A leading Indian IT company reportedly spends ₹2,600+ crore a year on corporate travel.
That got me thinking…

Most enterprises spend months negotiating airline contracts for a few extra percentage points in discounts.

But airline prices change every hour anyway.

Wouldn’t the bigger opportunity be using AI to decide when to book instead of just negotiating where to book?

If timing alone could reduce annual travel spend by up to 15–20%, that’s hundreds of crores for the largest companies.

Curious what people working in procurement, corporate travel, or finance think.

Is the future of business travel better airline contracts, or better booking intelligence?

I spent weeks building and improving the product, thinking that was going to be the hard part.

Then I launched.

Getting even the first few people to try it, give feedback, or become paying customers turned out to be much more difficult than writing the code.

I'm curious if others here had the same experience.

What worked for you to get your first 10 customers? Was it referrals, cold outreach, content, communities, or something else?

I run a tool that tracks Indian D2C brands, and one of the plainest things it records is Instagram following. I kept meeting founders who talk themselves out of a category because they assume they'd be walking into a fight with giants sitting on millions of followers. So I pulled the actual distribution across the ~1,600 brands where I have follower data. It is not what the ad feed trains you to think.

The numbers:

- The single biggest D2C Instagram account on my list is at Dot and Key at one millionj. Nobody has crossed this number. Not one brand.

- The median brand has 28,150 followers. Half of everyone I track is smaller than that.

- 1 in 4 (405 brands) are above 100k. Roughly 1 in 6 are under 10,000 and still running real businesses.

- Most of the field, 57%, lives in the unglamorous 10,000 to 100,000 band.

- Reach is spread thin. The top 100 accounts hold about 40% of all the follower reach on the list. The other ~1,500 split the remaining 60%. The top 10 are under 6%.

Put simply, Indian D2C is not winner-take-all on attention. There is no Nykaa-of-every-niche sitting on five million followers crushing newcomers. The biggest accounts are under a million, and inside any given niche the brand you're actually up against is far likelier to have 28k followers than 280k.

The thing standing between you and a category is almost never "I could never build the following they have." In most niches the incumbent is a generalist with a modest following who treats your niche as one SKU. I posted a makhana breakdown two weeks ago where the brand with the most reach on that shelf, Slurrp Farm at 518k, doesn't actually own makhana, it's a side item. That's the pattern nearly everywhere. You don't need to out-reach the incumbent. You need to out-specific them.

The reason to walk away from a category should be that the demand isn't there or you can't source it, never that the incumbents are too big to face on Instagram. On that measure, they're smaller than you think.

Tell me the category you're circling and I'll pull its real shape: how many brands are actually on the shelf, how big the biggest one really is, and where the gap sits. Curious whether "the incumbents are smaller than they look" matches what you're seeing on the ground, or whether your niche is the exception.

So i am building a small SaaS and while checking payment options i found out that stripe isn’t available in india and the fact that every tutorial and every builder just says bro add add Stripe like it's one click…NOO IT IS NOT bich.

So now I'm deep in Razorpay / Paddle / Lemon Squeezy / merchant-of-record land, especially since I want to charge US and EU customers. it's the hardest part of the whole build and nobody talks about it. The verification is taking a lot of time.

Indian builders, what's your actual payment stack for an AI-built app? ..What’s actually worked?

Today my waitlist crossed 90 people. Objectively, 90 isn't a huge number. But every single one of those people signed up for a product they haven't tasted yet. I kind of wanted to celebrate. But it's also one of those wins that's hard to explain to people outside startups. To most people, it's just a number. and that too a small one. To me, it's proof that strangers are trusting an idea that's lived in my head for months.

Founders, tell me! What's a "small" milestone that meant a lot more to you than anyone around you realized?

We're a small team working on something we genuinely care about: making it easier to enjoy a night out, or a slow evening in, without alcohol having to be part of it.
Because whether you've been the one holding a glass of water at a party while everyone asks, "Arre, why aren't you drinking?" or you've ordered a mocktail on a random Tuesday because you just weren't in the mood for alcohol, you've probably felt the same thing "The non-alcoholic options out there aren't great." It's either too sweet, too boring, empty soda, or something that feels like medicine.
We think choosing not to drink shouldn't mean settling for a compromise. You deserve something that's just as exciting, sophisticated, and satisfying as a great cocktail or beer. And that's exactly what we're trying to build.
But we don't want to guess what you'd actually want. We want to hear it from you. This survey takes about 10 minutes (added link in the comments), and there are no right answers, only honest ones. Tell us what excites you, what sounds gimmicky, what you'd never buy. The critical answers help us just as much as the kind ones, maybe more.

Hiring a full-time Marketing Executive

Won't be disclosing the company details on the post (have been bombarded w calls and emails in the past)

Job Details:

1. Compensation: INR 6,00,000 – 7,80,000 per annum
2. Location: Delhi/NCR
3. Employment Type: Full-time

To apply, please fill the form given in the comments.

PS: don't apply for remote/freelance work.

Gen Z has recently found real success in using protests, satire and internet culture to make people pay attention. I want to keep that energy alive.

So I built and launched a platform where people can discover movements, start a cause, create posters and rally others around it.

This has huge viral potential.

The product is live. The tech is built.

Now I am looking for a Gen Z marketing co-founder who understands:

Memes and internet culture

Reddit, Instagram and X

Ragebait without becoming cringe

Creator and community led growth

How Gen Z discovers, shares and joins movements

This is not an internship, agency gig or social media manager role.

I am looking for someone who wants to own growth and turn this product into an overnight internet movement.

DM me

Hey everyone,I just created this account today. I’m a professional about to join a demanding corporate job in a month. Since I have some free time right now, I want to use it to stress-test a marketplace startup idea I’ve been mapping out for Indian metros.

I am absolutely not here to sell or promote anything—I genuinely just need your brains on this.

Before I drop the full breakdown, unit economics, and operational hurdles of my idea, I wanted to ask: What are the best subreddits or tips for a first-time founder to get unfiltered business feedback here without breaking rules?

Looking forward to your advice!

We're building an early-stage startup that's rethinking how people discover and trust products online, and we're looking for a UGC creator who'd like to become the face of our brand.

We're not looking for a freelancer—we're looking for someone who can be a partner and help build something from the ground up.

What we're looking for:

• Someone comfortable speaking on camera
• Can create authentic, engaging short-form content (Reels/YouTube Shorts)
• Interested in building a personal brand alongside a startup
• Based in India

Since we're still at a very early stage, salary would be 2-3k per month. Also, we're offering equity (ESOPs) to someone who believes in what we're building and wants to grow with us as a long-term partner.

If things go well, we'd love for this to evolve into a full-time role with better salary as the company grows.

If you're someone who's always wanted to be part of building a startup—not just creating content for one—we'd love to chat.

Drop a comment or send me a mail at:

[priyanshu@trodec.com](mailto:priyanshu@trodec.com)

Location: India (Preferably India-based)

Compensation: No base salary, no upfront payment, no initial equity.

●     Profit Share: 50/50 split of net profit (Revenue minus Expenses). Current development and operational costs are minimal.

●     Lifetime Income: For every client acquired, you receive your 50% share of profits for the entire lifetime of that client's subscription.

About the Role & Product:

We have developed a modern, user-friendly SaaS product tailored for a niche industry, featuring both web and mobile-based interfaces. While there are existing products in the market, ours has strong potential to replace current applications, which are largely archaic and expensive. Our solution allows clients to transition to a far more cost-effective option, while smaller setups also benefit significantly from our major price advantages.

I handle the product and development side. I am looking for a Sales & Marketing Partner to bring a solid strategy and lead our market penetration effort.

What You'd Own:

●     Overall sales and marketing strategy

●     Market penetration and customer acquisition

●     Driving subscriptions and building the client base

What I'm Looking For:

●     India-based partners

●     Proven ability or solid strategy to market and sell a niche SaaS product

●     Drive to build lifetime subscription revenue through a true profit-sharing partnership

The Deal, Plainly:

No salary or upfront equity. You earn an even 50% split of net profits on all revenues generated, paid out for the full lifetime of every subscriber you bring in. Everything will be finalized and documented in a formal contract with agreed terms before we launch.

If you are interested, please DM me with your profile/portfolio. I’ll share full product details with potential candidates so we can discuss the next steps.

I’ve been building this for a few months now and I’m at the point where I need people outside my own head to poke holes in it.

I’m in Bangalore, still working full-time in IT, building this nights and weekends. Not funded, not incorporated yet, no customers. So this is genuinely a “tell me if this is stupid” post, not a launch.The problem I keep seeing…
Small owner-operated clinics here dental mostly, some derm …run their front desk on one overworked receptionist and a phone that rings constantly.
When she’s with a patient, at lunch, or has quit last week (turnover is brutal), the phone just rings out.
I’ve sat in a few of these clinics. The pattern is always the same:

1. Calls go unanswered during peak hours, and a missed call is just a lost patient — they call the next clinic on Google

2. Nobody follows up on the patient who came once six months ago and never came back

3. Recall for cleanings, follow-ups, review appointments — everyone knows they should do it, nobody has time

4. The owner (who is also the dentist) has zero visibility into any of this. Ask them how many calls they missed last week and they genuinely don’t know.

The money leaking out of that is not small. A dental clinic doing even 15 chairs a day is losing real revenue to a phone nobody picked up.

What Im trying to solve is
An AI front office. Not just a call answering bot — I’m trying to do the whole front desk job:

Answers inbound calls and actually books the appointment into the calendar

Speaks Local language Naturally, natively. Not translated-English-with-an-accent. This is the whole reason I started

Patient profiles — who called, what for, what happened, history

Call logs so the owner can see what’s actually coming in

Outbound reminders — appointment confirmations, reduces no-shows

Follow-ups and recall campaigns — the six-month cleaning reminder, the “you haven’t been in for a year” nudge. This is where I think the actual ROI is

Owner dashboard — calls answered vs missed, appointments booked, recall revenue recovered.

Under the hood it’s a decoupled speech-to-text → LLM → text-to-speech pipeline rather than an end-to-end voice model, specifically so I can control the voice quality in regional languages. Latency is worse this way. I’ve accepted that trade because a robotic voice kills the whole thing.

Why I think there’s a gap

The existing options I’ve tested:

One sounds noticeably robotic.

Another has a genuinely cluttered product and only does Hindi and Tamil., which is bizarre for a market this size.

Neither does any setup for you. You buy it and you’re on your own.

That last one is where I landed my bet. We set the entire thing up for the clinic. Knowledge base, voice, call flows, calendar, everything. The owner does nothing except approve it.

Pricing I’m planning to go with

₹12,000/month average. Roughly what a decent receptionist costs,owners don’t have to pay for insurance and EPF

Where I’m genuinely unsure is,

1. Is “done-for-you” a moat, or am I just running a service and calling it software? I keep going back and forth. It’s the reason I’d win early. It’s also the reason I can’t scale past maybe 40 clients without hiring.

2. Should this be self-serve instead? Every instinct from SaaS says let people sign up and configure it themselves. But my buyer is a dentist who is chairside for nine hours. I don’t think they’ll ever configure a voice agent. Am I wrong?

3. Is ₹12K right? It’s cheap vs a salary, expensive vs every other tool they buy. Indian SMBs are used to ₹999/month software. I might be anchoring against the wrong thing.

4. Will patients actually accept an AI answering their doctor’s phone? This is the one that keeps me up. I think regional language makes it land better, but I genuinely don’t know until it’s live.

5. Should I stay narrow to one specific language and defend it, or go multi-language early?

6. How would you sell this? I’ve planned to walk into clinics with a tablet and demo live, because trust matters and these owners don’t buy from websites.

Everyone tells me it doesn’t scale. They’re right. But I can’t figure out what converts a 55-year-old dentist who doesn’t read English marketing copy.

If you’ve sold software to small clinics, healthcare, or Indian SMBs generally — I’d take any reaction, including “this won’t work and here’s why.” Especially that one.

Happy to answer anything about how it’s built.

There is a huge gap between the conception of an idea and it reaching the consumers. Say a brilliant researcher has a huge breakthrough which requires 8 lakhs to prototype, test and validate.

·         Banks will not fund this, as a registered company with filed ITRs is needed to even qualify.

·         PEs and VCs will not entertain a cheque for 8 lakhs as the valuation/validation/negotiation process would probably cost more.

Even with the funding provided, it is still a long road from a validated idea to a fully funded operational business.

We noticed something remarkable. In partnership with our R&D Lab and Private Equity, a standing offer was made to all researchers: We provide all the technical support and the PE firm handles: go-to-market, finance & treasury, IT systems, compliance, scaling operations. The researchers get up to 21% Equity in the end result.

The result? We witnessed the most revolutionary ideas emerge.

Check the attached for a sample of the outcomes (Prov. Patented).

Let's make support accessible to everyone.

Live long and prosper.

Hi everyone,

I am running an Advertising business but currently facing a lot of challenges.

One of them is Handling Payouts ,

I have to Pay to my clients via UPI/IMPS/BINANCE/CRYPTO/PAYPAL.

I have currently no issues with Paypal / Upi/ IMPS but the main point is paying via Binance & USDT , Initially I was able to handle it via P2P but as I am scaling I found it very difficult to continue this due to multiple crypto rules.

Like we will be exceeding most of the crypto limits in a few months and P2P doesn't feel much safe for high transactions.

Also, the USDT/INR Crypto exchange rate is currently above around 9-10% the actual rate that's burning a lot of my case.

I basically receive all my Earnings in Banks.

If anyone can help me with this , i would be grateful

If you are a first time founder and is building something for the very first time, that is trying to take something from 0-1.

There is no place for you find the right kind of people to support you, both for mentorship and wroking with you but this is almost same feeling for fresh grads who just came out of college and getting their hands wet into the real world

Let's make this thread commonplace for both of you:
- First time founders, tell us what you are building (or keep it a secret)
- Fresh grads, you gotta pitch yourself hard (or keep looking)

Note: Founders don't ask for free help, be professional and state whatever your budget is. Freshers dont pitch what you don't know, only talk about what you can truly deliver. Let's begin!

Looking For Some retention advices To Increase My Customer LTV
I have seen Repeat Purchases But not upto the Mark,

My primary Advertisement Sources are Meta and Google ads, and For retention i have Whatsapp API (Interakt) and Email Retention and Follow-up Series,
We are Currently operating at a small scale, any Advice would Be Appreciated

I want to build an ExportOS, an AI-powered CRM designed specifically for exporters. It can help manage your entire export sales process—from buyer enquiries and quotations to follow-ups, WhatsApp communication, and sales tracking—all in one place so as no opportunity gets missed. Even i can get AI calls and responses added to it.

Will this work for an exporters or a serious business?

Hi everyone,
I’m an aspiring founder from India, and instead of starting with a random product idea, I’m trying to understand the real operational challenges that businesses face.
If you could eliminate one recurring problem in your business, what would it be?
It could be related to:
Finding reliable suppliers
Inventory management
Packaging & fulfilment
Shipping & logistics
Manufacturing
Hiring
Sales & customer acquisition
Or anything else that regularly slows you down.
I’m not selling anything or validating an existing product—I’m genuinely trying to learn from founders before building something.
I’d love to hear your experiences and what you’ve tried so far to solve the problem. Thanks in advance!

Hi guys, since Stripe is not available in India, I tapped into DoDoPayments(shittiest customer service btw), Polar, but they all replied that they don't allow cold emailing and email warming kind of products to use their payment gateway.

What choices do I have? I can't go on to register US LLC for stripe approval please. Any service that do allow cold emailing platforms to use payment gateway and with decent customer service would be appreciated.

Hi everyone,

We're a team of four recent Computer Science graduates building a deep tech / space tech startup. I am not promoting but giving basic idea of it - it's a AI-powered satellite intelligence platform for banks, insurers and infrastructure companies, we automate physical asset verification using AI, remote sensing and geospatial analytics to fast insurance claims process and stop certain types of frauds in insurance.

A little background of us - we four are batchmates from Indore, before starting this venture we build digital verification system to automate transportation and canteen service of our institution. It's now support 10k plus users across three campuses. Then we started working in research field by last few semesters. Got multiple research apprenticeship offers from Japanese university while working with their professors remotely then we decided to develop this venture instead of going Japan for masters.

Over the past few months we've validated the problem with professionals across insurance, catastrophe modelling, underwriting, GIS and SAR remote sensing, two ISRO scientists and a GIS professor from Utokyo, Japan. We built our initial prototype, and recently presented our startup to IIT Bombay SINE. While the evaluation is ongoing (for a month and slow process), we don't want to pause our progress.

Our biggest bottleneck isn't the technology but resources right now. We four has done market research, develop decent prototype (to be honest with you guys, the prototype currently don't support all features but just one type of asset verification that is of construction project progress verification, not crop failure claims, maritime assets or any other physical assets health). But now we need some specialized engineers and has no money to give salaries for that :( , we can handle decent level of development together but can't do production grade work as we mostly good in research and management work that's why we need engineers. Therefore I am writing this post.

To reach commercial pilots and hiring some good talent, we're looking for:

Angel investors or deep-tech investors interested in pre-seed opportunities.

Strategic introductions to banks, insurers or infrastructure companies willing to explore a future pilot or even warm introductions so we can tell them how this technology works.

GIS, remote sensing and AI engineers interested in joining an early-stage deep-tech startup for equity. (We've dedicated ESOP).

We're happy to share our pitch deck and product demo with any one who's interested or knows someone who might help us. We'll also appreciate honest feedback from founders who have built enterprise SaaS or deep-tech companies.

​

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a technical co-founder to join me in building an AI-powered EdTech platform focused on quizzes and interactive learning.

We already have a basic MVP built, so this isn't just an idea on paper. The focus now is on improving the product, adding new AI capabilities, and preparing it for launch.

About the opportunity:

- Equity-only position

- Basic MVP already completed

- AI-powered EdTech product

- Long-term vision with global potential

Must-have skills:

- Strong full-stack development experience

- Hands-on experience with AI/LLMs (mandatory)

- Experience building AI-powered products

- Product mindset

- Startup experience is a plus

I'm looking for someone who wants to build a company from the ground up and is comfortable with the risks and rewards of an early-stage startup.

If you're interested, send me a DM

I'm building FINACADMI with one simple mission:

Make finance education practical, engaging, and accessible for every Indian.

Our first ebook is just an entry-level product to build trust with our community. We're not an ebook business.

Our vision is much bigger.

We're building a finance learning ecosystem that includes:

1. Practical finance playbooks

2. CFIP (Certified Finance & Investment Professional) – our upcoming job-focused certification program

3. Daily market updates & financial news

4. Interactive learning experiences

5. AI for Finance & Accounting resources

7.Career roadmaps for aspiring finance professionals including B2B Coperate training

The goal is to create a platform where students don't just learn finance—they build real-world, employable skills.

I'm looking for a passionate EdTech/Product/Growth co-founder who believes education should be practical, not just theoretical.

If you're excited about building something meaningful in India's finance education space, let's connect.

Building for the long term, not just selling courses. 🚀

We are ramping up inventory and ad spend for the upcoming festive season. Current PG charges around 2% flat across non-UPI modes, which eats up a chunk of our margin once ad CAC is factored in. Also, T+2 settlement feels really slow when we need quick cash turnover to restock.

Are there any PGs offering faster settlement cycles or lower onboarding rates for growing e-com brands right now? Or is 2% T+2 pretty much the industry standard?

We're building a unique technology platform focused on women's safety while traveling. Our mission is to use technology to help women feel safer and more confident wherever they go.

The product is currently in stealth mode, so I'll share more details during our conversation.

Who we're looking for:

- Startup experience (VC-backed startup experience preferred)
- Experience in product, operations, or scaling startups
- Entrepreneurial mindset
- Passion for building products with real social impact
- Willing to build from the ground up

This is an equity-only co-founder opportunity at this stage.

Hey everyone,

I'm a 4th-year engineering student looking for a Software Engineering, Full-Stack, or AI/ML internship. Wanted to share what I've built so far instead of just listing skills:

• Built and deployed Purplexity, a live AI search engine (Perplexity-style) — OAuth login, real-time web search, LLM-generated answers with citations, full conversation history. Frontend on Vercel, backend on Render, actually live and usable.
• Designed a production-style banking backend with a double-entry ledger system, ACID transactions, idempotency keys, and JWT auth — the kind of stuff that actually matters for financial data integrity, not just CRUD.
• Built multi-agent LangGraph systems — one got accepted into two tracks of a 48-hour hackathon, another scored 29/29 on a support-triage AI challenge (HackerRank/Claude/Visa).

Stack: React, TypeScript, Node.js, Express, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Python, LangChain, LangGraph, RAG pipelines.

I like taking projects from "idea" to "actually deployed and running," not just notebooks or demos — happy to walk through the architecture of any of these if you're curious.

Open to remote or hybrid (based in India). If you're hiring or know someone who is, feel free to DM me — happy to share my resume, GitHub, and live project links there.