Episode 77- Turning Adversity into an Advantage: Building Wakefit, Importance of Sleep, How to build a great company, w/Chaitanya Ramalingegowda
About Chaitanya Ramalingegowda:
This episode of The One Percent Project tells the story of Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, the co-founder of Wakefit, a household name in India synonymous with quality sleep. Chaitanya's journey to Wakefit is a testament to persistence and unwavering determination. Before starting Wakefit, Chaitanya had nineteen years of experience spanning entrepreneurship, management consulting and marketing. Wakefit, his third start-up stint, co-founded with Ankit Garg, has emerged as a game-changer in the world of sleep solutions. Crafting products that redefine comfort and wellness, Wakefit's journey parallels Chaitanya's own pursuit of excellence in entrepreneurship.
In this episode, Chaitanya talks about his remarkable journey, an expedition marked by uphill battles, shares the challenges he faced, the motivations that fuelled his drive, and the strategies that led Wakefit to its current stature. From the tough decisions to the transformative moments, Chaitanya's story is a masterclass in turning adversity into an advantage.
Join us as we dive into the narrative of Chaitanya's entrepreneurial journey and explore the grit, resilience, and insights that turned a vision into a successful venture.
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Key takeaways:
Sleep is a vital health pillar. It plays an important role in memory consolidation, emotional processing, and neural connection formation. Beyond physical recovery, sleep is also important for mental well-being and influences the way we respond to life's challenges.
Founder-market fit is the alignment of a founder's strengths, passions, and expertise with the demands and dynamics of a specific market. For Chaitanya, it was about recognising his aptitude for data-driven execution, digital marketing, and customer experience in the context of building an e-commerce business like Wakefit. His co-founder Ankit excelled in other areas like product development and production. This blend of skills and passions, combined with the correct timing and external factors, played a pivotal role in the success of Wakefit.
A startup in its early stages is an extreme expression of the founder's identity, characteristics, and drive. But as it grows, relying solely on the founder's perspective can become a hindrance. The founder's traits may have been instrumental in initiating the venture, but allowing other leaders to contribute their insights and shape the organisation's direction is essential for sustained success.
Branding is the overall perception people have of a company based on all interactions. Marketing involves the messages a company puts out to maintain a consistent image. Branding is earned over time through various touch points, while marketing shapes the company's voice and personality across channels.
Capital allocation is simple in theory but challenging in practice due to competing priorities and biases. Objective data is essential for effective allocation, still emotions often sway decisions. Achieving successful capital allocation at scale also requires a team alignment in terms of thinking and approach.
Launching a successful D2C company doesn't require an extensive range of products; rather, focusing on a few highly differentiated products is key. Additionally, initial growth in the D2C space is primarily driven by product or channel differentiation rather than simply relying on investments.
Perseverance often outweighs glamour. In the face of adversity, showing up, not for external validation, but to align with one's own values, can be the driving force to overcome challenges. Resilience isn't always flashy but it is the daily determination to wake up, turn up for the things that matter, and be the person one wants to become.
Chaitanya’s book recommendations:
Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach
The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
In this conversation, he talks about:
02:19 Why is sleep important?
08:06 What was India's association with sleep and mattress before Wakefit?
12:24 Chaitanya's entrepreneurial journey:
Setting up English classes in a garage as a youngster?
Setting up a failed content startup with friends.
Finding a job post his startup failure
35:32 Building Wakefit:
Is a startup an extreme expression of the founders?
At what point did Chaitanyia and Ankit become bottlenecks in Wakefit's growth?
Setting up internal feedback loops.
44:03 Marketing Vs Branding: One is built, and the other gets built.
49:36 How has packaging accelerated Wakefit's growth?
52:41 40 investor rejections- Chaitanya and Ankit built a business which didn't even have a category on Amazon.
1:02:02 Is it service or product- that leads one to become an industry leader?
1:06:11 What is the kindest thing anyone has done for Chaitanya?
1:09:50 Three Books he recommends
Transcript:
Pritish: Let's start. What was for breakfast today?
Chaitanya: Today it was idli, and that too from a small roadside stall that opened on my way to my office. And so, a small three-wheeler parks on the side of a park, and it's two people running the stall, one person collecting payment, and the other person serving fresh idlis from the steam oven there. So, I used to see it every time on the drive and today I said, let me stop and try it. And it was completely clean, very good. And it’s idli and vada, that's all, they focus on only two products.
Pritish: Brilliant, brilliant. Okay. You will be an idli vada expert. Let me ask you this, idli is such a simple product. How does one distinguish themselves?
Chaitanya: Even though it is such a clean and simple product, it's ultimately just batter that you soak, grind, and then serve. I think there are only three or four parameters through which they can distinguish themselves. Number one, how soft and fresh idli is. Number two, the accompanying chutneys, whether it’s the coconut, or peanut, or tomato, or ginger. There's a ton of them, and then there's sambar where you try to do different accompaniments to give it a different flavour. And number three, I think it's the post-sales experience. What I mean by that is do you get an upset stomach? Do you feel unnaturally full because of baking soda? Do you feel that, oh, it was like homemade and it is clean and so let me go back again. It is not something that you experience immediately, you experience after you eat and go to your workplace or wherever you're heading towards. So, I think those are the three ways that you would probably distinguish yourself given that it's such a commoditized product.
Pritish: Brilliant. So, let's get into your journey at Wakefit. First thing, why is sleep important?
Chaitanya: Pritish, there are three pillars to a healthy life, fitness, nutrition, and sleep. The first two get a ton of attention and they're also very glamorous to show on screen. Fitness, you'd show somebody working out in a gym with a really buffed up body, six pack abs, glistening sweat, pull-ups, pumped up music, very nice to show. Then you see food and it is so appetising to see. You'd see a ganache being cooked, pastry being served on a plate. You see how a five-star Michelin star chef would plate the food. It is so nice, so appetising. But then the third pillar is sleep. So boring to show, but it is equally important. So that is why in popular media, in brands, it gets a very small share of voice and almost a step motherly treatment, but it is equally important. Now, I think Ariana Finkton, then Matt Walker, ‘Why We Sleep?’ Andrew Huberman kind of podcasts where they're talking about sleep health. I think people's awareness is slowly going up, but it's still a tiny fraction of what it should have actually gotten. And come to your question of why sleep is important. People think sleep is resting, but it is far from true. Sleep has REM, rapid eye movement sleep, and non-REM Sleep. Both of them perform a very different role. You won't believe it, the forgetting of traumatic experiences, the reinforcement of strong and pleasant memories, long-term memory association connections that happen in the brain, processing the good and the bad that has happened in the last awake hours. And whatever learnings you have had on that day, forming new neural networks and connections so that you use it differently on the next day or next occasion. All of that happens in the sleep duration. Obviously, the rest of the things like body recovering, lactic acid going down, all of that is a much more known thing that you rest and your body recovers. But the mental aspect is very big. In fact, it has been proven that when somebody goes through an extremely traumatic incident, like for example, a sexual abuse or a car accident, the more they're able to get restful sleep, the better their processing of that traumatic event is and they move on faster. It's very pedestrian to think that sleep is just for rest.
Pritish: I completely agree. I listen to a lot of sleep podcasts and by the way, till a few years ago, I was absolutely agnostic to the value of sleep. I would say sleep five hours, six hours, get back to work or get up, go to exercise. Now, I've been trying to consciously practise that I at least sleep for seven hours, eight hours, and it has truly impacted my thought process and help at saying no because I have limited time. But coming to the other part of it, A lot of youngsters believe, and some influencers also promote that everybody should be working 18 hours and you should just go out there and just not sleep at all if you can. How do you reflect on that?
Chaitanya: I think it's one of those narratives that has so much currency, yet it is completely wrong. Like the social media algorithms promote a lot of things that are completely incorrect, but it's just viral. It's so believable or so aspirational that it gets picked up everywhere. This is one of those that if you want to be successful, you have to work 18 hours, sacrifice sleep, all of that nonsense. But if you actually look at the humans that are pushing the forefront of humanity, they actually value sleep. The sports people like Federer, LeBron James, you find their interviews and ask and see what they said about sleep. They say nine to ten hours because as sports people the physical recovery takes much longer. When you look at people like scientists, you look at Charles Darwin, look at Einstein, read their diaries very clearly, they state that they take a nap in the afternoon and they sleep seven to eight hours at night. So, these are people who have really taken humanity forward and not just saying that they work hard to make money successful, a very narrow definition. It is just one of those narratives that just seems very logical. Oh, you want to be a millionaire? Work 18 hours. It feels so aspirational, Hey, I can do it. I'll work harder. I'll work harder than my colleagues, my friends, my peers in B School. And it's so easy to get carried away in that without realising the trauma you’re putting your body through. So, it's just one of those things, which is very unfortunate. I don't know if you're aware of this, that whole thing that you study in nutrition in schools that we should have carbohydrates, proteins, fats, a lot of research, which shows that the whole thing was an accident. Today it is considered as a true thing in nutrition. What I mean by that is in the 1960s or 1970s, a bureaucrat in one of the food departments in the US drew that pyramid and said, these are the food groups that we have just discovered. Back then, we had just discovered those food groups. They said, every meal, every person should have carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and fibre to some small extent. It is completely wrong. It's been debunked today with a lot of scientific evidence, but it is just so ingrained in 40 years that it's believed to be true. While it's not, this is one of those unfortunate things.
Pritish: Actually, I did not know that. Yeah, I completely agree. You don't need to have all the ingredients in your every meal. What was the association of Indians with their sleep and mattresses when you kicked off Wakefit?
Chaitanya: There were three broad categories of people. I wouldn't go so far as to call them personas because personas are very sharply different, let me call them categories for the sake of it. One is people who are very below the middle-class threshold, so to speak, lower middle class, just about making ends meet in an expensive city, sending money back home to their tier-2 family members, working really hard. For them, association of sleep was that I will kill myself through the day, I will pass out at night. Very simple. They didn't care about the quality of the mattress, they didn't care about sleep tracking devices. Imagine 2015-16 when we started. Then the second kind, which were people in the middle class or getting to be upper middle class, so they had a stable and well-paying job for the last five or seven years. That means they have some kind of a salary, some kind of stability, and are settled in life. They're thinking about home buying, thinking about vehicle buying, thinking about a kid. Here, they were hungry for good quality products, but they could afford, and they also had not really gone to the level of sleep-tech. The aura ring or the sleep tracking chest, band, none of those, they wanted a good product, which they could afford because whatever was in the market was not affordable, thirty-five to fifty thousand, still very expensive. Then there's a third category where these people had already been well travelled. They've lived in the US, Dubai, Singapore, or at least travelled on work for 7-40 days. They've experienced good quality products and they are willing to pay more. They're even willing to pay fifty to sixty thousand, but it should come from something that is aspirational. I should feel like I've arrived. Sleep quality was second. They should feel that I have purchased the Mercedes of Mattress. The feeling was what they were looking at, and I will be very honest with you. This is my third startup and Ankit’s second startup, but we worked hard in the failed startups. Here also we worked hard, but we cannot take credit for Wakefit’s success. There are so many things that came from outside that enabled us to be successful. So, in 2015-16 first of all, within a year or two, Jio started. Secondly, UPI and the payment ecosystem picked up very well where people trusted it being online. Third, because of all the content consumption, consumers were willing to give a chance to untested brand-new companies who had zero reviews. They had never heard of them, but they were willing to put their money out and test. And the fourth thing that ended up happening was slowly and steadily sleep came into focus. Slowly, we contributed a little bit as a company, but the ecosystem itself, there was a lot of noise around that, and slowly people started talking about it. So, despite our hard work, that hard work meeting these four or five extraneous factors ended up making Wakefit a success to the level that we are in today. So, the market thought very differently. Each of the three segments thought very differently, and who we appealed to was, I think, more the middle one, saying that they were tech savvy. They were not looking for the Mercedes of a sleep mattress. They were looking for, if I may say so, Santro of sleep, saying that really good comfort really takes me from point A to point B and I can afford it. So that is the kind of audience that we initially targeted. But today, as we've expanded to premium, we expanded to entry level, expanded into home furniture, so far as wardrobes, the whole thing. But the association back then was very clear, just two or three SKUs. Target this, people who are just stable in their 27-28 to 35-40, and their association with sleep is good quality at an affordable price point. No jazz. Just service them in a good way. That's all we thought about.
Pritish: Before Wakefit, there are a few things that you have done, two startups, you even started English classes in a garage in 95-96. How has that experience been? And obviously you also talk about a burnout that happened after your second start-up failure. So, let's start with why did you start the 96-95 English classes and what did you learn from your other two startups before Wakefit?
Chaitanya: The English classes, honestly, I've thought about why I started, what was my motivation as a 15-year-old? What would've driven me to do it? Is it pocket money? Was it just to use up that money for my pleasures? What was the reason why I would want to do that in summer holidays instead of just going and playing? So, I honestly haven't been able to come up with a very clear answer, despite introspecting quite a bit. The best I can come up with is that there was some kind of chasing of freedom. Can I be my own boss? Even as a career? I don't know what I'm going to study, where I'm going to go after I graduate. I'm just 15 years old. But what does being your own boss sound like? I think very deeply I chase freedom. I chase autonomy at a subconscious level. I like the fact that people can control their own destiny. That's the closest I have been able to articulate because it's not like I made pot loads of money. Right. And it's not like I ran it for three years. It was the summer vacation so I did it. So that is, that's what happened. And there was a motley crew of people who would come. There was one tailor, one housewife, and a homemaker. There were a couple of students who came from the interior parts of Karnataka. They were knowledgeable about English, they were knowledgeable about physics, maths and so forth, but they were different and they couldn't speak English, and they knew that if they had to get a job as a salesperson or as a shop retail person, they needed to speak English. Very different kinds of people with different motivations. Whatever I could, I taught and that's how we approached it. So, I don't know what else I can think of about that stint.
Pritish: Two parts. Learning something like English for individuals such as them, is it about confidence? Is it about grammar? Is it about practice? What is it about? Who really becomes good at speaking English? At least spoken English. What would you say will be the key trait?
Chaitanya: Hunger and confidence. Hunger to absorb it in whatever way they can. Confidence to use it in whatever way they can. I don't think the most successful communicators are grammatically a hundred percent correct. I think the most successful communicators get their point across emphatically and clearly. So, I think the people who used to graduate and do it, use it well would be those people. They're very hungry to do something in their life, then they're confident enough to use it. I would know students who were better than other students, but it was very difficult to use it. And then those skills would again rest and they would go back to being their old self. So, what's the point? If you're 15% better than somebody, but use it 50% less than somebody, it's just a wasted effort, unfortunately.
Pritish: And you are teaching people, also probably making some pocket money. Did that give you any sense of confidence of thinking that, hey, if I can do this, I can do much bigger things, go out and try more things?
Chaitanya: I don't think it gave me confidence as much as it gave me a sense that it's not such a big deal to start up. But it took me 15 years to start up again. I actually started up a formal startup when I was 30. I quit my job to start at 30, but for the next 15 years I completely forgot about it. But what it did was demystify it. Hey, it's no big deal to start something. People really make it a very big fearsome experience in their heads that, oh my God, I have to leave the security of my salary. I will not have these perks, I will not have these conveniences, etc. But actually, when you think about the nuts and bolts it's not a big deal. You put up an ad in a newspaper, you opened it up in your aunt's garage, you got customers, you served them, you took payment. It's done. So, it wasn't such a big deal. I think that when I actually did it at 30, I think I was very naive and I made a ton of mistakes there, but there was zero fear in trying it out.
Pritish: Brilliant. Let's go from 15 to 30. How was your first real entrepreneurial experience and how did that unfold?
Chaitanya: I quit management consulting. About three or four of my colleagues also quit and they joined me. We were all co-founders. Really, really amazing set of individuals. Today, they're all doing brilliantly well in their lives to the extent of international MBA, to the extent of top consulting firms to the extent entrepreneurs who have sold their businesses, really good people. Unfortunately, we didn't work out as a team. We were all good friends. We were all good colleagues, but I think the time horizon that we took, the mistakes that we made in terms of saving our cash runways, the mistakes that we did in terms of understanding consumers, saying what they say in a focus group interview, what they do actually in reality, what they say they will pay, and where they will actually pull out their wallet to pay, what service they want, and what we are delivering and how to achieve product market fit. We made a lot of mistakes so that 10-11 months, the company shut down. We all parted ways. I had run through my personal runway. They had all run through their personal runway. Not only did I lose my co-founders, I lost my friends. So, it just ended like that. And while I'm really proud of what they have done, they're no longer my friends. When that was breaking up is when somebody asked in a meeting that have you read ‘The Lean Startup’ by Arie Creese, so in that break between, I shut that down and in the second start-up, I realised that although my personal runway has gone away, I didn't want to go back to a job so soon, 10-11 months, what have I tried? Not really tried or learned or done anything to say that I've given my everything, so I should go back to a job. So, I said, let me stick it out, and they all chose their different parts. I chose to incorporate another company and start all over again. But I tried to incorporate all of the things that I had learned from my first startup and from all of these learnings, Paul Graham, YC, Eric Reese, Cardin startup, how to be less wasteful, how to test features iteratively. I did all of that and landed up in building an online community for women. This is where, from puberty to menopause, everything that a woman would need or go through pregnancy, beauty, fashion, makeup, fitness, relationship advice, dating, marriage, how to handle and manage relationships with your partner, every single thing. We got a ton of original content and we said, if you're an original content community where experts are writing the content and experts are coming, can we do a content to commerce play? Please remember, this was again 2012-2014. Which means Buzzfeed, Pop Sugar, all of them are trying content to commerce and they're working with branded plays with brands. So, brands come to players saying that they want to create native advertising content, and we would like to engage with X million people. This is the ambition, this is the payment, so on and so forth. That's where we intended to do and that's what we ended up doing. We raised angel funding, but we couldn't get to Series A and my first startup that shutdown was about relationships. We had said that if you're single, we'll help you find a partner. If you're a couple, whether in live-in, dating or married, we'll help you spend quality time over activities, which means wine-tasting, dancing, pottery classes, poetry, whatever else, online and offline. We'll enable you to spend quality time. So that was the content and other things that we generated there that gave the seed idea to this content to commerce play. So here we iterated, did all of that, but couldn't get to Series A by which time I realised that I was not enjoying what I was doing. I was burnt out from four years of trying, burnt out from doing three jobs in parallel, doing consulting at night, taking that money, partly putting it in company, partly taking care of my expenses, all of that. And finally, it wasn't a switch. It wasn't that one day I woke up and said, oh, I'm not enjoying it. Really, it was a painful six-month transition for me to realise, to hit me that why am I doing this? I'm not enjoying this. My customers are there, my team is there, but they're all limping around. It's not that my customers are saying stellar experience. I want to work only with these guys. Not that my team is saying we were five people last year, we are now ten, we are now thirty, we are now forty. They're seeing growth in complexity, in team, in promotions. Nothing. So why am I just dragging it? It's a dead horse. I managed to get jobs for my team members. It was very painful to shut it down a second time, shut it down and look for a job, and finally joined at a lower salary than my management consulting five years back. So that was the story of the first and second start-ups.
Pritish: Brilliant. Few things that you overcame and we should touch upon this will really help people who are listening to the podcast. You went and did two startups probably in a tenure of two years to three years.
Chaitanya: Yeah, about three and a half.
Pritish: Three and a half years, and obviously, and you ran out of all your savings. You also mentioned that nobody in the corporate world was willing to take a bet on you again and you had a family. That all accumulates to a lot of burnout: mental and sometimes even physical. How did you manage through that and what did you do?
Chaitanya: See initially it was just about, hey, my team is showing up every single day, I have to show. You can't just sit and pity for yourself. Get past it, show up at work, just pushing myself literally, unrealistically. In hindsight, I wouldn't have done it. But that time, that worked as a crutch. I said, the team is showing up every day so I have to show up. So, a few months later, that motivation ran out. I know the team is working hard, but I'm not motivated. Why am I sad to work every single day. This is not why I started up. At that point in time, I realised that as a founder, people use three types of inputs. Some who are extroverts have a peer network of founders where they use them as a sounding board, discuss, chat, and then get ideas and deal with the stress. Second is you have a co-founder with whom you know everything, and you have both gone through the same, so you exchange notes and support. Third is people who don't have a co-founder and they end up getting all their inputs from books and podcasts and other things that they consume. So, I was clearly in the third bucket. After reading a lot of books, I realised that, one, I was not enjoying it. Two, I was doing a disservice to clients and my team. And three, if I have a limited period of time to live, I should be using every minute of it in a better way. So once that realisation came, I started applying for a job. And how did I go through it? It was a drag. People tend to glamorise failures. Journalists also tend to write really romantic stories that, oh, he had only this much money and he still survived, he still came on successful startup. But let me assure you, there's nothing glamorous those days. It is horrible. I don't want to go back to those days. That's all nonsense and glamour. But the truth is, every day was a struggle. Every day getting out of bed was a painful thing, but you also wake up and do things because of commitment, because of who you want to be as a person. You don't want to be a person that didn't show up. You don't want to be the person who just shut down the startup without notice, without pay, without getting jobs for your team. You don't want to be the person who abandoned clients in between. You don't want to be the person who took payment from somebody but didn't deliver a service. So, a lot of the time you just do it because you don't want to be somebody and then you can't deal with yourself. Who will you look at in the mirror? So, I think a lot of the last few days was just that I don't want people to remember me as this, so I put in the work. And so, I think that was a combination.
Pritish: You helped each of your employees to find a job, and as you mentioned, they got better jobs at a better pay because they were with a startup, so they were not getting market salaries. But how did that conversation go with them? Like when you told them that, hey, I'm going to help you out, or we need to move on. How did that unwind?
Chaitanya: We used to work out of a small house. We couldn't afford an office. We somehow convinced the landlord to take the rental in my name, but these people come in and work. Don't worry, it's not a professional setup. We are not converting into a commercial so that you don't have to pay a commercial electricity bill. A lot of the jugaad was happening. I still remember the discussion happening in that living room where we used to have two, three tables and we were sitting and working. So, when I told them that this is what is happening and I have managed to find a job for myself, that means till the time that all of these ongoing projects, ongoing deliverables are there, you guys continue to work and your salaries will not be impacted. And so, now that I've found my job, I've also looked at my contacts, my friends’ networks and so forth to find you all jobs. But you'll have to trust me and give me some time. So, my joining is two to three months away. In that period let me figure out what I can do for you. Definitely there was a healthy degree of scepticism, but they also, to their credit, trusted in me. They had all spent a minimum of two years and maximum of three and a half years with me. So, they said, okay, we, it's very sad that we are wrapping. It was a tiny, very closely knit team. So, they said, we understand what you're saying, but it's a tough time. We should also start looking, I said, to be honest with you, yes, you should. Because I said I'll try and I'll do my best, but if, God forbid it doesn't work out, you should not be the only avenue you are depending on, I know you're getting married. I know you're trying to get a bike. So, all of those were youngsters, 27-28-year-olds. So, they said, okay, try. Thanks for the honesty. And I said, the only thing I request is, if at all you get the job, please ensure that there is a joining notice period such that we finish everything that we've committed to clients. We did that. To give them credit, they all waited. None of them came back at the end of two months and said that I have a job, or I'm leaving. Thankfully, they were able to get interviews and jobs for all of them. Literally to this day, I'm most grateful about that. And you won't believe it, three to four of them were or are part of Wakefit.
Pritish: You helped them around their fate and you were at the cusp of your fate turning once you joined the startup and you met Ankit there and Wakefit is a history after that. But having said that, why did the startup hire you? Because I understand you are a sales and a marketing person and strategy. Your personality is not the hero type, somebody bombastic. I'm going to close X deals, I'm going to make X millions. So how did that unwind?
Chaitanya: Well, I'm just grateful that they gave me a job, but it had nothing to do with my past experience. They had just raised a round of funding of hundreds of crores and one of the co-founders in that company was my co-founder in my first startup. Can you imagine? He referred to his CEO saying that I know this person, he used to be my boss in management consulting. We did a startup together that shut down. I have no friendship with him anymore, but he's available. And that CEO met me for dinner and the role was ops operations. And we had to build a team from 0 to 650 people in four months or something like that. And I had never done ops before. We had to hire, train, set SOPs, and run such a large team firm arranging laptops and internet connection to train them and responding to customers. That was the opportunity. And I, by that time, I was desperate because management consulting, my previous company, had not accepted me back. Other companies that I was trying, they were interviewing but not giving me a role. They said you were a founder, CEO. But basically, that means you've been doing everything from a peon’s job to a CEO's job. What are you an expert in? Why should we take you? But this one in ops, it was literally about working hard. They did not require to see me that I was a great strategy consultant, or I was a great techie and, or I'm a great product guy. I think the bar was very low and I met that bar and there was an urgent need. So, I'm still very grateful for that company. The person who referred me, and for the person who hired me. All they needed was somebody to work 17-18 hours. We used to be in the office until the shifts would start at 7:00 AM and would go until midnight. Continuously you had to be online and just hire, get them trained and respond. So, I just picked the bill and they hired me.
Pritish: That's fascinating. Somebody has to take a bet on you. And I'm assuming during this period did you learn the whole thing on the go because you obviously had no time. Or did you actually read or spoke to friends who were in operations? How did you equip yourself?
Chaitanya: One was first principles thinking because that kind of company was not dumb. It was a company that was trying to put everything into a super app and solve through chat what today is being called as NLB and Chat bots. We were doing it in 2015 through a combination of manual and rules, and that's why the 650 people and we were trying to solve every category, movie ticket booking, E-commerce, food ordering, cab ordering everything into one super app, but done through a chat interface. So, there was nothing where I could go and just learn from. So, it was first principles thinking and working closely with the team for long hours. Second point was every vendor interview that I did saying that we wanted to partner with you, where we were actually trying to partner. They felt that they were pitching their business. I felt like I was in a school. For them, I must have looked like a client, but for me, I was looking like a student. I was absorbing everything like a sponge. What are the metrics? What is AHD? FRT? First response, average handling, every single thing. I was learning like a sponge. Frankly, that became the genesis of Wakefit’s customer experience, DNA about three years later. I was exceptionally hungry to just absorb and learn and say that these people have hired me, I should deliver. I didn't want to be without a job. So those were the two things. First principles, daily looking at metrics and data, and second was every single vendor metric learnt from them.
Pritish: Now comes Ankit, who you met there. Obviously, you guys had a great jugalbandi. You guys had a good understanding. He's eight years younger than you. I know as time passes on, he'll still stay eight years younger to you. You can't take that away from him. You talk about founder market fit and with Wakefit, that hypothesis really comes true. Can you double click on that? What does that mean?
Chaitanya: Maybe an example will help. That company that I told you about, where we were helping singles to find partners and couples to spend quality time that required on the offline part of it, that required a lot of socialising, at those events like wine tasting, whiskey tasting, dancing, and you see me, I am the kind who's very happy with a book and newspapers or writing with a pen and paper and socialising for joy is the farthest thing that I do. So, I thoroughly did not enjoy that stint. And here in Wakefit it was so beautiful. Ankit was brilliant at new product development. From the chemistry level and not at the trader level, chemistry of form, the intricacies of the chemical reaction, what material gives what benefit, why is it important and not because it was a job, because I was simply passionate about it. On the other hand, here I was with one startup where I did a lot of digital marketing. One experience where I learned how to handle large operations teams. It seemed like such a natural fit that I was handling, building the website, building order management system, product, managing it for that one-or-two-year period, generating demand through digital marketing and SEO and so forth, and setting up a small customer experience team with 20-30 people. So, it just worked out so naturally that it fit my strengths where it is about data, trying it out with analysis, thoughtfully hydrating it being very logical. Not just randomly doing upheaval for the sake of upheaval, or a lot of these founders have this unspent energy and that is used in completely throwing the team into this array. I'm not at all like that person. I'm very happy putting my head down and just executing. And Ankit on the other hand, was brilliant with product production, shipping, warehousing, new products, new categories, adjacent expansion. Brilliant. So that is where I think when you said founder market fit, he enjoyed what he was doing and he was great at it. For me, it was, I enjoyed what I was doing, but I was not great at it. I was learning all of these things on the job. What does customer experience look like for a product company? How does digital marketing look for a product company, not for a content company? So, I was learning it, but I enjoyed it. I think that's where it worked out. And then the external factors helped out and we were at the right place at the right time.
Pritish: Let's talk about building Wakefit. Is a startup or a business an extreme expression of the founder?
Chaitanya: In the early days, yes, in the later days, that can become a curse. In the early days, startup was an extreme expression of the founder's identity, behavioural traits, and hunger. But as you pass series A, series B, and series C, you slowly become bigger. You build, bring in a lot of professional leaders, and if the company remains to be an extreme expression of one or two or three people who are the founders, it is going to stumble. You need to make room for other leaders to express themselves, to bring in their own input and create the team, their projects, initiatives in their image. And if that doesn't happen, I feel a startup is doomed to fail because it's very rare that a founder's mentality and ambition will also expand at the same pace as a successful startup does. So very few people do that, and that's why you see so few founder CEOs who are also great at being a CEO. Even 30 years later, very few. And even if somebody great, like Steve Jobs, had to be kicked out and then he came back. Then you saw Bill Gates. He remained primarily because it was a monopoly and he was a brilliant person, but very few Zuckerberg, 20 years or so, he's been there. But not many people transition for 20-40 years. So, you need to bring in those leaders and you need to be able to take a backseat and play the role of a quarterback. Not be at the forefront of every single decision.
Pritish: Actually, that's a brilliant insight, what you just touched upon. The reason Steve Jobs was kicked out was because he just thought like a founder, but when he came back, he thought like a CEO. So, when did Ankit and Chaitanya realise that they had become a bottleneck in Wakefit's growth?
Chaitanya: I don't think it was a particular year or a particular decision. It was definitely a pattern that we got. First of all, are we having the benchmark high enough that we're getting really kickass people or are we just getting people who follow orders? Second is if we are getting people who are really exceptional in their field, then are we giving them autonomy or they're finding it unhappy to get into work? So, this pattern, when you make this mistake once or twice, you realise very quickly or you choose to ignore and say, boss, this is my startup, I will do this way. Rest of them can suffer with me. So, we very quickly realised that we didn't want to lose any of the good senior people because the first part was true. We used to have a very high benchmark for getting senior leaders, but once they came in, we didn't want them to be unhappy because they're unproductive, they're not happy, their teams are not performing well. That whole of the company is not performing to the level that you wanted or dreamed of. So once that is noticeable, you realise that this is not how it is. Let's change our way of working. Let's bring in a different review mechanism. Let's bring in OKRs to align everybody. Let us have more weekly catch ups. Let us have more social gatherings to break the ice and go beyond professional relationships. So, you think and you discover on your own. But I think those were the observations that made us realise that we have to move very quickly. And fortunately, we didn't lose people in those days because of those mistakes.
Pritish: Let's talk about Wakefit's growth and building. I think the whole D2C industry in India looks up to Wakefit's customer experience, the way you have built the feedback loop between the customer and the Wakefit team. But my question is, have you built a feedback loop within the company about how you manage or run the company?
Chaitanya: Initially we thought we could just do it through HR service, and we realised that only very few people were giving us honest feedback for whatever reason, either respected or worried or saying I've always been in different companies where you could never talk about your boss very honestly. So, we said that we will circumvent all of those. We'll partner with a trusted outside agency, which works only with startups. I'm referring to X210X that was founded by Binny Bansal and Sai Kiran and Neeraj, ex-Flipkart team members. And so, they’re so respected and trusted, and they work across all departments, customer experience, planning, branding, HR, and so forth. So, we requested them, and they have been working closely with us for the last few years where they do anonymous data collection and gathering by department, by seniority, by tree of the organisation. They give us very clear things at where things are failing, where we can be better in terms of small things like facilities and large things like policies and transparency. And we have increased our employee NPS by six points in the last 15 months simply by being so focused because we realise that we cannot just run a company saying that salary and incentives and goals are going to motivate everybody. As you become a 1500 person company, different people have different motivations. It's a fact of life. Somebody just wants to do nine to six, work hard during that time. Go home. Somebody is motivated by growth. Somebody's motivated by financial incentives. Somebody's motivated by building a team that looks up to them. So many different motivations. So, one size fits all is not going to work at this size. So, can we really learn what we are doing differently and incorrectly as leaders? Are we even communicating simple things like the vision of the company? Are we being transparent with the decisions we took during Covid time? Are we communicating enough times? Are we encouraging people to raise and ask questions in public forums? Simple things. And you'll realise by doing these surveys and discussions that in a company which is founded by people and then they're also running it, by default, their word carries an inordinate and incorrect amount of weight, which is very wrong. But it's a fact of life. There is a power distance and they don't question as much as it should be questioned. I don't know if you've read this,but there's a book called ‘Trillion Dollar Coach,’ about Bill Campbell, and it's written by Eric Schmidt, who used to be the CEO of Google. And Bill Campbell was the coach for, you name any executive in Silicon Valley, he was a coach for Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayers, Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Serge Brin. Literally you take the top executives, he was the coach for them. One of the things he taught, Marissa Mayers, she was a brilliant executive, but she was getting tremendously negative manager reviews. One simple thing he taught her was in any meeting where people have to go around the table and give opinions, you speak last, just change the dynamic of the meetings because once the boss says something, the rest of the people stop thinking. Rest of the people, even if they have a valid opinion, do not raise it because it's an opposing opinion. So just by encouraging people to talk before the boss, it just changed the whole dynamic. Small things like this, if you need to take a backseat, you need to be able to get people to talk. I think that is where we are thinking, that's how we are operating. You need to be brutal and honest, but in a respectful way. That's the distinction. Keep the focus on the problem, not on the person. So, can we build that culture of questioning? We are there on the journey. I don't claim to have solved it.
Pritish: I think you are way ahead in that journey and congratulations for doing this because without it, I don't think anybody can sustain a generational business. I think you have very distinctive views about branding versus marketing. One is built. The other one gets built. Can you double click on that?
Chaitanya: See, the way I look at it, your brand is how people talk about you when you're not in the room and when they can say anything they want about you. And that means it is a sum of all interactions and all touch points. It has nothing to do with marketing. So, the brand of Wakefit is to honour the hundred-day trial policy without cheating me and without having some surprise, fine print. It's a brand. I called the customer care even late at night, I made a mistake in ordering. They agreed to replace, they didn't claim some more artificial return fees, and so that's a brand. Really all big, fitter advertising is really funny, but I also get to learn something small in it. That's a brand. And investors are investors. Any of them you should go and question these guys never lie to us in board meetings or hide numbers or these founders, good or bad news, whatever, in the MIS, it comes out very transparently. That's a brand, so that is a sum of all touch points for all stakeholders over a period of time. There's no way to short circuit. I believe that is what is a brand. Marketing, on the other hand is again, not advertising. Marketing is the summer of all touch points and output that you put out there in the world across influences EDL, BTL and TTL, through the line. So that is the brand and there if you are a cohesive voice and you behave one person, then you are not one day behaving erratically, one day being very funny, one day being very serious, one day, changing your colours all over. That's the marketing. So, brand is what gets earned over all touch points, with all people, with all periods of time. Marketing is a sum of all output that you put there about yourself and behave as a person. You will have good days, you'll have bad days, you will have all kinds of emotions, but are you behaving within the constraints of one person's personality? That's what you build as marketing.
Pritish: Brilliant. I think this response would be great if it is backed. I know you've repeated this a number of times, the phone call, one of your customers called to get a mattress for the ailing dog. How did that unwind? And the reason is because this goes back to how you built the brand. And what did marketing do for them to actually make a phone call or reach out to you and find something that would help their ailing dog to have a good last few days?
Chaitanya: Honestly, I didn't even know this had happened. Many months later, that sales team lead, we were in a coffee shop, we were discussing and he brought it up and then I followed it up to closure and that's when I learned what happened later. So that is when I felt that we have built something where other people have found value to learn and behave on their own without telling me, without checking with me, or without doubting that this is part of the culture or not. So, the incident was that an older gentleman called and said, I've had this dog for many years. It's a 13-14 year old cancer patient. It's not going to survive for many more months. And we've read about your product. I'm not going to try it. You're a new company, but how is this product for the dog? So, the team explained everything and said, even kids are sleeping on it. It's a good quality, all of that. But if you are sure that you want it for the dog, no problem. But one small request, the hundred-day trial might be hard to accommodate if your dog rips it apart with its claws. Is it okay? The customer said yeah, it's fine, let me try it. So, they ordered, we sent the mattress and that's about it. The case was done. Eight to nine months later, and these were pre-cloud telephony days. We were so small that we didn't have cloud telephony. So that person had ended up saving that salesperson's phone number. So, eight, nine months later, he called back and said, I just wanted to close the door. Do you remember me? So, this person said, I don't. So, they explained and they said, yeah, sir, I remember. So, he said that dog passed away recently. So just wanted to let you know that I want to thank you for giving my companion a peaceful last few months through that mattress, whatever you're doing is very good. Now I am ready to test it out on my own. So, I want to order for my master bedroom. Can you help me out? So, it was such a heartwarming case that we just remember. And there was a client from Kashmir. He was super excited that he said, I want to do a video call. Our team did a video call. He wanted to basically show that in his joint family where there's three, four floors, some 12 different products of Wakefit had been purchased over the last two years. He wanted to do a video call just to show that, first of all, no big brand services were present in Jammu kashmir, and this is some interior part. I just want to show you, I'm just happy. Literally, that person did not want anything. He didn't ask for a discount. He didn't, that was not a preamble for anything. Nothing. He literally wanted to show on a video call saying, I purchased these. For the last two years, see this. Thank you. So, this is what makes it feel like it's worth it.
Pritish: Absolutely. By the way, that Kashmir example is brilliant because I wanted to touch upon the wonders that packaging has done for you.
Chaitanya: See, before we brought this technology to India, you would notice that any of the large mattress companies, incumbents used to have about 10-14 different factories across the country. So, the logic back then was that you produce in a small factory, you service a 200 to 300 kilometre radius because it is so expensive to ship a mattress because mattresses would go in their full form. If you imagine big king size 78*72 or seven feet by six feet, whatever the size is, a small truck can accommodate about four to five mattresses. It's so expensive to transport it, and they never had a return policy. They never had a trial policy because it's so expensive. When we came across this technology and we bought it in 2018, about two and a half years after we started, it really transformed how we looked at logistics costs and how our customers found delight in the mattress. So, a giant king size mattress also now goes in a small packaging of this width. It is barely about three feet tall. This is called the roll pack technology, and the mattress can be rolled in, then shipped. But, there's one small criteria. You can only roll back a mattress if you use pure raw material without any adulteration. If you use adulterated foam and then you roll back it, it becomes a carpet. It just does not come back to its original shape. So, it just worked out so beautifully that we were always using pure ingredients, producing our own form, not buying anything from anybody because we had our own factory. And then we came across this technology that suddenly opened up even the farthest pin codes. Like, you're rightly said, Andaman and Nicobar, Leh and Ladakh, Manipur or Rajasthan, you pick any further pin code and this product now goes because it's just such a small package and one truck can accommodate 25-40 mattresses and we even take it back if the trial period ends and they don't like it, and suddenly it became very viable to ship everywhere and service and honour our customers, wherever they are.
Pritish: Who came up with the technology? How did you find it?
Chaitanya: So, it was not our invention. This had become our recent invention in Europe back in 2014 or so. This technology had come up in Europe and then some of the companies in the US like Casper and all started using it. We could afford it two years later because we were bootstrapped and we were bootstrapped for three years since we started. Nobody would invest in us, so those three years we couldn't afford. Finally, we saved money and from our profits over nearly nine months and placed an order for this, negotiated some terms saying that we will pay later. And we are one of the first to order and get this technology, and now it is a hygiene factor for anybody entering the industry, which is a big improvement for customers I would say.
Pritish: 40+ investor rejections for the first round, and then Sequoia comes in. You started a business which did not even have a category on Amazon, but you landed up convincing Sequoia. What did they bet on?
Chaitanya: Even Sequoia declined. I think they were the 42nd or 43rd investor we met for our first round, and Sequoia also declined. But about 40-45 days later, they again came back and said, we'd like you to meet another partner. So, we would like to pick up the conversation, what is the progress? How has your company done? And this time around it was converted. So, that was nearly three years after we started, I think they bet on us, actually. I asked GB, who were the partners who led the deal back then. I think two, three things worked in our favour. Number one was that this was a category indeed, to see where the ticket size was high enough that the first transaction itself, you could make some money. You could be EBITDA positive on the first transaction. That whole thesis of acquiring a customer, in the second, third, fourth customer you make money. Until that time, you're a loss-making entity, that was a very scary thing back then. So, this seemed like a good value proposition because the ticket size was higher. Second thing that they believed in was our full stack backward integration. In 2015-16 when everybody was talking of being Uber of x, I'm Uber of laundry, I'm uber of shoes, I'm Uber of Apparel, and here we are like a very old-world business, setting up a factory, taking up assets, taking up long-term lease, importing machinery. That clearly showed them that we were committed. We were not touristy in our approach to this category, if you're setting up so much, it's not like I'm going to flip and tomorrow run away or flip and say that I want to sell this company. We are here for the long haul. That backward integration opened up definite avenues for margin improvement. I think the last thing that worked in our favour was that Ankit and I both had gone through our own respective startup failures, our own normal middle-class backgrounds, so we were very careful and frugal with how we deployed the Capital. Even today, at the scale that we are on, we have raised only about total and across four rounds. Barely about 90 million out of which some 45 or so are still in the bank. So extremely careful and never the kinds of people to just throw money at the problem. So, I think these will be the four that I heard from them, if I'm not guessing.
Pritish: After your two earlier startups, you started listening or reading a lot about capital allocation. So, what are the three tenants that you have learned about capital allocation?
Chaitanya: Number one, capital allocation is simple but not easy.
Pritish: Double click on that. What does that mean?
Chaitanya: You read a book about capital allocation, you read case studies. It's very simple to understand, but when you have to actually do it, it's very difficult because of the competing priorities in front of you. How do you actually do it while taking away your biases? It is very hard, so it's simple, but not easy. Point number two is you torture data enough to tell you what you wanted to tell. So, to be totally rational and deploy capital based on objective data is something that very few master. You're always carried away by emotion and your own biases of what will and will not work. Third is that capital allocation at scale can only happen if your whole team thinks in the same way. No matter how deep you think, if your team is not taken along in the journey, you will never be good capital allocators at the company level. You have to process everything that I've read. These are the three that come to my mind.
Pritish: Let's talk about D2C. Take a step back from WakeFit. What is your counterintuitive insight about D2C?
Chaitanya: Two insights. One is that the belief that you need 100 SKUs to launch a D2C company is incorrect. You need one or two hero products. Second counterintuitive insight is there's so many people, so many business plans, so many founders who contact, who say that for me to succeed, all I need is 3 million because CAC is so expensive. All I need is 5 million because it's so competitive. But they don't realise that good companies are never built on money. It is just something that people don't realise. You won't believe the number of people who say I have a brilliant idea. The only reason it did not succeed is I don't have enough capital. So, one is you don't need a hundred products but a very small number, but really kickass differentiated. And number two, initial growth never comes from money. It comes from product differentiation or channel differentiation.
Pritish: How do you build a great company?
Chaitanya: A feature is not a product. A product is not a business. Business is not a company. Very different, each of them. See, you might have a really kickass product feature in your product that people might love, but that is not still enough to make it a successful product. People might copy it. People might like it, but not enough to pay for it. When you make it a good product, it is a combination of multiple such features delivered consistently at a compelling timeline. But it still doesn't make it a big good business. For a good business, all of the things that I told you about features and product should be true. But on top of it, unit economics should work out. When I say unit economics, I don't mean the fuzzy IMCM2 positive, cash flow positive, none of that. Real hard accounting level, unit economics should be such that, at a bare minimum, contribution margin positive, for the new categories. And for mature categories, you're trending towards EBITDA positive. That's the only sustainable way to build, irrespective of the outside environment. But still, it doesn't make it a great company. Because a company means, you're not a one product, or one business wonder. You have now made it institutionalised such that tomorrow morning you die, it still survives. It still grows, and builds leaders. You've built people who are capable of taking independent autonomous calls. They can go raise funding. They can continue interacting with people like Pritish. Journalists will come and still meet them. It's a company. It's not Ankit or it's not Chaitanya. So, features, product, business, and company, you can fail at any one of these steps and each of them are very different.
Pritish: How does a young founder in terms of a new business identify a hero product?
Chaitanya: I think the only single source of truth is consumer behaviour and consumer understanding. Can you really approach that category with a learner's mindset? And that is one thing that I told you my first failed startup showed that what people say in an interview or a focus group is not at all how they behave. And I don't blame them at all. People respond in a way that makes them seem cool or smart or thoughtful and this natural human behaviour. But what do they actually do when nobody is looking at them, what do they click on? What do they click buy on? Where do they pull out their wallet? It's very different. So, the only way to do it is to test a bunch of hypotheses and do the iterative lean startup that I briefly alluded to earlier. Technology instance, it is very, very well defined. How do you add a new feature? Launch it, test it, iterate on it. But in the D2C world, it's not as well discussed. It's the same thing. How do you test out a great landing product for a set of, for a new product with a certain set of features? How do you test out just a landing page to know that there is demand or not? Before you launch 20 types of furniture products, how do you create prototypes on software? Get the feel of which of these people are liking by running, actually click buy now or add to cart or wishlist. It'll clearly give you signs that they're looking to buy it. So, you can still do a lot of the lean startup principles in the physical products world also. So that is the single most important source of truth. Consumer behaviour, not consumer research.
Pritish: Service or product, which leads one to becoming an industry leader versus a category leader.
Chaitanya: Pritish, I think it's very hard to answer this. It's very tough. So, these days now, earlier, let me take a step back. till about 15-20 years ago, somebody with an average product, but a big enough media budget could outshout the competition and succeed. But the last 15 to 18 years, though, people's voice has been completely democratised and open. You cannot survive with an average product and inferior service, no matter how much money you put into marketing because the negativity on social media, on Google, on Amazon, on Flipkart will just overpower no matter how much money you want to spend. It is just impossible. I'm not even saying it's difficult. I'm saying it's impossible to just continue to survive and grow into a massive industry leader by having an average product and average service. It’s just impossible these days. You won’t believe it but I worry about one negative review today, and then I chase it down and say, what happened here, how do we rectify it? What can we tell the customer? How can we replace the customer's product? What part can we ship? Can we send a porter tomorrow morning? So, today at this scale, we still worry about one single negative review. You have to be on top of that.
Pritish: Quickly, I want to touch upon competition. I'm sure there are a number of companies who would like to compete with Wakefit and build a similar thing. Yesterday, actually I was reading Jamie Dyson's book from Dyson technology. I will just read the line. I found it very interesting. He says, “copying reduces the choice of consumers. Rather than encouraging different products, working in different ways and achieving different objectives.” Do you agree or disagree with that?
Chaitanya: Strongly agree. And you're right. So many competitors have sprung up, nearly at some point we used to track 25 or 30 companies and we are a weird company. So, we have three sets of competitors, one on mattress side, one on accessory side, and one on furniture side. And a lot of them do tend to copy us. So, over a period of time, it becomes that observe them, notice them, be aware of them, but just ignore them for the rest of the business decisions, because it's really scary to think that you can just look at competition and take all your decisions based on that, because that means you're doing a disservice to your customers. In our industry, the barrier to entry is very low. Barrier to scale is very high. So, we said, okay, no problem. Let 40 companies come. Let's not lose sleep, but be aware because the next big disruptor can come from some small garage. Don't be cocky about it. Be aware, but don't get obsessed over it either. And scaling is so hard because we know how difficult it was to arrive at the material margins and gross margins that today we are operating at. We know how much difficulty we had to face to shave that half a percent production overhead. And we know that somebody who is just contract manufacturing and running it as a trader will never achieve. We know how difficult it was to launch a new product after nine rounds of testing. Humidity, temperature, stress, heat dissipation, like nine things that you go through, we know how difficult it was. So, if somebody is just copying something from outside and giving it to a manufacturer to say, do it, I've started my margin, good luck. So, we know what our strengths are, but at the same time, we have to be super aware of everything that's happening. That's the balance. A lot of companies say, oh, I ignore my competition. We should never look at competition. But I believe that is also another extreme that is not correct. You need to see and learn from everywhere.
Pritish: What is the kindest thing somebody has done for you?
Chaitanya: While I was on a road trip, it started pouring and I was on a bike and this was in interior Maharashtra somewhere. It was a deserted highway. I stopped below a tree and I was standing right next to the tree. There was some construction going on and there were a bunch of labourers who had just woken up and were cooking for themselves. So, they just called me, gave me their bed. They continued cooking, continued chatting, and they let me sleep till the rain ended. Then I left. They wouldn't take money from me. They wouldn't do anything. In fact, they offered what they had cooked. And they were just construction labourers. They had no business knowing me, talking to me, helping me. They just called, helped, and did it. Just imagine the generosity of heart that is needed to simply do that for a stranger with no expectations, genuinely no expectations.
Pritish: Do you have a story worthy learning?
Chaitanya: One day in our old office, a 77 year old gentleman just turned up very agitated and he and our customer experience team, a very senior manager, said, okay, what do you want? Can we get you some water? Please have a seat. So, he said, yeah, I live in Banaswadi. It's a far off area and I took two buses and an auto to get here. I placed the order and suddenly I felt that I've been cheated. So, then I went to the contact page, found the address and I've landed up here. I want to know whether my money is safe. This person opened up the order history and said, this is your name, your address. This is a product. This is a promise delivery date. Is it all correct? He said, yes. So, there's nothing to worry, sir. Please go back home. We will ship it on a promise date. We found an auto, put him in auto and sent him. I think, and then we realised that he was also one of the creators of the Kannada typewriter. He was a distinguished gentleman. So, two to three learnings were there for us. Number one, even people over 45-50 that are completely ignored by social media platforms and Google for targeting, there is a market. Number two, India is still a trust deficit market. Not because people are worried about their money, but because they've had enough and more people who have cheated them in their lifetimes. So, we have to never let them down because then they'll never trust us again. And the third one was, I think every small act of kindness that we do to our customer, they'll remember and pass it on to somebody else. So, you do it without any expectations.
Pritish: Advice to a younger self?
Chaitanya: Nothing I would say. It's very hard for me to say, Oh, can I cut out this part, cut out that part? Because everything has added to where I am. Including the really bad days. One thing I would probably tell that person is if you're depressed today, you're really sad today because of these things. Five to seven years later, you’ll be in a much better place. So, look forward to those. It's not going to be like this forever.
Pritish: Brilliant. What is your superpower?
Chaitanya: I think being calm and objective, irrespective of the situation, I'm just happy to dissociate from all the drama and emotions and just observe and then form a rational, steady view on my own terms.
Pritish: Three books or blogs that have influenced you the most?
Chaitanya: I think one is ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ by Richard Bach. It's a very small book, the basic summary being that the only thing limiting yourself from what you want to achieve is your own mental boundaries. Nothing outside in the world. The second book I really like is called ‘Snowball.’ It is the authorised biography of Warren Buffett. He's the perfect personification of compounding in his investing, in his life, in his relationships, in his capital, every single thing. So that clearly shows you compound everything. So don't just treat people and relationships transactionally. You meet somebody five years later, they'll be friends. 10 years later, they'll be a partner, whatever else that will happen. And the last thing that has really helped me in my thinking itself is ‘Lean Startup’ by Eric Ries and how not to be wasteful in building anything.
Pritish: Chaitanya, it was a pleasure having you on the show.
Pritish: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Pritish. I hope people find value in this time spent and all the very best to you in continuing this podcast.
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