As they say in the U.S., this isn’t my first rodeo as a co-founder. But how many people can say they’ve started a second startup with the same founding partner after failing at the first one? Well, I can!
My journey as a co-founder began back in college with the same partner I have today—Rishi Singhal, my senior at the time. We were convinced we had struck gold with our first startup idea: Groctaurant (a blend of "grocery" and "restaurant"). It was a home-delivered recipe kit that provided all the ingredients in exact quantities based on the recipe, eliminating waste and the need to buy more than necessary. For example, if a dish required 50 ml of oil, you wouldn’t have to purchase an entire 500 ml bottle. Instead, our kit would include precisely 50 ml, along with all the other pre-measured ingredients needed to prepare the dish.
We poured weeks and countless nights into this project, meticulously crafting recipe kits (our Shahi Paneer kit alone had 27 ingredients!). We even reached out to suppliers in China, exploring automation processes and the machinery required to scale. But reality hit us hard and fast. We realized this was an incredibly operations-heavy business, with huge logistical complexities and was highly prone to errors. Eventually, I decided to step away and pursue my own venture. Unfortunately, demonetization struck, and I had to face a bitter truth - getting a job was the more practical way forward.
Around that time, I reconnected with Divir Tiwari, a fellow IIT Dhanbad alum and the current CEO of FieldAssist. Within just 2.5 weeks of joining, Divir threw me into the deep end of the pool and said, "Swim!" 😄
Okay, maybe not literally, but he did send me straight to Kerala to meet customers, something I had zero experience in. They didn’t speak Hindi, and my English was just about passable. But despite the language barrier, I quickly realized how much I enjoyed these conversations. Understanding how brands operate, the challenges they struggle with, and the features they desperately needed (but we didn’t yet have), and finding jugaad solutions to solve those problems (till we built a feature for it) was fascinating!
Spending time in the market, meeting distributors, retailers, and even shadowing salesmen gave me a deep, first-hand understanding of how FMCG distribution really works in India. And I loved every bit of that journey.
The time when I became a Serial Entrepreneur (if you count 2 attempts as ‘Serial’)
COVID struck in 2020, and then we were forced to rethink the ways we could continue to help our customers. At that time, I had been building an app on my own for a few months, an app for retailers that would help shrink the distance between brands and retail shelves. I discussed it with Divir, and also presented my concept to some of the other functional heads. They liked it because its aim was to make the life of retailers easy. So we met hundreds of retailers and even managed to implement the app in several places, But the biggest roadblock we faced was the sheer resistance to adopting any kind of sales tech. Back in 2017-18, convincing retailers, or even sales officers to use an app was an uphill battle. Eventually, the idea had to take a backseat.
Meanwhile, in my downtime I continued catching up with Rishi, discussing market challenges, sharing unique industry insights, and bouncing ideas off him. Somewhere along the way, without even realizing it, we started piecing together a blueprint for a product. What began as casual conversations slowly took shape into something real, something exciting. And when I finally saw its potential, I knew this wasn’t just another venture. It was an opportunity to achieve one of my biggest life goals: creating massive impact while building generational wealth.
That day, I put on co-founder boots again and decided to badho (move forward) as their Business Head for Badho, responsible for on-ground ops and execution for our brand partners.
But there was one problem.
I was back in the deep end of the pool!
When I joined, the retailer app was ready (well, as ready as we could be as Badho 1.0) but the actual app implementation, downloads and active retailers were at a big fat Zero.
I knew we couldn’t sit around waiting for the perfect product or the ideal market conditions. We just had to take the leap. Since we had already made inroads with a major distributor of Kapila Pashu Ahaar in Uttarakhand, we decided to kick off Badho’s retailer app launch in the picturesque hill town of Kashipur.
Without waiting for approval from Rishi and Saurabh, my co-founders, I went ahead and started getting retailers to download the app. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this - you don’t build a perfect product before launch. You launch with a less-than-perfect product and let real users shape it. Only when retailers started using the app did we begin to see what worked, what didn’t, and which features needed fixing.
During our initial days of building the app, we understood that the biggest challenge that brands faced was that even though they wanted retailers to adopt sales technology, they had neither the bandwidth nor the resources to provide the retailers with adequate support. So I knew that we would need to be the keepers of all the trainings and support that the retailers need to keep using our app. So, I went from one retailer to another, getting them to download the app, training them, and showing them just how easy it was to use. Slowly but surely, things started looking up.
Within six months, we didn’t just onboard retailers from the one distributor we started with, we brought in retailers from 30 to 40 other distributors as well! That’s when we knew we were onto something big.
When Badho became the Indian Retailer’s new BFF
For any brand, cracking Tier 1 cities is a piece of cake, because there is both demand and volume. However in semi-urban and rural areas, brands face a lot of challenges, so we thought let’s expand our operations in cities like Kanpur, Varanasi first, because they also have robust distribution networks but not enough brands tapping it. While entering Tier 2 and 3 cities, we also were simultaneously experimenting with FB ads and Google Ads etc.. which threw up some really surprising results!
So what was our data telling us?
Find out in : http://blog.badho.in/the-story-of-gyannendra-bharti-part-2
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