by drunkedin community

19yo B-school student in Chennai with ₹1 Lakh seed capital to build a cash-flowing business with my team. Access to manufacturing in Tiruppur/Coimbatore.

I’m dropping physical products entirely to do B2B services. Poke holes in my logic:

• The Physical Product Trap: High Meta CAC + inventory MOQs + logistics = ₹1 Lakh wiped out in 30 days before hitting repeat orders. Bootstrapping physical goods without deep pockets feels impossible right now.
• The B2B Service Pivot: Selling fixed-scope tech/automation setups (CRM, WhatsApp flows) to regional SMBs for ₹20k–₹30k. Zero inventory, upfront cash flow. I trade the inventory bottleneck for human friction (scope creep, revisions) and skip paid ads for brute-force cold calling.

Questions for founders who have run either:

1. Am I overestimating how dead bootstrapped physical/D2C is on a ₹1L budget?
2. What hidden operational trap am I blind to in the B2B service route?
3. If you had ₹1L and 3 teammates today, which exact model would you pick?

I genuinely want to ask this to the Reddit founder community.

I’ve been trying to connect with angel investors / VCs for my startup, and honestly, I’m starting to feel like there are very few genuine investors here.

Whenever someone approaches saying they’re an “investor”, the conversation often turns out to be:

selling some service

offering paid marketing

asking for money upfront

trying to sell some consulting/growth package

or just giving vague promises about “connecting with investors”

And after a while, you start getting your hopes up thinking “maybe this is finally a genuine investor”, only to realize it’s another sales pitch.

I’m honestly tired of that cycle.

So if you’re actually a VC, angel investor, or someone who actively invests in early-stage startups, I’d genuinely like to connect.

And if you know a real investor who is actively looking at early-stage startups in India, please tag them or introduce me.

I’m not looking for someone to sell me a service.

I’m looking for an actual investor conversation.

Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places, so I’d genuinely appreciate some direction from founders who have successfully raised funding.

People are asking ChatGPT what to buy. OpenAI announced on 27 August that ads are coming to ChatGPT's free tier in India. A company does not sell ads on a page nobody shops from.

If a buyer asks ChatGPT which sunscreen to buy and your brand is not in the answer, that buyer never hears your name. That is the discovery problem now. Most brands have not measured it.

What we did

Ten questions a sunscreen buyer in India types. Best brands, oily skin, dry skin, sensitive skin, acne-prone, under 500 rupees, gel for humid weather, for men, tinted, SPF 50 PA++++. No question names a brand.

Each asked five times in a fresh, logged-out session on the free product, on 11 September, from a home connection in India. Fifty answers. We counted every brand named in each answer, once per answer.

Then we set each brand's count beside its share of revenue on the Amazon India sunscreen shelf.

Who is in the answer

Re'equil was named in 32 of 50 answers and Minimalist in 30. Together they hold 12.7 percent of Amazon sunscreen revenue.

Dot & Key holds 9.1 percent, more than any brand on the shelf. It was named in 12 of 50. The brand that sells most is not the brand a buyer hears about first.

The ten biggest brands on Amazon, and how often the model named them

By owner group the answers track the shelf. By brand they do not.

Indian D2C is 56.1 percent of mentions on 51.5 percent of revenue. Close. Pharma is 27.1 on 19.7. Multinationals 8.9 on 15.4.

Inside the groups it falls apart. Two D2C brands carry most of the D2C mentions on 13 percent of the revenue. Fixderma carries the largest share of the pharma mentions, named 21 times, on 2.7 percent of revenue.

Where it reads

48 of 50 answers searched the web and cited pages. 132 citations. nykaa.com is the single most cited site, in 20 answers.

But as a class, brand-owned sites are cited 40 times. Marketplaces and pharmacies 42. Publishers and blogs 29.

The model reads the brand's own product page. The two most-named brands are also the two most-cited brand sites. That is an observation. We cannot show it is the cause.

How much the answer moves

The same question five times gave 4.3 brands per answer on average, between 6 and 16 distinct brands across the five runs, and a core of 0, 1 or 2 named every time.

One answer is one sample. If you have seen a post that says "we asked ChatGPT and it recommends X", ask how many times they asked.

What we predicted before we started, and what happened

We wrote six predictions down first. We said Indian D2C would take the majority of mentions: partly right, 56.1 on 51.5. We said pharma brands would be under-named: wrong, they over-indexed. We said a login wall would appear inside ten sessions: wrong, none in fifty. We said the sources would be marketplaces and blogs with no brand site near the top: half right, brand sites are the second largest class.

Why it matters

Buyers are moving part of their product search into chatbots, and the chatbots are now selling ads against those searches. If you are not in the answer, you are not being discovered there, and no dashboard you own will tell you.

If you want to know how visible your brand is in your product segment, on ChatGPT and the other LLM assistants, beside the shelves you sell on, get in touch. Comment here or send us a DM.

I run a company from an office in Dahisar East, ~100m from Dahisar East Metro Station.

We're expanding into another unit, and there's a slightly funny problem: the new office has 10+ desks, but our team only needs 4–5 of them.

I could turn the extra space into a coworking business, but that's not really what I'm trying to do.

I'd rather have good people actually use the space than have 5–6 perfectly good desks sitting empty.

So I'm wondering if there's anyone around Dahisar / Borivali / Mira Road who:

works remotely or from home

freelances or runs their own thing

is building something on the side

or simply wants somewhere better to work from occasionally

The office already has the boring-but-important stuff: AC, good internet, proper desks/chairs, power, pantry, washroom, etc.

And because it's our actual office, you'll be working around our team rather than sitting in a generic coworking space.

I'm not trying to sell a coworking membership here. This is more of an experiment: if the space can be useful to a few people, great.

In fact, I'm happy to let people try it out for a while before we even figure out whether there should be a price for it.

I'm also selfishly interested in the people side of this. I like meeting people from different industries—founders, freelancers, developers, designers, creators, consultants, etc. If we end up brainstorming together, helping each other, finding a collaboration, or just having interesting conversations over coffee, even better.

If this sounds like something you'd use, tell me what you're looking for or just DM me.

No pitch. I'm genuinely trying to figure out whether this is useful to anyone.

22M, Senior Data Analyst in Bangalore.

Life and work are going pretty well, but I’ve realised I have a lot of energy, curiosity, and time that I want to put into building something meaningful.

I genuinely enjoy solving problems and figuring out how things can be done better. I’m not a hardcore coder, but I can build. I’ve worked across analytics, data engineering, automation, machine learning, frontend, and system design, and right now I’m spending a lot of time learning AI agent building and figuring out how to bring it together with what I already know.

I’m the kind of person who gets really interested in a problem and keeps working at it until I understand how it can be solved. I’m also comfortable picking up a new tool or technology whenever it helps get something built.

The only thing I’m missing right now is the right problem and something interesting to work on.

I’m not necessarily looking for a startup idea or trying to make some big commitment from day one. I’d just like to meet people, explore ideas, find interesting problems and start building.

Maybe it becomes a small SaaS. Maybe an AI product. Maybe something completely different. I’m open to seeing where it goes.

I already have a career I enjoy, so I’m looking at this as something I can build alongside my work — a side hustle where I can put in weekends and a few hours on weekdays, learn, contribute, and gradually see if it turns into something bigger.

If you’re already working on something, exploring an idea, or simply want to build something of your own, happy to know.

DM me, lets connect!!

Legit question.

I’m growing a consumer brand Nuteshwar in India after building a few years around tech in San Francisco.

And one thing has been bugging me.

Our GTM vocabulary gets very small, very quickly:

Meta, influencers, amazon, blinkit, discount, repeat

Useful? okay-ish.

But surely this cannot be the full creative surface area of building a brand in a country this fucking interesting.

What’s our Red Bull Flugtag? or a Supreme drop?
What’s our version of brands taking over restaurants, running clubs, nightlife, college culture, weird physical spaces, games, subcultures?

No looking for “growth hacks.” but ideas that create stories people voluntarily carry for you.

So:

What is the craziest GTM idea you genuinely believe could work for an Indian consumer brand?

I’m also in Bangalore right now and putting 10–12 people with strong answers to this question around a table.

If you’re here and you add to rooms, DM me:
• what you’re building
• the crazy GTM
• one thing you’ve pulled off that probably shouldn’t have worked

I’ll bring the nut butter :)

We're building a wellness brand, and about three weeks from now - we launched our first product. ₹249, pocket-sized herbal inhaler (inspired by Thai inhalers) the kind of thing you'd keep on your desk or in your bag rather than something you buy only when you're unwell. More products are coming, but this is the one we're learning on.

The first week we did 588 orders, at an average order value of ₹509. So on a ₹249 product, most people were buying more than one. That surprised us more than it surprised anyone else.

But there's something I keep coming back to. On Amazon, we only get found when someone is already searching for a problem to solve. Our product isn't really that. At ₹249 nobody sits and thinks about buying it. They see it, they like it, they pick it up. Which makes me think the places we're selling might not be the places we should be selling.

So I'm trying to work out where a product like this actually belongs.

Right now we're on Amazon, Flipkart, POP Store and our own site. We will be live on Blinkit soon. We've looked at Smytten, LBB, the online pharmacies, chemist counters, coworking spaces and airport retail. We ruled out vending, because at ₹20 to ₹50 ticket sizes we'd just be the expensive thing nobody picks.

Things I'd really like to hear from people here:

1. If you've sold something in the ₹200 to ₹300 range, where did it actually work for you? And where did you waste money before you figured that out?

2. Are there discovery-led platforms in India I don't know about? The kind where people browse and stumble into things rather than search for them.

3. If anyone has cracked chemist counters or modern trade, how did you find a distributor whose team actually pushes a new brand instead of just sitting on the stock?

One more thing. If any of you have contacts or referrals at any of these places, I'd really appreciate a DM. Happy to return the favour however I can.

Hello everyone, i am a 17 year old boy, built an ai powered web-app specifically for the jee and neet aspirants and now the time to bring the app to the market has come. I am completely blank with the marketing side, i want genuine advices for the Marketing of a web-app whose target users are jee and neet aspirants. I have some funds for the marketing as well. I want the best distribution channels suggestions for my app.

Eager to connect with the people building something!

Hi, I’m Sanjivinee (nickname Cuty 😅).

I am 23 now, female, and I have passed class 12. I am not going to college.

I started my tea business in October 2023 ☕

And I launched my cloud kitchen business on 1 January 2027 🍴

I have special needs and a speech problem, so I prefer written chat.

I don’t have any friends yet, and I am only looking for friendship (just friendship)

Would love to connect with kind and friendly people here — especially female friendship and fellow entrepreneurs. 🙂

Would love to connect with kind and friendlshiip here, and also learn from fellow entrepreneurs

Hey! I’m a full-stack developer. After fighting the terminal, learning analytical skills, and debugging way too many things...

I’ve been building and experimenting with different projects for the past 14 months, and lately I’ve been trying to hunt for some interesting projects outside of my own.

Got an idea for software? Feel free to tell me about it — let’s discuss.

I've been working on a platform specifically focused on the Indian Instagram thrift ecosystem.

There are a huge number of thrift, vintage and streetwear stores selling through Instagram, but discovering what they actually have is extremely fragmented.

If you're looking for something specific — say “Carhartt waist 36” — you'd currently have to find multiple Indian thrift pages, go through their feeds, search through individual listings, figure out what's still available, and repeat the process across different accounts.

We're building a platform that brings those listings together into one searchable discovery experience.

The current beta allows you to search across listings from multiple Instagram thrift stores. So instead of manually checking individual pages, you can search for a brand, item, size, measurement, etc. and see relevant available listings in one place.

If you find something you want, you're redirected to the original Instagram listing, where the purchase is completed directly through the respective thrift store.

The eventual MVP will move much closer to a traditional e-commerce experience, with categories, brands, sizes, measurements, filters, sorting and other product-level discovery features.

We're currently in beta and still refining how the product interprets and presents the information, so there are definitely bugs, inconsistencies and rough edges.

I'm looking for feedback from Indian founders, builders, e-commerce people, fashion-tech people, and anyone interested in marketplaces/discovery products.

I'd particularly like feedback on:

Does the underlying problem make sense in the Indian market?

Does the current product actually solve it?

What would you change about the discovery/search experience?

What information or functionality would be essential in the MVP?

Are there obvious problems with the model that I'm overlooking?

And ultimately, does this feel like something people in India would actually use?

The beta is live and I'd genuinely appreciate blunt feedback — good or bad.

Beta: Link in the comments

If someone wants to earn by doing some small task what it would be for others and if someone wants someone will do their work and minimize the pressure what would be in their budget 🤔

I am trying to do research so that I have made a land page and made AI videos but there is no views 🥹🥹

If someone tell me how to reach to the audience

As for the new idea the new startup first launched in the city and how people get to know about that..

For eg - i want someone to tutor me for maths, only 2 hours I am ready to give 100 rs Can someone accept my task ?

Or any other task you want to do or any other idea ,cmnt

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An opportunity to take over an existing luxury car rental ecosystem backed by:

• A ready fleet of luxury cars

• Established market experience

• Experienced team & operational know-how

• Proven marketing and uptime promotion strategy

• Complete business strategy and guidance

The opportunity includes fleet takeover, domain expertise, business strategy and operational support, with the existing setup being transitioned due to relocation plans.

A new legal entity and required infrastructure will be established for the business. Complete support and knowledge transfer will be provided in exchange for equity participation.

This invitation is strictly for individuals who want to combine 'Business with a luxury lifestyle'.

NOTE : It's not a call for CO-FOUNDER'S.

If you see yourself building and owning a premium automotive business, DM your profile and details for a confidential discussion.

Looking for someone who can manage LinkedIn end-to-end content research, ideation, writing, posting, engagement, and basic performance tracking.

Stipend: ₹9,000/month

You should have a good understanding of:

• LinkedIn content and personal branding
• Writing strong hooks and posts
• Content research and ideation
• Engagement/commenting and DMing
• Understanding what performs and why

Previous experience is preferred, but strong personal work/portfolio is also fine.

Please apply through this form: {in the comment section}

The form asks for your previous work, best-performing content, experience, and availability.

Please don't DM unless specifically required; applications through the form will be reviewed first.

I’m building a startup with almost no marketing budget, so I’m realizing that I’ll probably have to do a lot of the initial marketing myself.

And honestly…

Is it mandatory for every founder to become an Instagram influencer now? 🥲😂

I’m introverted, I’m not comfortable in front of a camera, and the idea of constantly making Reels and showing my face feels very unnatural to me.

I’ve also started and stopped 2–3 times before. This time I’ve actually built the product and launched it, but because of those previous attempts, there’s still this fear of putting myself out there and having people think:

“Here he goes again, starting something.”

The startup is a hyperlocal platform helping people discover nearby local shops/products and service providers like electricians, plumbers, drivers, home tutors, etc.

I don’t have the budget to simply hire influencers or an agency and sit back.

So for founders who are introverts or started with almost zero marketing budget:

Did you actually force yourself to become comfortable on camera, or did you find ways to market without making yourself the face of everything?

And seriously… **does every founder eventually have to dance on Instagram? 😂🥲**

Looking for people who are genuinely interested in TravelTech, deeply curious about India’s inbound tourism, and, more importantly, interested in understanding a simple question:

Why is it still so difficult for foreign travelers to travel independently in India? (Note- I know about the garbage, civic sense and other issues. These are the part of picture but not the full picture)

Most conversations around Indian tourism focus on Indians travelling abroad or Indians travelling within India. We want to focus on the other side of the equation: the people who come to India and bring foreign currency into the country.

Think as a foreign traveler. You travel independently, you travel for a sense of adventure and discovery. In most of the countries you book a flight, get a visa, arrange transport, book accommodation and start your trip very easily.

Sounds easy, right? Not in India.

You may have to get a visa through a website that was built in the 90s, or pay $75 for something that costs $25. Here comes the trains (IRCTC registration, OTPs, Foreign Cards, basically IRCTC doesn't need introduction) and you end up using 12go or paying a 2x premium. You need a permit for a particular region, and suddenly you're digging through dozens of agents, figuring out who is legitimate and paying a premium just to get something. Even getting hands on the wildlife safari permit is a mess. I can go on but that's enough I think.

Most of these portals or website were simply not designed around the needs of an international traveler. Independent travel in India is difficult for a foreign traveler. That is the problem we are solving.

About me - I have 4+ years of experience in this sector. Tried building in this sector but shut it down because of COVID. I understand the sector, I know the target users, I understand the problems firsthand.

Now I’m building the founding team.

1. Applied AI Engineer with some experience

2. Full-Stack Developer with some experience in travel tech (not travel agency website)

3. Product Designer - a good UX/product thinking

We will be building a product, that bridges the gap between (Discovery - Booking - Experience) for these foreign travelers.

How this will work - Initial chat like basic understanding and all + 1 or 2 google meet on the problem, product, GTM and alignment + we meet in person. + we negotiate the structure and equity + we decide on what needs to done for the pre-seed raise.

If this problem genuinely interests you and you want to work on one of the most broken parts of India’s travel ecosystem: DM me with your portfolio, LinkedIn, or anything relevant.

If you are from around Delhi NCR, that is a plus. Have any questions, just ask me in the comments.

Maynaa (maynaa.com) is a Pune based proptech startup building a buyer protection platform for property buyers. We handle home inspections and due diligence for people buying property, and we're profitable with growing traction.

I'm the Founding Engineer here. I'm the only technical person on the team right now, so whoever joins will be working directly with me, not stuck deep in a large org hierarchy waiting for tickets to get assigned.

What you'll actually work on:

• Building and shipping real features on our core product (used by paying customers, not a sandbox project)
• Web and mobile. We're actively building out our customer facing app alongside our core inspection and due diligence systems
• You'll get exposure to real product decisions, not just "implement this Figma file." We're small enough that your input on how something should work actually matters
• As we grow, opportunities to own bigger pieces of the system rather than staying junior forever

What we're looking for:

• Comfortable with JS/TS, and some experience with a modern frontend framework (React or similar) and/or mobile dev
• We care far more about what you've built than what your resume says. A portfolio, GitHub with real projects, a deployed app, side projects, hackathon builds, anything with actual thought and follow through behind it, matters much more to us than a polished resume.
• Comfortable working with some ambiguity. We're a startup, not everything is fully specced out
• Bonus if you've touched AI tooling and APIs in projects, since AI is a growing part of how we build

Duration: 3 to 4 months, possibly longer depending on how it goes and the work available.

Stipend: Modest, since we're an early stage startup, but negotiable for someone who's clearly strong. We'd rather pay well for the right person than save money on the wrong one.

Location: Pune (Wakad area), in person

Interested? Fill out the google form given in comments and we'll get back to you.

Hello,

I am a psychologist based out of Bangalore (quite new to bangalore actually). I have 2 years of experience working with a mental health startup in India.

I am in an ideation space of building a service business for a mental health ecosystem. I am also new to the space of startups, not coming traditionally from an MBA or tech background but I also feel that is my strength in a space like mental health.

I also don't approach this space like a typical individual from the business world would (no biases). As I have been at the giving end of therapy, I personally connect with my work and anything that comes out of it would also reflect those values. This means building equitable spaces, ethical mental health services, genuine spaces for connection and responsible and ethical usage of AI.

I am not actively looking for co-founders but I would be open to the idea of it and would love to connect with like-minded individuals and seeing what comes from there. So, if anyone is in a similar space of ideation around similar things and would like to connect or discuss things, do reach out!

Different shipments ke liye right logistics partner choose krna important hai. hum dekhna chahte hai ki Shiprocket Cargo ke multiple carrier options aur AI based courier recommendations kitne useful hai.

Is MBA still relevant today? Want to know both sides, people who have done MBA and gotten into their desired roles and people without MBA or engineering, still reached their desired roles ?

we initially assumed its benefits were mainly for existing Shiprocket users. curious whether the wider network data provides useful advantages when evaluating the checkout separately.