Send me a mail if you want to talk to him.

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A couple of weeks back, we covered the Trend of Paid or Private Communities. We explored the rise of these communities amongst millenials and Gen Z and looked at the opportunities that exist in this space in our Trends Newsletter.

Today, we have Vivek Narain, Founder of The Quorum, a Member only lifestyle club in Gurgaon with close to $1m ARR. Lifestyle clubs have always existed across the major cities in India. Think the Gymkhanas and Golf Clubs. But, these clubs are now fairly saturated and the philosophy there is to now keep people out as opposed to letting them in. These clubs have been designed for quote , unquote Old Money. And that left space for likes of Quorum to cater to the needs of new money and evolving tastes.

Quorum offers a high end luxurious space for a wide range of services, starting from Hospitality, Wellness, Cultural events and even co-working spaces. The focus is on diversity within the member community and the pricing structure has been designed to keep it more accessible for a wide range of demographic.

This is an asset heavy business, but if done right, can be extremely profitable. We talk to Vivek about the thesis behind Quorum, the economics and what it takes to make a physical private community work.

This was an interesting episode for us, as one of our primary goals with The Indian Dream Project is to build a community of knowledge seeking entrepreneurs to help each other build profitable businesses. And if you have any aspirations to build a community, even a digital one, I recommend you listen to the episode.

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) announce a new Referral Reward - you can be invited onto this podcast if you get enough referrals to our newsletter. Here's the link that you can use to generate your referral code!

(0:00) - Referral Campaign Thanks
(0:45) - Decentraland
(3:20) - Regional Newsletters - The New Tropic
(14:52) - The rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages
(21:00) - PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies

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Decentraland - A new virtual world that's combining two hot topics: NFT's & the Metaverse. You can buy pieces of land in the game that are permanently yours using NFT's and then you can use that land to showcase everything else you've bought on the metaverse like your Gucci bags or whatever else. This is the direction of the future and we should keep our eyes on it.
Regional and Niche Newsletters - First saw this as a Tweet by Tanvi Dessai. Regional Newsletters are basically a digital version of something that's existed for centuries - local newspapers. People always want to know what's going on in our surrounding areas and there's no reason why this can't go digital. The New Tropic does $1.5 million in ad revenue just by focusing on Miami - it's now branched out to several other smaller cities in the US. There's no reason to just bifurcate by region - you can also do it by topic. One WhatsApp newsletter charges Rs. 11,000 per year for giving daily commodity prices updates on commodities not easily found in the exchanges. Another idea is to take Business Updates (government mandates, commodity prices, etc.) and just simplify it without any Business Gossip (who raised how much, etc.).
The Rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages - Amul placed a full page ad in several leading newspaper about the Myths & Facts of Plant Based Milks/Beverages. This move by Amul is an indication of the rise of Plant Based products in general such as meat alternatives, plant milks, Tofu, Tempeh, etc. Plant based milks already do about 150 - 200 crores of revenue in India and one of our community members also launched a brand called Oat MLK (please support him). Another community member is building Better - an amazing vegan food company - I highly recommend their spreads.This is a huge topic that we'll cover in a future trends series.
PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies - My favourite idea from this episode. Siddharth met a CA who invested early in several regional snack brands (like Bikaji, Yellow Diamond, etc.) and helped them professionalise and expand their reach. He is now set to make a bonanza as all these snack brands have matured and are planning IPO's. A PE fund can be built to focus on a particular sector (snack brands, industrial products, ice creams, whatever else) and tries to find regional players throughout India and help them scale up.

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This episode is a deep dive into the business of Restaurants.

Hunger Inc.
Sameer Seth
TID Whatsapp Newsletter (No Spam)

We talk to Sameer Seth, Co-founder of Hunger Inc. They've created brands such as The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro & very recently, The Bombay Sweet Shop.

Now if you're not from Bombay, you might not have heard about these places. But, ask your friend who lives in Bombay, and they'll most probably have good things to say about these places.

We talk to Sameer about his journey of moving from a Banking career to the F&B space, how he went about entering a new Industry and the experience that he gathered before starting Hunger Inc.

We also talk about a wide range of topics, all within the purview of building a profitable F&B business. We talk about the thesis behind The Bombay Canteen, what it takes to start a restaurant focused on providing great experience at affordable prices, how they think about the menu, pricing and customer service and the economics of a restaurant business. At the end, we talk about the thesis on starting a Direct to Consumer New Age Mithai brand in The Bombay Sweet shop, something we've discussed in our previous Business Munchies episode.

Talking to Sameer, I realised Story-telling is a big part of getting food right and it was interesting to hear some of Sameer's stories of building Hunger Inc. If you're curious about the F&B or hospitality space, don't miss out on this episode.

This episode is a homage to Chef Floyd Cardoz, Co-founder of Hunger Inc and a bunch of other top class restaurants in New York. He passed away last year due to Covid-19. We thank him for everything that he has done and backing Sameer and Yash to create Hunger Inc.

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We're doing our first Giveaway! We'll be sending the book 'Psychology of Money' by Morgan Housel to 5 people who help us get the highest number of referrals for our Newsletter. Here's the link that you can use to generate your referral code.

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) munch on these ideas during the episode:

(00:50) - The Indian Dream Book Giveaway - Psychology of Money
(02:06) - Gumroad Investment & Equity Crowdfunding
(09:05) - Biostimulants & Sea6 Energy
(16:25) - Manufacturing & Warehousing as a Service (MaaS, WaaS)
(28:52) - High end locks

Li Jin's article on Passion Economy and Future of Work

The Indian Dream Book Giveaway - Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel - One of the best books both of us have ever read about Wealth Management & Accumulation. We'll be giving away 5 copies to the people who get the most people to sign up to The Indian Dream Newsletter. Here's the referral link that you can use for this campaign.
Gumroad Investment & Equity Crowdfunding: As per SEBI guidelines, equity crowdfunding is still illegal in India - despite India overall being much more lax in its rules than the US SEC. Equity Crowdfunding is basically a chance for retail investors to invest in early stage startups - think Kickstarter but you actually get Equity in the company in which you invest. Gumroad - the creator platform - raised $5 million on the Republic.co platform which itself raised $35 million. The same day, the SEC had raised the maximum allowable capital raise from Equity Crowdfunding from $1.07 million to $5 million - expect a lot more companies use this method for raising early money but also expect a lot more fraud.
Biostimulants & Sea6 Energy: On this podcast, we are obsessed with anything related to agriculture and especially Seaweed. India has become the first country in the world to pass legislations about Biostimulants and Sea6 Energy has become one of the first companies in the world to receive a patent for a Seaweed based biostimulant. And Sea6 Energy is raising a $5 million Series A round right now. On a previous episode, we spoke to Mr. Abhiram Seth from AquaAgri Processing about the future of Seaweed biostimulants and he said that this is just the start - there's a lot of room for growth in this industry.
Manufacturing & Warehousing as a Service (MaaS, WaaS) for D2C companies: D2C companies are good at Marketing and they try to outsource everything else. Warehousing is a growing and profitable part of this changing business model. Can you build a warehousing marketplace with a software layer on top that helps D2C companies find the best warehousing space for their products. Same thing can be done for manufacturing.
High End Locks

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Private communities are being built across India and globally as traditional communities built around religion, physical location and trade are being disrupted. New age digital first communities focused on hobbies and learning interests are gaining traction.

Leap.Club is one of those exciting private communities that is shaping the landscape of India. Only a year after its founding, Leap.Club has 1000 paying members and more than 8000 people in the waitlist.

But this is not a one-off phenomenon.

The Quorum, a Members Only Club in Gurgaon, has more than 700 members paying them Rs. 75000 per year. Makerpad, an online paid community of No-Code enthusiasts was recently acquired by Zapier for millions of dollars.

Private Communities Newsletter

Leap.Club

Ragini Das, Co-Founder Leap.club

Well, to dig deeper into the world of Private Communities, we have Ragini Das, Co-Founder of Leap Club, a Private network for Women.

An Army Kid, Ragini traveled the length and breadth of the country before starting her career at Trident. She then went on to work at Zomato and was part of the team that conceptualized Zomato Gold. Last year, she co-founded Leap Club and has had an interesting journey scaling Leap Club to 1000 Paying members and with 8000 more members in the waiting list.

We talk to her about the workings of Leap and the opportunities in this space.

Please follow us on Spotify and Rate us on Apple Podcasts.

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) have some fun discussing the helicopter rental industry in India and how it's shockingly profitable. We have some exciting business ideas that we discuss on this episode of business munchies.

Join our Spam Free WhatsApp Group. Timestamps:

(0:45) - The Indian Dream Fund for Bootstrapped/Profitable Businesses
(11:05) - The Economics of the Helicopter Rental Business in India
(26:25) - Wealth Management with Social Commerce
(37:00) - Opportunities in the Carbon Allowances Market

Topics we discussed:

The Indian Dream Fund for Bootstrapped/Profitable Businesses: Our primary goal at The Indian Dream is to promote entrepreneurship and as part of this Podcast and the community we're trying to build - we meet many people who're on the verge of starting their own business or have just started one and are looking for new ideas. Our thought is that once our audience is large enough (10x - 100x of the current size), we can raise a fund to help people start their own profit oriented businesses (instead of VC funded hyper growth machines). There is a big gap in the market for people who want to & can build profitable businesses but don't have the capital to do it & can't raise that capital for banks. We are envisioning a fund that would bridge this gap.
Blog for Crypto Accounting in India & How People can Invest Abroad
The Economics of the Helicopter Rental Business: Sahil spoke to a friend who works in the helicopter rental space and got all the numbers about the economics of this business. They cost anywhere from 2cr to 25cr to buy, maintenance is ~8,000 rs. per flight hour, fuel ~ 20,000 rs. per hour, take off/landing charges ~rs. 10 - 15,000 & pilot salaries are ~3,00,000 per month. Apparently, 150 hours of flying time per year is the break even point for helicopter rentals. There are some big players operating throughout the country with some having revenues of 10 crores per helicopter. Siddharth is optimistic that this industry will grow as India gets richer.
Wealth Management with Social Commerce: Wealth Management advisory is a broken industry with broken incentives. Wealth Advisors only recommend products that give themselves the highest commissions instead of products that would actually be best for the client. Is there a way to make this industry better through social commerce. Perhaps social marketing like meesho combined with content creators to ensure that investors are getting the right information.
Opportunities in the Carbon Allowances Market: Carbon Allowances in the EU alone is a €200 billion industry in Europe itself in 2019 and this grew substantially in 2020 - in 2021, the prices peaked at €40 euros - up from just €15 a few years ago. Tesla earned nearly $500 million from carbon allowances in 2020 - this was one of the major contributors to its profits in 2020. Along with this, California and the US as a whole are experimenting with the idea of setting up a carbon allowance system. This system is only going to grow in the near future as climate change becomes a bigger threat with a high possibility of a global carbon allowance system. Entrepreneurs in India have already started buying up forest land and other resources that count as carbon sinks so that they can sell these allowances to companies in Europe and other parts of the world.

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Jatin Modi, a serial entrepreneur whose latest venture FrogIdeas is one of the leading B2 B marketing companies in the world with world class clients such as Tata communications, SAP, HCL and many more.

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Jatin Modi

Our conversation with Jatin starts in his college hostel where he starts his first venture. after that he tries many ventures before starting MadeinHealth.com, one of India's first ecommerce companies which was eventually sold to healthkart. after playing a pivotal yebhi.com, another ecommerce player, Jatin was an early entrant into the space of digital marketing - so early that even his family couldn't believe his career choice. Now, Frog Ideas is India's first and only LinkedIn creative partner out of only 7 globally.

Two things to watch out for in this episode:

Firstly, Jatin’s vision of where B2B Marketing & Enterprise Sales are heading in the next few years – this is important for anyone who works in or is looking to get into a B2B enterprise.

Secondly, Jatin describes his experience while working at the venture funded Yebhi.com and the troubles that sometimes come with taking VC money.

Please follow us on the Podcast app you’re using and if you’re on Apple, please give us a rating and a review! We’ve also crossed 1000 members on our whatsapp groups – if you don’t want to miss out on regular updates, join the group through the link in the show notes.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

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Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) have some fun discussing how Siddharth made $1,000 in one week by trading NBA cards. We also have some interesting business ideas in this episode of business munchies.

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For the first time ever, we were not too lazy to provide timestamps.
Timestamps:
(0:00) - Introduction
(0:33) - Final Conclusion to Practo for Lawyers and CA's
(2:35) - Summary of two the ideas of the podcast
(3:32) - Sikkim Tourism centralised marketing agency for adventure sports + local franchises in villages.
(16:48) - What are Non Fungible Tokens and what are the future opportunities in this space?
(40:22) - Cyber crime insurance

Topics we discussed:

Final Conclusion to Practo for Lawyers and CA's: We got a lot emails from Lawyers and CA's about this - there are a lot of regulations that prevent lawyers and CA's from marketing themselves. This was the clarification we got about CA's from Anshutha, "A Chartered Accountant is prohibited to solicit clients through advertisement, circular, personal communication or interview or by any other means. However, you as a Chartered Accountant, can give a classified advertisement in the Journal/Newsletter of the Institute (ICAI)."
- Based on the last line of this clarification, Anshutha mentioned that a business could be built along with ICAI but I would not trust a regulatory body such as this. They could easily change a law and your business would be dead.
Sikkim Tourism centralised marketing agency for adventure sports + local franchises in villages: This is an idea that's really close to my heart - I absolutely love the outdoors and have spent a good deal of my life hiking, climbing, running, etc.. I was recently travelling through the mountain state of Sikkim and realised that a lot could be done to improve tourism in the state. Our specific idea was to have a centralised marketing agency and drives a digital marketing campaign. This marketing arm then flows the customers to outdoor focused franchises that are built in villages across the state.
NFT's or Non Fungible Tokens: Huge topic. Here are a few links:
- Non-fungible token Wikipedia
- Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT): Beginner's Guide
- Nifty Gateway
- Crypto Kitties
- Neer and the Patent Drop Newsletter
- We discuss a lot about NFT's in this part of the discussion - from digital displays for your new digital art to the eventuality of the Metaverse and the possibilities of the Metahuman Creator by Unreal Engine.
- IPL or the Pro Kabbadi League should totally start an NFT based trading card company as well. Dream 11 will definitely buy up a company that does something like this.
Cyber Crime Insurance: Cyber crime is spiking these days and the way its taking place now is ransomware. The ransoms for these ransomware attacks can be in the millions of dollars nowadays. Cyber crime insurance for small businesses or different niches can be a lucrative business in India if done well. Siddharth was not convinced by the idea of cyber crime insurance and building a business in insurance in general. Let's prove him wrong.
- A16Z Podcast Episode about Ransomware

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This week, we're covering Hi-Tech or New Age Farming. There are tons of niche farming opportunities that can be turned into massively profitable businesses. We wrote about them in our newsletter last week. We also released an episode with the largest seaweed producer in India.

In the episode today, we talk about large scale Mushroom farming. We are joined with Avdhesh Kumar, Co-Founder of CEO of Jiwa Foods, which produces over 100 tonnes of mushroom per month! And they're just getting started.

We speak about the challenges in setting up large scale, hi-tech farms, the distribution channel and the export potential. We also talk about the various opportunities that exist in the world of Hi-Tech Farming and Agri Supply Chain. Lastly, don't miss out on the heartwarming stories of the social impact of Mushroom farming in particular.

If you have any interested in setting up a business in the field of Agriculture, I highly recommend you listen to the episode.

If you like our content, please please Follow us on Spotify and Rate us on Apple. I have a bet with Sahil that I'm close to winning, and your support will make that happen.

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In this episode of Business Munchies, we explore some interesting business ideas and how they can be leveraged in order to build new businesses. We hope you like them!

Timestamps:

(0:00) - Introduction
(3:00) - Pre-School/Day Care Industry
(15:20) - Creator Economy
(20:42) - Invoice Discounting
(30:58) - Non-Alcoholic Beer

Join our WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/2LgDN2n

Pre-School/Day Care Industry: Urbanization is increasing, and nuclear families are on the rise. Combine this with the fact that more women are now part of the workforce, the need for Day care and pre-schools will be increasing at a 20%+ compounded growth rate in the next few years. This presents opportunities to build businesses in this Industry. We speak about the niche in this space of doing Corporate Day Care and also the opportunity in Tier 2 & Tier 3.
Creator Economy: We look at what's happening in this space and the two core problems that need to be solved as this industry matures. First, how do you ensure that the wealth created in this space is spread across many creators instead of just the top ones. Second, how can you improve distribution for new creators.
Invoice Discounting: We talk about TReDs and the government's intent to expand the scope of this platform to ensure all government agencies use the platform to enable their vendors to discount the invoices raised against these agencies. This will provide working capital relief for companies working with government agencies. We also talk about the opportunity to identify niche industries in this space and develop a strong expertise in that segment.
Non-Alcoholic Beer: There is growing concerns over the health impact of Alcohol and the hangovers that older people have to deal with. We discuss if there are opportunities to create non-alcoholic beverages and if there's a space in creating products that help with hangovers.

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High Tech/New Age Farming Newsletter

3 weeks back, the Indian Union Budget was released and within that was a special nugget of information that got us very curious. The government had approved a proposal to spend 640 Crores in setting up a large multi-purpose seaweed park in Tamil Nadu.

Now, our initial thought was, who is going to eat so much seaweed? Are we exporting to Japan and China, coz those are the countries that consume seaweeds in their food. We were horribly wrong. Turns out, Seaweed has tons of use cases and is used in the food, cosmetics, bio-stimulants. More on that in the episode.

The Global Seaweed production market is ~13 Billion Dollars and is expected to double in the next 5 years. Currently, China and Indonesia dominate 80% of this market. India is less than 1% of the global market, a stat that shows the room for growth. We aren't behind because we don't have the necessary resources to produce seaweed, we're behind because the necessary focus and resources haven't been allocated to this Industry. All that seems to be changing now.

In order to go deeper into this industry, we have Mr. Abhiram Seth, Managing Director at AcquAgri, India's largest producer of seaweed. He's had an interesting journey which started with him managing the export business at PepsiCo starting 1993. We got to learn in this episode that because Pepsi had entered the country pre-liberalization, they were required to export a certain amount of goods out of India. That resulted in them exploring the agriculture and contract farming route to export food products out of India. One such chance encounter with an international customer pointed them to the seaweed farming industry.

Over the years, Mr. Abhiram Seth, while heading the Agri and Export initiative at Pepsi developed this market along with the government's support. In 2008, when Mr. Abhiram was leaving, he asked the team at Pepsi if they were going to continue the seaweed business. Given that the export conditions had since been removed, Pepsi was planning to shut down the initiative. That's when Mr. Seth requested Pepsi to buy this business and Pepsi happily obliged by selling the business at Book Value to Mr. Seth.

In the episode today, we talk about Mr. Seth's journey, the uses of seaweeds, the value chain in this industry and where he does he think are the opportunities.

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Business Munchies is an exploration of business ideas and how they can be leveraged in order to build new businesses or scale up existing businesses. This week, we had an interesting line up of strange ideas, we hope you like them!

Timestamps:

(0:00) - Introduction
(0:18) - No Code
(9:47) - Shopify Growth
(20:18) - Virtual Exhibitions
(30:45) - Lawyer/CA/Agencies Directory
(37:09) - Building Niche Websites

Join our WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/2LgDN2n

Business Ideas Discussed on this Episode:

No Code: Inspired by our own newsletter about No Code - we discuss the opportunities that exist for entrepreneurs to build businesses using No Code tools like Webflow, Softr, Bubble & more. These include building ecommerce stores using Shopify, creating templates for Webflow, building affiliate websites to generate traffic, diverting your instagram followers to Tribe.so or Circle.so to create communities. Finally, tools like Zapier and other no code ERP software like Grid will help small manufacturing units digitise themselves.
Shopify Growth: Shopify grew 2x in 2020 - that means that the Total Addressable Market (TAM) for Shopify apps has also grown by 2x. There are still a lot of opportunities for people to build Micro SaaS apps in this field.
Virtual Exhibitions: Since the onset of the pandemic, Virtual Exhibitions have really taken off but we have never seen a good virtual exhibition platform. Opportunities in Virtual Exhibitions include niche virtual exhibition software (example: engineering exhibitions with CAD drawing capabilities)or creating phygital solutions that will allow a physical and digital mix once physical exhibitions reopen.
Lawyer/CA/Agencies Directory: Lawyers, CA's and other professionals are often recommended from people's network. But, just how Practo created a directory of Doctors, why can't the same thing be done for Lawyers and CA's? These professionals are a heterogeneous bunch - is there a way to build trust across a large range of lawyers? Perhaps private communities may be a way to solve this issue but only for a private bunch of people.
Building Niche Websites: We absolutely love niches on this show and this Tweet thread was a great example of that. John Speed built more than 100 websites for paint stores during the lockdown. He contacted more than 700 paint stores to get these 100 clients but he made significant revenues by focusing on a niche and really executing.

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We speak to Vineet Gupta, Managing Director at Jamboree Education and Founder & Trustee at Ashoka University, one of India's first University for the Liberal Arts. Vineet has had an interesting entrepreneurial journey - we spend the first half of the podcast going into detail about how he started his career and the second half focused on the passion for improving India's education which eventually led him to founding Ashoka University. We actually go into the specifics with Vineet on how he founded a world class University such as recruiting professors and marketing it - a unique experience that very few people can say they've done.

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Despite his heavy focus on education nowadays, Vineet's entrepreneurial journey did not start of this way. Vineet's first company, founded in the 90's and sold in the 2000's, manufactured Styrofoam. He spent 14 years manufacturing styrofoam and becoming one of the largest producers of this commodity, supplying these products to consumer durable giants who entered India in the 90's post liberalisation.

After selling the Styrofoam business, Vineet joined Jamboree Education along with his wife to help scale it up to one of the largest test prep institutions in India. And after that, he was one of the founders of Ashoka University. So many things done in one lifetime.

I decided to dig deeper into what I think were the factors that led to Vineet’s Success that I learnt from episode.

Creating Optionality as an Entrepreneur:When Vineet sold his styrofoam business, he was able to make that choice because his wife had already founded Jamboree and because his brother had also founded a Pharma company. Vineet could sell his styrofoam business and join either business to help them scale it up. We also speak to Vineet about the importance of always tinkering on the side - whether that means building new businesses or new products for your existing business. Vineet tried his hands at various businesses on the side (which failed) while scaling up his main businesses and he attributes this constant tinkering to an itch for personal growth and scale as an entrepreneur.
Service Businesses Need Strong Training & Processes to Scale Up:Jamboree Education was founded by Vineet's wife Akrita who was the face of the Jamboree brand. Akrita's skill as an educator drove customer's to Jamboree but if the brand were to scale up, they would need to find a way to consistently recruit teachers at Akrita's level or train new teachers on how they can teach like her. Jamboree doubled down on teacher training and Vineet attributes the sucess of the company to their ability to train brand new teachers to perform at the same level as Akrita. Service businesses always face the question of how they can replicate their founder's success - building solid processes and training programmes will allow new hires to perform at similar levels as the founder and keep the brand's quality consistent.
Talent attracts Talent: Service businesses, Universities are a service business, are completely dependant on the quality of people who work there. Training is one part of building a productive workforce but a new University doesn't have the time to train professors and PhD students. So what does a new University like Ashoka do? The first 10 - 15 professors hired by the University become critical to the long term success of such an institution and this is the same for any business. These first two dozen hires would attract other talent like themselves from their own network and also attract high quality students or customers. If you get your initial hires right, you can enter a virtuous circle and build a high level team that can help you scale. Talent attracts talent.

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In this week's Trends Newsletter, we covered the $10 Billion IoT Market. In our previous episode with Kush Mishra, we discussed the opportunities that exist in the overall IoT market.

We go further niche in this one. As regular listeners of TID would know, we love niches. In the episode today, we discuss the IoT Industry as it pertains to the automobile industry. Globally, we're now moving towards Smart Mobility, basically all automobiles connected to the Internet.

We have Sonia Bajaj with us today, AGM of Product Development for IoT & Smart Mobility division of Vodafone Idea. We talk to her about the state of this market, and the opportunities that exist in this space. If I were to be honest, I wasn't aware that the Smart Mobility Industry was as advanced as it is in India, we were pleasantly surprised by the foundational work at the infra level that has been done over the last few years. This industry will present tons of interesting opportunities to build profitable businesses - At the hardware, software and even services level. Listen on to learn more.

One last request, if you're reading this on Spotify, please consider following us. If you're on Apple Podcasts, consider leaving us a review. This will the Algorithm Gods help us reach more people and motivate us to keep at it :)

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We're going to dive deep into the trend of Internet of things which has seen a huge resurgence in the past few years. We have Kush Mishra with us – he’s the CTO and COO of an IoT company called Senra. Through our conversations with various people in this industry we've actually come across an opportunity for a young business leader to become the business head or CEO of an industrial iot based company - if you or someone you know is interested please send an email.

Email Us
Kush Mishra
Senra
IoT Newsletter

I know all of you guys are probably thinking that the Internet of things is more than 10 years old and these guys are stupid to call this trend. just hear me out. This market is already worth billions of dollars in India and is still growing at a rate of 20% per year across the world. there are so many use cases that have still not been solved for specially on the industrial side of things. the government is really incentivising the entire it boom with so many different programs including the digital India mission the smart city program and so many other things.

On top of that, before the trade dispute with China last year we were importing a large percentage of our IoT hardware from them. but now there is a large demand supply gap which needs to be filled by somebody.

Before we delve into the episode I just want to give all of you a basic idea about of what I mean by IoT. The Internet of things essentially means that you take a sensor and connect it to some object, either electronic or not, and then have that sensor send data back to the main server through some kind of communication like WiFi or 4G or whatever else. for example, I could buy a sensor for my running shoes. that sensor will pick up data about how much have run or how I am running and then send that data through Bluetooth to my phone which then sends it back to the central server. later on whenever I'm in the mood look at my running data I can just open the application on my phone and look at all the analytics about how badly I run.

IoT is broadly broken up into consumer IoT and industrial iot with industrial IoT being about 60% of the global market. consumer iot are generally your wearables like your smart watch or home automation. Industrial iot generally refers to B2b applications of iot such as adding a sensor to a machine or engine so that you know about the health of that machine. you can also use IoT To track your fleet of trucks for example.

We have an interesting discussion with kush about the entire state of IoT in India right now, the opportunities that exist in this space and this kind of skills that a young person can build right now to get ready for the IoT industry.

Before we get into the episode, if you are interested by what we're doing at the Indian dream and are looking for an internship - don't hesitate to send an email. we are looking for someone to help with social media and distribution. you would be an early hire and would be great way to learn how Companies are built. Send us an email now.

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Thanks for listening to another episode of The Indian Dream.

Join our WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/2LgDN2n

We're looking for social media interns! You can email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com

As always, Business Munchies is an exploration of business ideas and how they can be leveraged in order to build new businesses or scale up existing businesses. This week, we had an interesting line up of strange ideas, we hope you like them!

Timestamps:

(0:24) - Update on the Seasonal Fruit D2C Idea
(2:10) - Trend of Urban people moving to build High Tech Farms
(5:08) - Modernising Direct Selling Agents (DSA's) for Bank
(16:02) - Modernising Real Estate Agents
(24:45) -Branding
(34:26) -Zetwerk for Jewellery

Business Ideas Discussed on this Episode:

Update on the Seasonal Fruit D2C Idea: Sahil got an update from his friend who built this kind of business in the past. His friend said that, "Indian avocados are seasonal, I had not come up with products to sell in this offseason. There were chances of low quality produce. Last mile delivery was not as established as it is today." These problems can be easily overcome with today's infrastructure and somebody can build this business. The customer base will remain the same across different fruits and seasons.
Trend of Urban people moving to build High Tech Farms: Seaweed farming was discussed in the Union Budget and we dug deeper into it and found the largest Indian farmer and processor. We found the 3rd largest Indian farmer of Mushrooms as well. High tech farming of new age crops like Mushroom & Seaweeds are increasing across the country in addition to the latest techniques such as hydroponics. We'll explore all these ideas in detail in future trends episodes.
Modernising Direct Selling Agents (DSA's) for Banks: Siddharth has previous work experience in B2B lending and during this time he saw how far behind the technological curve Banks and NBFC's really are. DSA's, who sell unsecured loans for banks, are a market of more than 1000 crores across India, get commissions of about 3-3.5% on the loan size but operate their entire business on paper without any digitisation. There is space for a newcomer to digitise the customer relationships (think policy bazaar but for B2B lending) and streamline the loan disbursement process to make it much simpler.
Modernising Real Estate Agents: We were inspired by this tweet which said that "Real Estate Agent has to be, on average, the laziest group of professionals. I guess that's why the few that are highly-competent hustlers clean up." This Tweet was referring to American Real Estate agents but we feel like it applies to Indian agents as well. This is a huge market and it is ripe for disruption in the way it operates, right from CRM softwares for Real Estate Agents (all of them use whatsapp right now) to a new way to sell houses online.
Branding: Branding is more important than ever in today's world because it is so simple to build businesses these days. However, there is still a big demand supply gap between good branding/digital marketing agencies and what is actually needed in the market. We discuss the various branding related businesses that you can build including an automated product photography software which allows you to upload a green screen photo of your product and then automatically puts that product in more appealing settings and backgrounds.
Zetwerk for Jewellery: Inspired by a Tweet by Siddharth

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We hit 50 Episodes last week! (We didn't even realize!). Consider this as the 50th Episode Special: Our take on The 2021 Union Budget.

At The Indian Dream, our goal is create a community of knowledge seeking founders who are looking to build Profitable Businesses. A big part of building these businesses is being aware of the direction the government is focusing on. It always helps to be building in industries that the government is focusing on. Consider the example of Baddi and the Pharma boom that happened there. By understanding the governments future plans and intentions, you can start executing for the future and get help from Tailwinds. That's the lens we used to make sense of the Union Budget. We host Sarthak Ahuja (ISB Alumni, CA, CS and more!) on the Podcast to make sense of the budget.

Our focus is Businesses & Startups, but we covered other sections such as Infrastructure as it has significant downstream impacts.

Sarthak's Website
Sarthak's Email

This by no means is a complete in-depth review of the Budget, we'll be honest, it's a lot of information to put in 40 minutes, but the intent is to show that there is merit in trying to go deeper and understanding the budget to spot upcoming opportunities in sectors that might be relevant to you. We've covered the ones that have the most impact and some extremely unique ones too. Goa's having a party and Tamil Nadu is becoming a Sushi State. Have I stopped making sense? Go checkout the podcast, you'll know what I'm talking about.

This was our first topical podcast, do tell us what we could've done better :) Email us here.

P.P.S: We're thinking of building our team and are looking for interns. Checkout our podcasts and more about us here. If you vibe with what we're trying to do (even we're yet to figure it out, you'll be that early!), we are looking for some full-time/part-time interns. We are looking to put some fuel to The Indian Dream and see where this goes. Our biggest weak point is the Social Media Distribution. We create way more than we efficiently distribute. Come help us fix this?

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Thanks for listening to another episode of The Indian Dream.

Join our WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/2LgDN2n

Timestamps:

(0:00) - Introduction
(2:06) - AI Powered Writing Tools
(9:35) - Productizing Your Services
(15:30) - Luxury Direct to Consumer Fruit Brand
(23:45) - STEM Toys for Parents & Kids
(25:40) - Content Website Business

Business Ideas Discussed on this Episode:1) AI Powered Writing Tools - there are many websites already doing this like Copy.ai & Nichness and many other services. However, this is a very new field and we believe that there are still a lot of use cases for which you can build companies. For example, can you build content writing for different geographies or different industrial niches.

2) Productizing Your Services - are you already selling a service like graphic design or coding or some other kind of consulting service? Can you convert this service into a product of some kind? For example, graphic designers can make different designs and sell t-shirts/mugs/posters, etc.. A personal finance coach could make a paid online or in person course that they then sell as a product.

3) Luxury Direct to Consumer Fruit Brand - Build a luxury brand that gets you the freshest fruit from different corners of the country only when they are the ripest. This idea would require you to build the supply chains very slowly because agri products have very difficult supply chains. Maybe you can start with one product like fresh Apricots or Mangoes and build up a customer base who you can then sell the next fruit when it is in season.

4) STEM Toys for Parents & Kids - Sell STEM based toys for kids to learn more about science and technology.

5) Content Website Business - This is for people who at least understand the basics for SEO. Use tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest or any other keyword research tools and figure out high frequency, low search difficulty keywords where you can create significant content. For example, all the keywords associated with Shopify are very high volume but have significantly lower search difficulty.

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Today's show is a result of a phone call that I got after one of our listeners heard our Business Munchies episode. As we got talking, I realised his line of work is extremely interesting and operates in a niche. As our regular listeners might know, we love NICHE businesses. As they say, Niches build Riches.

Around 2009-10, Rishabh & Pranav wanted to start an Electronics Accessories brand and upon more research, they realized it was difficult to compete with existing brands without a solid marketing budget. That's when they came across the idea of Corporate Brand Licensing. Under this, an existing brand licenses its name to other companies that are creating products that can serve as an extension to the brand's current products. For example, JCB makes construction and mining equipments. A natural extension to it would be Hand and Power Tools. Now, JCB could invest capital, do product development for this new line of products, OR it could tie up with an existing manufacturer of power tools and lend them the JCB Brand by doing a brand licensing agreement. Under this agreement, JCB gets certain % of the revenues. This is a win-win for both the partiers as JCB didn't have to invest and do product development and the manufacturer builds credibility by using the JCB Name.

This model is extremely popular in the western markets and is estimated to be a market of 280 Billion Dollars. This is primarily dominated by Entertainment and Films, Fashion and Corporate brands.

Rishabh and Pranav saw the opportunity back in 2011 and co-founded LicenseWorks.They pivoted from their orginal idea and started An agency that helped brands match with manufacturers in India. Clients of Licenseworks were able to generate $70 million in revenue in 2019.

In our show today, we host Rishabh and talk to him about the Brand Licensing Market and the workings of it. If you're manufacturing products out of India, you HAVE to listen to this to understand the opportunity that it presents. They've had multiple success stories in India where companies were able to double the turnover in a couple of years.

In fact, LicenseWorks is now one of the Top 25 Global Licensing Agencies (on the basis the revenue generated for its clients), and the only agency from India among the top 25 global agencies.

LicenseWorks represents a wide range of International brands including leading Corporate trademarks, Electronics, Fashion and Sports brands such as Stanley Black & Decker, JCB, Schneider, Kodak, Thomson, Blaupunkt, Carrera Jeans, Karl Lagerfeld, HEAD Sports, Harvard, Santa Barbara Polo Club etc.

At the same time, several Indian companies also approach LicenseWorks with specific brand requirements. In such cases, LicenseWorks team works with them and helps them identify suitable brand licensing opportunities relevant to their categories, which could help grow their business.

Rishabh's email address: rishabh@licenseworks.co

Before we jump on to the episode, I'd like to invite applications for Internships at The Indian Dream. We have exciting plans for the year ahead and are now looking to build a team of interns who are interested in growing a business media company. We're looking for interns to manage our Social Media, community and content production. All of these are going to be paid internships. We don't care where you studied at or what your degree is, as long as you're interested in learning more about building profitable businesses in India and are open to learning new things. So, if you're interested, drop us an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com or text us from the link in the show notes.

With that, let's jump into the episode and learn more about the world of brand licensing.

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Thanks for listening to another episode of The Indian Dream.

Join our WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/2LgDN2n

Timestamps:

(0:00) - Introduction
(1:17) - Clout Kitchens
(5:50) - Virtual influencers
(10:25) - High End Ice
(14:45) - Cohort Based Learning
(24:10) - Transparent Pricing with Car insurance
(26:51) - Jewellery Insurance
(30:41) - Legal Micro SaaS

Clout Kitchens: Mr. Beast Burgers launched in 300 locations across the US in a single day. Why can't the same thing be done in India? Create a brand of Biryani around SRK or Salman Khan and give them equity. HRX and Wrogn have already done this with apparel and it's easier than ever to do this with food.
Virtual influencers: Lil Miquela is not a real person but this virtual persona brings in $12 million in revenue every year. There's no one doing this on a large scale in India. You can also do this for different niches: music, sports, fashion, etc. and use build economies of scale in design/animation, cross promotion, etc.
High End Ice: Where does the ice in your fancy whiskey come from? You have no idea, nor do I. I think there's a play to build a high end ice brand bringing assurance of high quality ice to people through a consumer campaign on social media. The main means of distribution would be bars and restaurants. In general, consolidating a disaggregated market can be a large potential business.
Cohort Based Learning
Transparent Pricing with Car insurance: MetroMile and the Good Better Best Newsletter
Jewellery Insurance
Legal Micro SaaS - A micro-SaaS business that helps take away the hassle of super basic and standardised legal documents such as NDA's, Lease Agreements, etc. so that you can just focus on the important parts of running your business. Example: The Legal Capsule

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I'm really excited for this episode where we interview Vidur Gupta From stranger and sons – a brand of craft gin. This episode is a continuation of our deep dive into the Trend of craft alcohol in India. You should also listen to our previous episode with Brew Whale about the craft beer scene in India.

Craft Alcohol Newsletter
Brew Whale Episode

I'm not gonna lie, Gin and Tonic has recently become my favourite drink after beer. I was first introduced to Stranger and Sons as a birthday gift and I fell in love with it. BUT I did not believe my friend when they told me it was an Indian brand. The packaging was so modern, the taste was so good and I just didn’t think that Indian brands were making such high quality spirits – especially gin.

Stranger & Sons has broken that mould though. In this episode, we have a fascinating discussion with Vidur on how they thought about building a gin brand, their entire process of getting the precise flavour profile they wanted and how they market the brand. We even speak about nerdy stuff like alcohol licenses, working capital and distribution for those of you who want to know more about the business side of building an alcohol brand in India.

If you’re interested in building a new business, you should read our latest newsletter – 21 Awesome Business Ideas for 2021 – the link is in the show notes.

We hope you enjoy our discussion with Vidur!

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Welcome to another episode of Business Munchies at The Indian Dream. We explore different business ideas on this segment of our podcast.

We had a friend of the show with us on this episode: Animish Gadve from The Wandering Band, an indie video game publisher. Having worked with Zynga games & EA in the past - Animish was able to provide us with a lot of insights into how the gaming industry is shaping up in India and what opportunities still exist for people looking to enter.

Animish also gave us two Promo Codes for his game, Airborne Kingdom, on the Epic Game Store. You can get it for Free!

Don't miss out! We only have two Promo Codes and whoever uses it first, gets the game for free:

7Z824-C38ZH-LQCPM-EH6LT
MSSJB-72GU8-R5GV3-BB3HX

Business Ideas Discussed on this Episode:1) The Toy Industry in India (1:50)
2) The Gaming Industry in India (13:41)
3) WhatsApp Privacy changes & its implications for Commerce & Micro-SaaS (23:24)
4) The model of an NGO running a business (Wikipedia, Bosch, Signal, etc.) (29:00)

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Our guest today is an ex- Merchant Navy Officer who, through an interesting sequence of events, became an Insurance Executive and eventually an Entrepreneur. He currently runs a Global Products & Services business in the Insurance Domain with a team 1900 people spread across 9 countries. This journey began little over 7 years ago when Arun Balakrishnan was heading the Berkshire Hathway's Indian Insurance Business. When Berkshire decided to wind up the India business, Arun spotted an interesting opportunity that would eventually lead to his company, Xceedance. And he's used the bootstrapped entrepreneur playbook of starting with services and then building products very effectively.

Arun's had an interesting journey, and it fits perfectly with the saying, you can only make sense of your life when you look backwards. He's often found himself in situations that might not have worked out in that moment, but it has all led up to him building a global business that started out of India. It all started post his MBA from IIM ahmedabad, where him and a friend of his decided to build internet businesses. Due to bad timing in the fundraising market, they couldn't get the necessary resources required to scale up their venture. The ideas they worked on would even turn into billion dollar ideas eventually, albeit executed by different people in a more favorable market.

You'll often hear him say, he was lucky, and while there is some truth to that, he undermines the action he took and the decisions he made to get where he is today. Join me in this conversation as we talk more about his Internet business days, building Berkshire's Insurance business in India, and how he has been able to scale up Xceedance over the last few years. We talk what it takes to build a global business starting out of India, how they've been able to scale the hiring and org culture to build a team of 1900 people across the globe.

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Welcome to the 5th episode of Business Munchies. This will now be a regular segment of the show with Sahil and I hosting the show with other guests (friends of the show).

If you're not familiar with our Business Munchies episodes, I'd urge you to start with the first one 4 weeks ago. We continue a few discussions from the previous episodes.

For our episode today, we discuss the following topics:
1) Update on the E-Com business in US that we are trying to acquire (3:11)
2) Using a portfolio of entrepreneurial bets to build wealth (4.14)
3) IoT and Wearables Manufacturing in India (12:02)
4) Fire Safety Equipment (18:00)
5) Competing with Amazon in the Retail Market (24:00)

If you're keen on coming on the show as a friend of the show, would love to talk to you and see if we can make something happen. Love geeking out with people on different trends, ideas and industries. Text us here

With all that said, Execution > Idea :)

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In this episode, we talk to two brothers about their journey of setting up and selling a packaging manufacturing business in 10 years. We discuss Market Research, Positioning, and
Customer Centricity as it pertains to a Manufacturing Business. This episode is relevant for folks who have interest in Packaging as a product and/or run manufacturing businesses. For others, check out last week's Business Munchies Episode :)

Creative Stylopack Acquired by Essel Pro Pack - News Article

Reachout to us here if you're listening to us from PodLP.

Detailed Synopsis:
We have a story of two brothers who scaled a packaging manufacturing business to close to ~100 Cr in Revenue in 8 years by focusing on niches. Bhavik, and Darshan started out their journey by setting up Creative Stylopack - a corrugated box manufacturing plant - as an extension to their family business in 2008-09. However, early on, they realized the importance of being ahead of the competition in terms of technology as well identifying and serving the niches. Their market research and the curiousity to find new niche products led them to a trade show in Germany which eventually led them to set up a Tube Manufacturing unit. These are tubes that are used for medicines as well as personal care products. They took a contrarian bet and invested in the significantly more expensive european machinery rather than the chinese machinery. This bet would prove to be pivotal in them finding marquee clients and scaling the business.

The reason I wanted to speak to them is because one of our listeners shared the news of Creative Stylopack being acquired by a publicly listed Packaging Manufacturer called EPL. It was great to see M&A activity in the SME Manufacturing space and we immediately reached out to Bhavik and Darshan to talk about their journey.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

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Happy New Year Y'all! Thank you for supporting us and allowing us the room to experiment with different content styles around profitable businesses in India.

Business Munchies (Yet to finalize the name) is now going to become a more formal part of the content that we create. New Business Ideas, across industries depending on the emerging trends. The idea is to look at the business ideas as an optimist and see how to make it work. Most of our ideas will probably be bad, but we are sharing a point of view on what the future could look like if these businesses work out. And it's fun developing this point of view and finding some interesting things along the way.

Sahil and I are on a journey to figure out how to build profitable businesses in today's business health and geo-political environment. We are open-sourcing our learning journey through this series. We are really excited for 2021, and while 2020 has been a tough year for all of us, we're still grateful to have to to the opportunity to build The Indian Dream.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

And drop us a text us here to tell us what you think about the content - we'd love to talk to you and get to know your expectations better. We're still figuring out how to build The Indian Dream and all kinds of discussion and feedback goes a long way to help us think through this. So we'd love to talk :)

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Update on E-Com Acquisition (0:20)
2) Brand Licensing for SMEs (1:34)
2) High Margin Businesses (9:00)
3) IPL Trading Cards (29:55)
4) India's Mini So? (39:00)

Happy New Year!

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This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

Business Munchies is our attempt to explore different business ideas while discussing the underling trends that make these ideas interesting and potential go to market strategies. This is by no means supposed to be a deep dive on each business idea as these haven't been discussed earlier.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Personal Leverage (Nate's Article) (1:02)
2) Our Journey of evaluating an acquisition of an online business (6:57)
2) Online First Sweets/ Mithai Brand (8:55)
3) E Sports (18:18)
4) Make in India Marketplaces (28:24)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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In this episode we speak to Pranav Mehra, Co-Founder of Brew Whale – a craft beer brewing company based out of Bombay.

Craft Alcohol Newsletter
Pranav Mehra
Brew Whale Website
Join the WhatsApp Group

I'm a big fan of good beer and could not resist doing a few episodes about the changing environment in the beer and alcohol industry in India. Craft beer has become a huge industry in the US in Europe - when you go to grocery store there you will see a number of bears from small breweries. With the advent of microbreweries in Maharashtra in the early 2010’s, with Doolaly at the forefront of this change, the entire beer industry in India has seen a radical shift. Young people like me have many more options drink a casual beer then just Kingfisher. However the biggest hurdle holding back the shift in the alcohol industry in India is regulation. Government regulations hold back this industry at every turn whether it is manufacturing, distribution or marketing.

In this episode with Pranav, we explore the how he first conceptualize the idea of building a beer brand in such a tightly regulated market, how he executed it and what he thinks is the future for this market. There were a few things that really shocked me through this conversation - number one, you have to build your entire brewery before you can apply for manufacturing license. Building the brewery is not cheap it can be as much as 1 crore. Number 2, Distribution is also a big hurdle where you have to apply for license for every restaurant with whom you want to partner.

Personally I think regulations are both good and bad for the entrepreneurs that work in that industry. They’re bad because they make your everyday life so much harder. however it's good because it dissuades people like me from even thinking of entering tightly regulated business like this. however the laws are changing and the winds are shifting - the alcohol space in India is going to look very different 10 years from now.

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This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

At The Indian Dream we have a dozen ideas that we discuss everyday but are not able to share with our listeners. This episode is an experiment that we've been planning for months. The idea really took off a few weeks ago when Sahil and Siddharth met up with Saransh in Goa. We started bouncing ideas off each other and realised that it would be great to record this and share with our listeners.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Means of Wealth Creation (0:48)
2) Our Journey of evaluating an acquisition of an online business (5:10)
2) Mushroom Farming & Processing (12:02)
3) Zoom and Notion Apps (18:35)
4) Zero Fee Marketplaces (25:00)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Earn in Dollars, spend in Rupees. That's one way to build a bootstrapped, profitable business. Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon Program) is a great way to target the global consumer. We talk to Rishiraj about building his Amazon FBA business, the playbook and what is he planning next.

Listener Survey Link
Republic of Sellers

The global e-com marketplaces coupled with digital marketing reach have enabled Indian businesses to target their products to the global customer base. It presents a great opportunity for people to build profitable businesses. Manufacturers can look at selling their products in various countries via platforms like Amazon, Etsy, Alibaba. Individuals who can figure out market gaps can contract manufacture these products and sell to the global markets.

And our guest today has been on the journey to figure exactly this out. Rishiraj started his entrepreneurial journey back when he was in his college, BITS Dubai. Rishiraj started a drop-shipping business leveraging his college friend's manufacturing business in Indore. They had multiple SKUs in the Bedding category with products like bedsheets, bedskirts, bed covers etc. After tinkering with Amazon listings and learning about how it works, in 6-7 months he was able to figure out how to make Rs. 50k in profits every month without spending too much time on the operations of it. Eventually, as competition grew and sellers started hijacking the listing, a common Amazon seller issue, Rishiraj decided to focus on his Product Management career and close the listings. He would go on to work as a PM at startups like 1Mg, Online Tyari for a couple of years. One fine day, on his vacation back home, he had the realisation that the money he was making compared to the effort he put in was actually lesser compared to his dropshipping business. And if he put similar kind of effort on the ecommerce side, maybe he'd fetch returns. And he decided to take the plunge once again and focus on this full-time.

We talk to Rish about building an Amazon FBA business, the learnings, the challenges and the profits that he made along the way. He also runs a community called Republic of Sellers where he posts content about how to build an Amazon FBA business.We discuss the playbook for Amazon FBA businesses.

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In today's episode we have Himanshu Arora from Social Panga again bringing us a D2C Marketing Playbook. We promised in our last episode with Himanshu that we would go deep into the digital marketing aspects of Direct to Consumer (D2C) brands and that's exactly what we do today.

D2C Playbook Newsletter
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In this episode we discuss various parts of Direct to Consumer (D2C) digital marketing that are being used by all the biggest modern brands such as Mama Earth, Yoga Bar and others. We start by talking about the foundations of marketing and brand building for online for brands and how consumer loyalty is the key to long term success. One of the themes that we've been speaking about for several episodes is about the importance of community building for any modern brand - this is the essence of building customer loyalty.

With Himanshu we also go deeper into the metrics that define success for performance marketing performance marketing, how we can think about organising our influencer marketing campaigns and several other topics. if you are thinking of building, or already have, a DTC brand then you should not miss this episode.

If you’re interested in D2C, don’t forget to read our newsletter which has all the information and tips on how to build your own D2C brand. The link will be in the show notes.

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This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following ideas in the episode:
1) Leasing/Buying Vacation Homes and renting them out on AirBnB, Saffron Stays, etc. (0:50)
2) Co-working 2.0 for remote workers combining long stay rentals along with a connected co-working space. (7:32)
3) Turning online communities into physical communities in vacation hotspots or Tier 2 cities. (10:32)
4) Community Building for brands on websites just as Tribe.so (12:38)
5) Software products for Sport Teams for Scout Management and recognition of young talent. (27:49)
6) Software for Fund Managers to rank companies based on Environmental, Social or Governance metrics. (32:05)
7) Online Marketplace for Buying/Selling Small Online Businesses - Micro Acquire (32:56)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com

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Listener Survey Link
Email us at theindiandream20@gmail.com

Thank you for supporting us on our journey of
building The Indian Dream Project.

This episode is just Sahil and Sid talking about Why started The Indian Dream, the journey so far and the plans for our future.

We're focused on creating content around Profitable Entrepreneurship in India.

We look at the past to create playbooks of building successful businesses through our Founder Journeys episode.

We look at the future to identify opportunities to build profitable businesses through our Trends Newsletters & Podcast Episodes.

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In the episode today, we have Navjor Kaur, Vice President at a Venture Capital firm that provides growth capital to early stage consumer brands. We go through the playbook of building a D2C Brand covering functions such as Marketing, Logistics, Manufacturing, Hiring.

D2C Newsletter

Direct to Consumer Business Model: In this business model you cut out all the middlemen that exist in the traditional supply chain - your wholesaler & retailer primarily. You leverage the internet and build your presence online to directly sell to the consumer. You save up on the margin that would've to be distributed across the supply chain and can utilize that to build your brand and generate traffic on your website.

Given the role, Navjot ends up advising and evaluating a lot of D2C companies. She has looked at D2C companies across different phases of growth and has provided us with a playbook of what it takes to build a D2C brand. We look at how to lay down the fundamentals for a D2C business and talk about functions such as marketing, logistics, manufacturing, hiring to really understand the nuances in relation to building a D2C brand. If you run a D2C or have aspirations to build one, this is a must listen for you.

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We have Dhimant Parekh on the show to talk about building an Audience First D2C Brand with The Better Home. In the episode today, We discuss the journey of building TBI, how they were able to leverage the community to build out their D2C business and what it's like to work with your significant other as a co-founder. Let's jump in.

Links:
The Better India Website
The Better Home Products
Audience First Products Newsletter

For our next edition of Trends, we are covering a new way of building consumer brands: by going Direct to consumer or often referred to as D2C.

Direct to Consumer is a business model wherein you cut out all the middlemen that exist in the traditional supply chain - your wholesaler & retailer primarily. You leverage the internet and build your presence online to directly sell to the consumer. You save up on the margin that would've to be distributed across the supply chain and can utilize that to build your brand and generate traffic on your website.

Pure D2C is hard to find in India. Most D2C brands leverage online marketplaces to reach their customers because building traffic for your own website can be extremely challenging. You need to pour in a lot of marketing dollars to make that happen and that often eats up all the margins you saved by going Direct to Consumer and ruins the unit economics.

Which is where the guest we have today on the podcast has an interesting point of view to share when it comes to building their D2C brand. We have Dhimant Parekh, Co-founder of The Better India and the better home. The better India is a content production house that focuses on positive happy stories. They feature stories on topics such as Agriculture, Education, Health, Environment from across the country. And the concept of Positive Journalism is very fascinatng for me personally because I actively avoid reading newspapers and following current affairs. I feel like most of it so negative that it hurts you more than it helps you. That's where something like TBI has been a go-to source for me to read feel good stories from the across the country.

Dhimant and Anuradha, co-founders of TBI are also married to each other. TBI started out as a Blog in 2008. In 2011, Anuradha quit her job to focus on this full-time and in 2013, Dhimant followed suit. They have had an interesting journey of building out the content business focused on Positive journalism and are present across different social media channels along with their own website. Cumulatively, they clock-in close 50 million views in a month for the content they produce.

Now, you must be thinking, how is this a D2C play. Well, enter The Better Home, the D2C arm of TBI. Over the years, TBI has been able to build a community of like-minded individuals. This community cares about the good that's happening in society. The community also believes in sustainability and that's where Dhimant and Anuradha got the idea for The Better Home.

The Better Home sells Eco-Friendly Home Cleaner subscription service. It has 4 products, Dishwashing liquid, toilet cleaner, laundry cleaner and floor cleaner. I'm not going to kill the suspense of how they came up with this idea, but I do want to share how this D2C line has scaled. So in 4 months of starting post the lockdown, The better home products achieved a monthly revenue of Rs. 1 Crore in 4 months! Now that's some quick scaling up. A big reason for this was the community that they had built over the years. A classic case study of building an audience first and then subsequently building a product or service to meet the need of the audience, in this case, it was D2C Home Cleaner product line.

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In this episode we have Himanshu Arora from Social Panga which is a 360 degree Digital Marketing Agency. The pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of traditional brands and has led to the growth of many D2C brands. All of us are now our own tiny digital marketing agencies, trying to build either our company or personal brands in the new digital world – just like us with this podcast.

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Himanshu Arora LinkedIn
Social Panga Website

In this context, understanding the functioning of a digital marketing agency and how social panga was scaled up was an enlightening discussion. In the last 10 years, starting a digital marketing agency has almost become a cliché. However, Himanshu and his Co founder Gaurav, focused on hiring and training the best people to differentiate themselves. The team is the essence of any successful service based industry and thus we talk to Himanshu in detail about his hiring practices and how he builds a culture of excellence. All of this focus on hiring and cultural fitment has led to Social Panga scale up extraordinarily fast in the 6 years since their founding led by customer satisfaction and thus strong referrals.

In this episode, we scratch the surface of digital marketing and we're going to go deeper into digital marketing for Direct to Consumer brands in a future episode with Himanshu. Join our whatsapp group to know more about everything we’re doing.

Music by Ben Sound

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Altigreen is an electric vehicle manufacturer that was started in 2011 with a retrofit product to convert light commercial vehicles to hybrid. Today, they sell their own 2,3, & 4 Wheel Electric Vehicles. We talk about this journey and the kind of opportunities (a TON!) that exist in the EV space.

Altigreen's Website
Dr. Amitabh Saran's Linkedin

Trends #6: Electric Vehicle Newsletter

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We also go through the ups and downs that the business has gone through in the last 30 years and how it weathered the different storms to build a business that's thriving today.

Tally's Website
Tally's Twitter
The Indian Dream WhatsApp Group

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Happy Diwali to all our listeners! We hope you have a great Diwali Weekend and a new year filled with Joy. We've had great fun doing this podcast and newsletter over the past few months and hope you've had as much fun listening to it. We have some exciting episodes lined up for you - can't wait to share it!

We'd love to hear from you - send us an email at theindiandream20@gmail.com

Music: www.bensound.com

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Today's episode is part of a series about New Mobility which includes self driving cars, car sharing , Internet connected cars and obviously the always talked about Electric Vehicles.

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Sachin's LinkedIn
Sachin's Newsletter Car Talk
Car Talk Issue where Sachin talks about a new form of Car Ownership - Highly recommended reading.

When you think about the future of cars what's the first company that comes to mind? Tesla right? it was the same thought process for us and thus when we started researching the topic we reached out to Sachin Seth from Tesla. Sachin is the Finance manager for model S and model x, the finance manager for the new factory in China and much much more at Tesla. Sachin has an MBA from the Wharton School of Management and a PhD in electrical engineering - giving him insights into both the financial and product side of the new mobility revolution.

You can take this episode as a primer for understanding new mobility. We discuss the state of technology of the various parts of new mobility, and the opportunities that lie within the space both in India and abroad. Sachin is able to understand the direction of the industry in the US and articulate how it will eventually affect India as well. we are still far behind Western countries and China on adoption and development off new mobility technology but we can look at these other markets as a guide for the possible direction of Indian electric vehicles and other technology. obviously India is a unique market and our own dynamics will dictate its evolution - for example electric adoption in India is most likely going to be led by 2 and 3 Wheelers where Bajaj may face a big challenge to its dominance.

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