It’s never easy to see a dream die, but it’s even harder to write a thoughtful blogpost about why it did. PepperTap, hours after announcing that it was shutting down its operations late last night, has come up with a brutally honest post detailing its journey and the reason why they chose to exit the grocery delivery business.
The entrepreneurial journey written by Yogesh Agarwal, Co-Founder, CareOnGo, India’s first chain of co-branded pharmacy stores.
I am not even remotely involved with the Indian startup ecosystem. But unfortunately, I read a lot and try to make sense of it in equal measures. And from whatever I have been reading and observing regarding the Indian startup story, especially in the last 12 months, I feel something is not right. Let me cut to the chase right away. Here’s what I think:
We’re past that phase where we needed to talk about what women bring to the table because if you don’t understand this by now, your company is doomed. This is about understanding that our work culture is masculine by default (since women entered workforce less than just a century ago) and working towards making it gender neutral.
I’d spent the last few weeks desperately trying to save my startup and failed. My co-founder had told me point blank that he had no faith in my ability to be the CEO of the company. I’d studied at the best engineering college in the country, worked at the best management consulting firm in the world. I took risks and tried to build a real business that built real technologies to help real factory. I even had paying customers. And still, I’d failed.
As I sit down to write this blog entry on why our offline model failed, a realization sets in. All the hundreds of conversations with mentors, friends, colleagues and investors across the globe over the last three years discussing this business is now seeing a closure.
The inspiration to start up came when friends and family who used matrimonial sites to seek matrimonial alliances, often cribbed about fakes and frauds on those sites. While matrimony is quite an important life decision, you often get bumped into a lot of fakes. Having seen this happen with close family and friends, I thought that no matrimonial site was looking at authenticating profiles. This led me to build Truejodi – a reliable place to find a 100% verified match.
Spinny’s story started from a conversation over coffee. Ramanshu and I were casually remarking on how many of our friends had bought used cars and how the experience has always been a very complex process.
Inspiring story of a failed up startup in India and the invaluable learnings from it, as shared by the co-founder, who left a job at Google to start up.