Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
A founder’s journey towards meaning | Sanchit Garg @ TravelTriangle & Inner Fit
343 Plays1 year ago
From being almost penniless to finding product-market fit to becoming a powerhouse- with his first startup TravelTriangle, Sanchit went through it all. But almost like the monk who sold his Ferrari, Sanchit realised that he was seeking something deeper and that started his journey of building up Inner Fit.
Read the text version of the episode here.
Read more about the startups :-
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Entrepreneurial Journey
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, I am Sanchit, founder and CEO at Inafit. Before, I also founded TravelChangle.
00:00:21
Speaker
This episode of the founder thesis podcast features one of the most unique founders we have met so far. Sanchit Garg was hired by Yahoo after he graduated from IIT Bombay. The next two years at Yahoo introduced him to the world of internet products and startups. And by 2010, he was a founder himself. What follows next sounds very filmy.
00:00:42
Speaker
But Sanchit went through the phases of entrepreneurship from being almost penniless to finding product market fit and raising the first check to becoming a dominant player in their space.
The Birth and Growth of TravelTriangle
00:00:52
Speaker
This is the journey of Sanchit's first start-up, Travel Triangle, which has raised more than $40 million in date.
00:00:59
Speaker
But almost like the monk who sold his Ferrari, Sanjit realised that he was seeking something deeper and that started his journey of building up inner fit. A start-up that helps corporate employees to be effective through principles of coaching and meditation. Stay tuned for this amazing story and subscribe to The Founder Thesis Podcast and any audio streaming app for more such founder journeys.
00:01:29
Speaker
I think the motivation by then was putting your name on the map. Like how do you make your mark on this place? And startup was the first thing that comes to your mind. So we started experimenting with multiple things. And Prabhat, Sankal, and me, Prabhat also joined in. So we all three were same school. Friends sent seven standard. They went to IIT, Kharagpur, and Guwahati. All come to design. So three geeks in one room.
00:01:56
Speaker
in a small room in my apartment. One of our products started getting some traction, one of our LED frames started using it. Which product was this? This was the holiday booking product. When we started, I had my savings from Yahoo. In one year, those savings went to zero. When you were building the holiday product, you had to pay for server costs and some maybe marketing costs and things like that.
00:02:22
Speaker
Yeah, we also hired four people the first few employees. So, that is where the savings were going and we all hit zero. Now, imagine coming from a place where financial security was critical for you and everything was about money first job and you said money is solved, but now bank count is zero.
00:02:42
Speaker
It took me two, three days to understand that it's okay, to get comfortable with it. But it was very empowering to live at balance zero and still be okay with it. So this one year period in which you burned through your savings, what did you do in that one year? Just help
Business Model and Funding Challenges
00:02:58
Speaker
me understand that.
00:02:58
Speaker
I moved to Naira, Sankal's house. He was kind enough to take me in. It was a small two-bedroom, three-bedroom house. We made one of them in the office. One was two of the bedrooms. And we were starting to experiment with multiple toilets. So we launched Panorama View of Taj Mahal, Red Fort. That was one toilet, didn't fly. And you wanted to do B2C, like consumer products?
00:03:22
Speaker
See, this is 2010. The words like B2C, B2B, marketplace were not common then. Flipkart was the only company which was big enough. So marketplace became common, B2C, B2B became common in 2013 kind of timeframe. At that point of time, it was like, you want to solve holidays. And yes, it was me to see them. But I remember it was a two-sided marketplace, travelers and travel agents.
00:03:47
Speaker
So we would go to Traveler's office saying, hey, we are from IIT, we are doing this, and we want you to come on our platform and service our clients.
00:03:56
Speaker
And I remember travel agents like almost kicking us out from the office here that we don't have time come something later. It's a very formal industry where you would take appointment and exchange cards and do all that. And we take people, we take our bikes, we just go to the office, you just go to the office and say, Hey, we are here, you want to chat. So, so it was also a B2B angle where we were building the other side of the market.
00:04:20
Speaker
The first few vendors were difficult. I remember that we also went to like at least 50 or 100 investors. There were very few investors then and almost everyone said no to us and that was basically we were not able to pitch the idea. In our Pan IIT event, we just came across one of my senior Akshay Saxena.
00:04:41
Speaker
And he asked you, okay, you're doing a startup? I said, yes. He said, I said, I want funding. He said, what, how much you want? I said, a number. I said, okay. I said, what valuation you are giving on? He said, you decide the valuation. And he put the money in and then I took that and told 10 more people, 10 more people put money in. But that's how we got our first funding. So my learning was, it's a very black swan moment. You try everything, but you know, where it comes from is hard to tell.
00:05:08
Speaker
So when you raised this funding at that time, what was travel triangle like? Like what was working? Because you were doing multiple experiments. What worked finally and what scale did you reach? Yeah, that time we were doing 20 lakh rupees per month top line. Okay. When was this? When you raised funding? 2012. Okay. Okay. Okay. And so your holiday experiment was successful in the first year. What else did you build?
00:05:35
Speaker
It was like on Amazon, you buy a shirt, that kind of experience to buy a holiday package, purely online. That did not work. Because everyone wants personalized planning and all of that. They want to talk to somebody and plan it out. Exactly. So what worked was they put up a request.
00:05:55
Speaker
in a nice way, and then you connect them to three local travel agents who can service that request. And those three travel agents would compete. You can see their ratings, and you pay on the platform, and the platform gives you assurance of the service.
00:06:10
Speaker
OK, OK. So this was like a matchmaking platform then, like helping match travelers with agencies. How did the payment get decided? Because this was a customized product, right? So what pricing to be charged would get decided after they actually spoke to an agent?
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, it was like pure discussion between travelers and two, three travel agents. And they would customize and in the end, the payment would come up. So travelers would put in the invoice on travel triangle and then the traveler would pay for it. So like, tell me how you did your, the go-to market and getting demand, generating demand. How did you do that? Like that's the biggest challenge in consumer internet, right? Like generating demand. We knew that you had to pick up a destination. We picked up Kerala.
00:06:59
Speaker
So we ran ads only for Kleda travelers. And we only got supply of Kleda by going to Kleda and being with travelers there.
00:07:09
Speaker
So, our go-to market was very basic that I had destination by destination, first 20% was right and we built on that. I remember that when we were having 20 lakh per month kind of top line, I went to my Indian investors and they were like, you know, how many bookings were happening? What was the percentage commission? Around 20-30 bookings were happening every month. And he was like, show me your MIS. I said, what is MIS?
00:07:38
Speaker
This is Amit Gauravar, again a super amazing agent. He gave me an Excel sheet, month one, month two, month three, for a bookings, for this commission, kind of a thing. And that was the first way of actually recording the data of what's happening, dashboard. So this 20 lakhs, you're saying that was like a GMV out of which you would get? That's right. Maybe a single digit percentage or more than like, what was the commission rates? Yeah, 10%, 10%, 5%.
00:08:06
Speaker
Okay. Got it. Okay. Okay. So how much did you raise at the angel round? 60-70 lakhs. Not bad. For that time period, it's a pretty good sum of money. So then what, like once you raise that around 12-13 period after that, like how did that change your trajectory? How did you learn how to build an internet business?
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, the funny thing was, every day in a bank count, the transitions were, I bought 25 rupees pre-paid of mobile chain balance, some 100 rupees, some 200 rupees petrol. And suddenly there was a transition of 10 lakh, 10 lakh, 10 lakh in the bank count. The SMS was funny to see, 5 rupees, 50 rupees, 100 rupees, 20 rupees, and then 10 lakh, 10 lakh, 60 lakhs.
00:08:49
Speaker
So that was the first time when I realized that, okay, we have money. That was the first feeling we could make the mark. And the big PR done by Times of India, that three founders made 20 lakh rupees per month in seven
Growth Strategies and Operational Excellence
00:09:00
Speaker
months. Nobody understood GMV and commission.
00:09:05
Speaker
Tell me a bit on also the things you did to make it grow. What were some of those tactics, strategies to make it grow? The tactics was basically create a playbook for ET destination. Like in Kerala, how do you get the first few travellers? How do you get the supply? How do you make the critical mass going? How do you set up a team inside?
00:09:25
Speaker
travel triangle to facilitate the boat. Once your destination is done, it has grown to a critical size. How do you build the best hotels, best cars in the system? Once you have done that, keep on adding more destinations. We are going deeper in destinations and then adding more destinations with the playbook.
00:09:46
Speaker
We were also hiring the right team members. Amazing. How did you know that hiring is important to get right, that you should screw it up? The way I feel it is that we keep on doing things, but we didn't know these terms and mantra. I'm building my second company now, and I feel there are so many frameworks. Everybody says that if you don't do this right, your company will fail. First hire, first investor, first client, first product, first this and that.
00:10:13
Speaker
Back then, nobody would say these things and the company still worked fine. My point is we did fundamentally right things without knowing about any frameworks and we were fine. So between the three or a few co-founders, what were you looking after? I think all three of us were coming from computer science background. So none of us knew anything else but coding, but we kept on changing our heads. So Sankal moved very quickly out of coding. He became the CEO guy, the business guy, the strategy guy, the fundraising guy.
00:10:41
Speaker
I spent some time in technology, then moved to operations, where I scaled the operations to realize. And when I moved to operations, Prabhat took care of the entire technology. So once I went to operations, I realized now operation is good, stable. We have five lead people team. We have the right leaders who can build it further, but our product function is left behind.
00:11:02
Speaker
When I took a product, I understood how critical function that is, the nuances of it, and we worked very hard for two years to make it right. Every gear about hiring the right team, putting the right sprint processes, putting the right roadmap exercises, the right synergies between business and product and tech.
00:11:21
Speaker
We were used to call it the silver bullet to make product, but it's a problem of 1000 gears getting it right. Tell me that product journey, like how did you improve travel triangle the product? Like what did you identify as the way to tackle it? And what made you feel that the product is not good enough initially? So see, initially when we made it was a technology, it was a code, put on the website, something code runs, you can do a transaction of the travelers, right?
00:11:52
Speaker
Then I moved to business with the technology we just pumped in on the number of users we have and we scaled. But then I realized that product has to make the customer's life easy. How can he plan a very beautiful trip for himself? You have to understand the customer each and every pain point his mindset. Disconnect yourself with what you have the solution.
00:12:13
Speaker
In his life, relate to it, breathe it. He's busy also the day. He has no time to plan. And yet he has to plan because his husband or wife also wants to go. It's a big investment for them. They won't go to the place ever again in 10 years. And that's the pressure and they know nothing about it. And they're talking to be stabilizing. So you understand what you're operating in. You are essentially selling trust and not holiday packages.
00:12:37
Speaker
you are essentially selling those memories. So how do you create those beautiful memories? Now thinking product from that angle is a very different technology and you need a founder to be in the product function to think that and actually execute it. If a founder is not a product guy, none of the founder is a product guy, the product team will fail.
00:12:55
Speaker
Okay. That's an interesting insight that you're selling trust and not a package. So was your product building led by data? Was it led by intuition or like a mix of the two? I think mix of two. We had like a lot of terms here. We said we want to be data informed, not data driven. Okay. And why is that? Like give me an example of why being data driven could be wrong.
00:13:22
Speaker
Right? So a lot of times, you know, for example, who do you want to sell holidays to? Only the luxury travelers or middle class travelers, because they need a different right. Now data can tell a lot of things that this has money, this has buying power, this is narrow funnel, this is broad funnel, and that's all data. But that's data informed. If you make decisions purely on this basis, that's a data driven thing.
00:13:49
Speaker
But if you take information and you apply, what do you really aspire to be? What is it that you're solving? Are you solving a niche luxury product? Are you solving a mass-scale product which you want to take globally and all? Those are the aspirations of yours that have to come in. And those aspirations are the sort of central thing which you carry for yourself for 5 years, 10 years. These are the expressions that make Amazon and Alibaba different, right? Amazon is more customer and Alibaba is more merchant.
00:14:16
Speaker
So we're still doing the same technology more or less. Got it. Okay. Okay. So like coming back to the journey, so when SaaS partners invested in you, how much did they invest and what, how big were you then at that stage? I think 2014 they invested, right? Yes, that's right. We then invested 2 million. We are $2 million and we were around 10, 12, maybe 15 people team then. Wow. That must have been like a life-changing amount of money then.
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, I can imagine like 10 lakh, 10 lakh and now you're 10, 10 CR kind of SMS. You have received 10 CR within your bank account. Amazing. Okay. And so those funds you used to scale up operations because this was an ops heavy business because for every location you would need to onboard travel agents. So you would need some feet on street who will
00:15:08
Speaker
like go be travel agent, so we'll explain, we'll pitch the process, help them understand how the commission works. And then you would also need a central call center team because you would be calling the inquiries also to make sure that the bucket is not leaky and you would be calling travel agents also to make sure service because you are responsible for quality of overall experience. You are right. So we were having around 500 people in operations and change.
00:15:35
Speaker
and around 200 people in the technology product design place. So around in total, there were like 800, 980 members. Wow. Okay. This was on the back of that 2 million fundraise, you hit this kind of headcount. The moment 2 million came in, we became
00:15:55
Speaker
known in the travel ecosystem. These numbers of 98 employees were in 2017-18 when I left. But journey from SAF to 2014-2018 is every year we kept on raising money. So after SAF, next year came Bessemer's. That was I think 10 million dollars, Bessemer's.
00:16:16
Speaker
Yes. Then we raised from Singapore with RV investors. Then, you know, fundamental team in 2016 or 17, 17 early. Yeah. So, and every year I would see our office growing up to a much bigger size, our team growing up and we kept on executing.
00:16:37
Speaker
So, I would say 2010 to 2014 was a journey of scrappiness, hustle, learning the basics, fundamentals. And the journey from 2014 to 2017-18 was pure fast growth, scaling up, seeing many competitors trying to copy us, learning how to root them out one by one. And we were very brutal with our competitors, with all the respect to them. Tell me those war stories I'd love to hear about those.
00:17:05
Speaker
So it was a difficult business to build to tame services of travel agents at scale and allowing good travel agents to deliver great experience to travelers. It's a very subjective commodity. A car will go wrong. It will break down in the trip and the flights, you will lose the flights there. That's the reality of the world.
Market Position and Competition
00:17:26
Speaker
So how do you team and you create a NPS of 52 and from travelers? That is what we basically we tracked. But the first competitor came in, they started putting leaves on our system and the traveler and started getting out the travel gains name from our system.
00:17:44
Speaker
and then pay heavy discounts to them. They also got the investors who we said no to. So they had the money from the investors who we refused. So now they have money and they have travel agents and they were paying heavy money to these travel agents. It's like a whole Albert fight to service on their systems. And I remember in our board meeting, we were showing that, look, we are here, but the computer started late, but going much faster.
00:18:10
Speaker
And I remember that board meeting where our investors called it out. Are you playing a laboratory here? We are saving logic that, look, we will do this and this is the plan and this is that. He said, I feel that you are making a science laboratory here and that is setting up a failure. You need to go out and crush them now. And we are sitting in the boardroom. We are not leaving the boardroom and don't order lunch for us. We're just sitting here. Go and kill it now. Oh, wow.
00:18:41
Speaker
Okay. And that is the first time I became like more competition aware. I came out of boardroom booked my cab, got my two team members went to the biggest agent who they were coaching. He was in some East Delhi some remote place, got to this office then and there in an hour, gave him
00:19:00
Speaker
We gave him all the lures of bigger discounts, bigger this, bigger that, and showed that the next day he's only working on us and not on them. And from there, the journey started off making sure that our product is so sticky. And it was not that we're making it more sticky. It was that we were using our product to pull the travel chains completely into the system.
00:19:19
Speaker
How do you incentivize travel teams who are again short on time to get very easy leads from travel triangle? Very easily, they can see everything, all their funnels, let them manage them. But it was not about giving them a tool, but it was saving their time and making it so easy for them that they won't step outside. It was everywhere outside the high friction. And then on the top of that, gave discounts, ensured that when they poach our team members, none of them talked to them.
00:19:45
Speaker
And our team was fundamentally loyal because they were in a nice home. And we did the reverse side in a very interesting ways. So in two months from that board meeting, the competitor shut down. Wow. And you went global also in that period?
00:20:02
Speaker
No, we were focused on India. Indian travelers going to India or outside. Okay. So how did you build like say Mauritius or like you send someone there or like this was all happening through phone calls and online? We started with phone. We started with phone. Then I went to a lot of these places, met travel agents, had a good dining experience with them, built relationships. 700 travel agents I would know and they would know me whenever running operations.
00:20:31
Speaker
Yeah, a lot of travel agents have their Facebook. So, you know, and that's the funny story. In 2012, I went to travel agents office and they would take me outside. And I was like, you know, something has to be done. In 2017, many travel agents have them and me on their Facebook profile and LinkedIn profile. So, for me, it was a very humbling
00:20:54
Speaker
but also motivating. I took pride that we created jobs for business for local vendors across the globe, a way to get the travelers and get the business, put bread and butter in Mauritius, Kerala, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Vietnam. That was something which was the biggest win for us.
00:21:18
Speaker
in everything. There were two wins. One, travel events in these local places, relying on travel triangle. And second, our travelers reporting an NPS of 52, which was, and you know, for my computer, it was minus 10. Okay. Okay. Amazing. Okay. So NPS of 52, what does this mean? How do you calculate NPS score? After every trip, we would ask travelers, would you recommend travel triangle to your friends?
00:21:46
Speaker
It's a standard way of seeing how good satisfaction was there. And then 52, the mathematics, but I'm doing a very broad approximation. 52% would say I would definitely recommend.
00:21:57
Speaker
And the rest would say maybe they may not be. Okay. I'm guessing you would have also done a lot of, like on the product side, it looks like there are two things which you would have done differently or better than others. One is you build products for the travel agent so that they could manage the workflow of preparing an itinerary. You probably had some product to help them make the itinerary quickly and easily share the itinerary, manage all the leads to see like, which lead, like their workflow of managing leads, like their workflows, you would have.
00:22:27
Speaker
put into the product so that it's easy for them to work with you. So that's right you know and again the advantage for this was in 2012 you were coders.
00:22:36
Speaker
You could write, I remember writing the entire travel agent dashboard, entire workflow in a week. And, you know, we went to travel, we went to investors and we showed them the business, the numbers, the product on traveler side, this and that, you know, why they invested in us because they saw the travel agent dashboard. And I was like, this is not even a selling picture for us. Like it's a small dashboard. But I realized that the way investors see is very different. They were right. That will be our mode. And that's why that became our mode when competition came up.
00:23:05
Speaker
fascinating. And the other thing which you would have done well is destination pages, like probably you would have a page on Mauritius, which would have a lot of content, a lot of like Mauritius for honeymoon, Mauritius for hiking, Mauritius for college outing, whatever, like different ways of exploring Mauritius for different audiences and like a mix of content and package options that people can, their journey of finding something in Mauritius is easy.
00:23:32
Speaker
That's right. And that was the next phase, right? This is the SEO phase, where we made all of these pages, and we had an amazing guy, again, a computer science from IT, contour, who built the marketing for us. We realized everything like software eating the world was very true for us. Whether it's a business guy, or a tech guy, or a product guy, or a marketing tech guy, everyone was computer science. So our pages for marketing, like you said, for each destination, was all automated on day one.
00:24:03
Speaker
And then as we would see traffic coming on a page, we understand what kind of thing they're looking for. We kept on adding things manually over there. But at one step, you could create all automated pages, change them algorithmically based on what keyword they're searching on Google and they're coming on. There are interesting things they did to bootstrap the marketing.
00:24:23
Speaker
So each person landing on the malicious page would see something different based on what data you have collected about him like based on what keyword he used or if there is some. So if you are clicking let's say on holiday honeymoon package for malicious and then and you land on our page the page will show honeymoon picture in a big thing.
00:24:44
Speaker
and honeymoon for malicious and if you click like say family trip to malicious same page will open but a new image would come and these are the small small thing that create the marketing because you have one second two second kind of a time to attract the travelers. So 2018 is when you left when did you leave? I left in 2018 yes. So what was the scale by then what kind of GMV were you doing and
00:25:12
Speaker
We were doing around $45 million gloss revenue and 900 team members around 1200 travel agents, roughly. Why did you need to raise so much money? You didn't money for customer acquisition or what was the reason? I think in a company, I've seen three phases in travel. The first one is pre-PMF. You say, Hey, you know, this is my product.
00:25:37
Speaker
and everybody says shit. The customers, the investors, the first few employees, vendors, everybody kicks you out from their office. The second phase, you have PMF, you have some good logos, some good names. People see, okay, there's some value and you scale and they put money. This is the place where you are raising money, you are scaling, you are on a very good high. You have already built a thick skin from the previous time of, because if you have crossed PMF,
00:26:06
Speaker
You have crossed it with great and multiple rejections. PPMF is like a founder, basically a rejection handling machine.
Financial Pressures and Strategic Shifts
00:26:14
Speaker
I like that term, rejection handling machine. That's what you do every day. You get rejected. Post-PMF, you are the guy whose PI is covering. Suddenly, you have a team which looks up to you. You have your peers who look up to you now.
00:26:33
Speaker
you are in the media, so your parents know it and suddenly for them, you are like, okay, you're not a bad Apple, you're doing something. And then the third phase comes, which is after CCD or C, when you at some place, it's like too much for you to handle.
00:26:49
Speaker
In the sense, things will go up and down, markets will go up and down. You will have multiple investors on board with different exit dates, with different liquidation preferences. You will have so many things that are no more like a straight path. It's not a company where there's one interest, one mission, and you are all going for it.
00:27:09
Speaker
That's the place where you start becoming insecure. Hey, you know, what if this goes wrong? Whatever I did for these many years will go to zero. So that, and that's where you start saying to team, Hey, do this. Well, I want it tomorrow. Get it done. Kill the, kill this and kill that. All of that is coming from a lot of anxiety, insecurity, stress, pressure on founders. So that's the third phase. The stakes are a lot higher. Like in the early stages, the stakes are not so high here. Now the stakes are very high. So it puts more stress and
00:27:39
Speaker
The stakes are high in your media vision for yourself that I am the one. Because now you are no more rejection handling machine. Now you are a praise handling machine. And the way you handle it is by saying, I am the one. So from a rejection handling machine, you are in the praise handling machine. And a lot of funders grew up here. Because this is exactly opposite, right, from what previous thing was. So in this phase, there are a lot of mistakes that everybody does. Our mistakes was we went on treadmill.
00:28:07
Speaker
of raising money and hence keeping steep targets for us for the next one year and hence focusing on scaling very hard and hence limiting our R&D development, aspirational products. And that's what my learning was that the treadmills were building up.
00:28:27
Speaker
for us with only one motor scale up and we are reading every year on years. It started from a place of scaling fast to a place of necessity. Okay. You had to like scale at any cost no matter how much that cost you. Like you had to burn money to beat those targets. And that's time, that's a time when you face also like earlier the competition was there, but it's a new challenge for you. You can, you solve it with first principle.
00:28:53
Speaker
But now you start seeing different challenges that what if money does not come in six months and you have a team of thousand people. Imagine, and every company goes through these moments when you have limited money in the bank and you have a thousand people team on payroll and you don't know how to give them salary the next month.
Personal Growth and Philosophical Exploration
00:29:08
Speaker
This is a much more scary moment than 2012 when you had a zero bank account, but nobody was dependent on you.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yeah, nobody would hear about it. Now, if something goes wrong, it will be all over the news and I mean, it's like a high profile failure as opposed to when you fail when you're small. Yeah. And it's not just your failure, right? Now you have 1000 people and their families and their bread and butter and their EMI's and their house sent on you. That's a lot of pressure. And you are dependent because of negative burn, you are dependent on investor money.
00:29:41
Speaker
Of course, you can fire, right? We were not shy of layoffs, but the problem was not layoff. The problem was getting on treadmill because once you get there, it's a downhill slope. And of course, you come out of them and there was a moment when the bank balance was low. We had to realign the 700 people team. It took us two days to understand that we had the situation. We went for two days. Why did you get into that situation? You were not getting term seeds or what happened?
00:30:11
Speaker
No, I think the money that was promised did not come that sort of disappeared.
00:30:16
Speaker
a lot of confidentiality somewhere, so I can't go into more details. But the outcome was that we were sitting, the situation was just sitting in a place where we... And which year is this? 2017. Yeah, 17 or 16, somewhere there. Maybe 16, maybe 17. And then we had a team of 500 plus 700 team members. And we didn't know what to do then because raising more money will take us six months and we don't have money for that.
00:30:42
Speaker
That's where we realized the power of zero. So we realized the situation we were in. We went into a, again, two days, sort of, we can't do anything kind of like, you know, you have flight response or a free response. There was no fight, no flight. Flight was not an option. Fight we couldn't do, we just froze for two days.
00:31:00
Speaker
Then we came back, we changed the entire strategy then there. We use zero-based accounting approach. What is that? 20% marketing, which was the least ROI, stopped that. You bring your traffic down by some percentage and it's less than 2%. It's less than 2% because it's the lowest 20%. The most expensive marketing goes away. You increase your commission by 20%. Again, 2% of traffic agents would leave, but that's okay because the net outcome of 20% is higher.
00:31:30
Speaker
you reduce 20% salary of all the leadership teams. You remove all the 20% local commerce. You do all of the 80-20, put one goal, every steep goal and get 780 members to only work for that goal for 2-3 months. We could see that in a tight run ship, we could further increase the revenue by 3x at a 50% reduced one. So that's the concept of nonlinearity, which we applied a few times to
00:32:00
Speaker
you know, get out of the situation. But now these situations are coming up, right? And they were, man, we were like, founder of my situation, or the other, you know, whatever, but everything comes to founder, bouquets come to founders, bigs come to founders. So we were in these situations where the 10 minutes became much faster. And there's a lot of pressure, how would you innovate in the situation, you can't, the team that will go away, the RNT team, for example. So yeah, I mean,
00:32:23
Speaker
That was an antidote, an anecdote where we saw hard things. Okay. So, is this what made you feel that you were... Did you get burnt out or what happened? No, I was living it. So, imagine yourself when I was... I failed to be empowered in 2012 when I was my zero bank. When I learned to live on my zero bank balance. I failed to be empowered after this situation.
00:32:50
Speaker
that okay, you know, we can do this also. This was a new learning for us. That was not the reason at all. I was very much I was living that journey. However, I got introduced to executive
00:33:02
Speaker
and meditation. Long story short, I learned that growth has to be inside, not outside. Okay. How did you get introduced to coaching and meditation? Both happened on same time, but from different sides. Coaching was my investors from Fundamentum who came recently. They told me that you should talk to a coach. All of you, one of the founders should talk to a coach.
00:33:25
Speaker
And I was like, why? And my coach tried her best to tell me in one hour, why? And like, I don't get what you are saying, but let's try it out. And then I learned it, basically learning about your unknown unknowns. And if you have to go from here to become a Jack Maus in the picture, who are your role models?
00:33:41
Speaker
don't wait for the next 30 years to get there. Learn your unknown unknowns now and start working on them with the coach. So because it's an unknown unknown, you're not actively looking for it. If it's a known unknown, you look for it. But I was realizing that everything is a shelf life. I was seeing Yahoo going down, every company, Nokia came and went. Amazon, Japrizology 20 said,
00:34:03
Speaker
Amazon is going to die. We are just working on debuting that day. And if everything is a shelf life, what am I doing here? It was more of a quarter life crisis. And I basically said I would explore all the ways of finding answers to this.
00:34:17
Speaker
What's the purpose? What's the meaning? And that's when I started exploring all the meditation areas. So I applied in all the meditation formats. I also started reading through quantum physics, astrophysics, the scientific realm of the smallest thing, the biggest thing.
00:34:35
Speaker
quantum physics talks about the smallest thing, astrophysics talks about the biggest thing to understand what we know about the limits of reality. I also started reading about Deepa in the books. It was more of an intellectual curiosity. More or less, everything was pointed to the same thing that we don't know. You were in a journey to discover reality. Let me put it that way.
00:34:57
Speaker
Because quantum physics is another way of looking at reality. Astrophysics is another way of looking at reality. Meditation also helps you alter your perception of reality.
00:35:07
Speaker
Yeah, I was saying the current thing is not what is permanent or whatever we are making, it has a shelf life. Company has a shelf life. Siputami came and went away. The culture has a shelf life. That is how they came and went away. The whole civilization and the species have a shelf life. Earth has a shelf life of 13.5 billion years.
00:35:30
Speaker
So if everything else shall fly, then this is not what it is. There's something else that has to be. And that's when I was exploring these things. In quantum varies, I learned about, about the double-state experiment where observation changes the way an atom reacts to the wave or a particle. And I was like, okay, human observation changes the way the reality of an atom. How do you explain that? So basically there was something that was a deeper part of human consciousness, which we do, which I did not know.
00:36:00
Speaker
And if you read all the Vedas or Gita or the Kurana Bible, it doesn't matter. But they all have the same implication in the end of surrendering, of being an observer, being a witness.
Transition to Inafit: Emotional Fitness Focus
00:36:14
Speaker
And that's the most productive way to be in this world, where you are not tied to your stress, anxiety, conditioning, and every moment you are on trying to do things. And meditation actually helps you experience all of this without having to bother the intellectual part.
00:36:30
Speaker
Okay. I am Shri Nirmala Devi. So, and I think at some place I felt very, you know, satisfied with my answers. So my intellectual curiosity sort of came to an end and that was a very satisfying moment for me. So that got me to leave travel triangle and I moved to B area because this is where I would see Headspace come as a soft companies, soft products, as a GTM. And that's my second journey. Okay.
00:36:58
Speaker
Oh, fascinating. So you had two tracks. One was the executive coaching you did and second was the transformation you experienced through meditation. What was it that you wanted to build a business around? These are like separate things, right? So the top quick hanging, lowest hanging food comes with coaching very easily. The deeper work is much better and faster than meditation.
00:37:21
Speaker
So what did you want to build? What was your product idea when you came to the US? How did you plan to marry these two and build a product out of it? For me, all of them are married, quantum physics, astrophysics, Vedic information, meditation, and coaching. They're all solving the subconscious tech in some way, telling that there's more beyond the intellect. My mission was to take emotional fitness to millions of people, same subconscious tech.
00:37:47
Speaker
But for that to happen, I had to learn psychology coaching, the academic science, so I don't BS anyway. So I spent three years learning psychology, executive coaching, got my license. I worked with Dr. Terry Soho, professor at USF to learn the science. I coached multiple founders in Bay Area.
00:38:03
Speaker
learned the science for three years the hard way. So now I don't be used. Then I started with Inaffit as a product because coaching is available, but I paid 25,000 rupees per hour. In US with a good coach, you pay $1,000 per hour. Of course, and you need like multiple sessions. So it's not that easy. But all the leadership in Facebook, Google, Netflix have a coach for them.
00:38:27
Speaker
Now, how do you break this privilege for them? That was my motivation. For that, I had to understand the science. And I started building inner fit where I tested eight products, started with meditation, psychology, grammarly for emotional intelligence. Nothing worked. What do you mean nothing worked? What was the indication that it didn't work? Take me through the journey. What was product work and what did you realize?
00:38:53
Speaker
I wish I could do a screen share. But anyway, the first word was meditation. I realized people don't stick to it after 30 days. They are fundamentally busy. Meditation is a solution which they see as a stress reliever.
00:39:07
Speaker
not as an emotionless fitness thing. The need for emotionless intelligence is for very few people who are on the top of the methodology. They will find their afters anyway. But for the rest, for the rest, they are busy with their day-to-day life. So this you're saying first protocol is like a headspace calm kind of a... Okay.
00:39:23
Speaker
I would call it better headspace and every founder does, but didn't work. And the second part was psychology. So I studied CBD, ACT, brief therapy. So CBD is cognitive behavior and dissonance, right? So that is about changing negative behavior and negative emotions. Okay. And what is ACT? Acceptance and commitment therapy. And what does that do? Like in a nutshell?
00:39:49
Speaker
It's in a nutshell, it tells that if there's something bad going on, you may feel anxious. And if you see an anxiety, it will make you anxiety. So don't react, don't react, accept your anxiety.
00:40:02
Speaker
external part of you, watch it, enjoy it and commit to what you can do in this moment. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It stops that feedback loop basically of exciting current. Okay. And then brief help is again different. It's like a 180 degree kind of a therapy, um, later, but the point is, uh, I built the product. It was great for people who are at the bed.
00:40:24
Speaker
product in what way? Like you could check in and it would ask you what's your emotional state and give you some tips or something like what? Okay. It was a decision tree, which will ask you questions that suggest you interventions to do. Okay. Okay. Like it said, breathe and count till 10, for example, could be one of the interventions. Okay. And more sophisticated ones like, you know, in acceptance, commitment therapy, it would go through how a coach would talk to you in a decision tree format.
00:40:51
Speaker
And I ran Facebook ads to get users, right users, targeted users on the platform to test out these things. And I would measure how long this David and I should have. And I would see that, you know, after 10 days, nobody uses it. I mean, less than 1% would use it. So in this second product of psychology, why did it not like, why was there drop off after 10 days? Again, because people are looking for promotions and, you know, more immediate outcomes in their life.
00:41:20
Speaker
unless they're another headline, we are they're incapacitated because of the mental health. And I don't understand those users, I did not want to touch there because that's that's a medical case. Yeah, yeah. So I don't want to go there at all. I don't
00:41:36
Speaker
I am not in the right place to relate that segment. You don't want to do medical interventions, basically. Correct. So that failed. Then I made a grammar for emotion intelligence. So you're typing an email. Hey, but can I just request you and it will pop up. Be more assertive. Don't use your non assertive word. That sounds really fascinating. Okay. Then it did work. People were like, you know, it was like little too much for them. And I had multiple themes, right? I had to solve the user.
00:42:06
Speaker
I have to solve the investors and I have to also solve the coaching world so that whatever I have learned remains true. So one of these things will not fit in and I have to monetize it. So whoever is paying has to be also in the line. So there are multiple stakeholders in this. So that was her product. Then I launched two minute videos every day, didn't work. You were doing the videos like you were personally recording.
00:42:32
Speaker
I was recording, I was using YouTube libraries to get started fast because there's a lot of content. See, the problem is not that there's no content. There's so much content. The problem is how do you take learning to learners? Knowledge exists, learner exists, but the bridge is broken. So I am solving the problem of taking learning to learners.
Inafit: Product Development and Market Integration
00:42:50
Speaker
You were curating it for your audience, basically, and also deciding the journey, like which video first, which second and so on.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah, but it failed. It failed. Bad way. Again, after 10 days, people don't come. And now I'm in a, and there'll be seven failed decisions like this after one, after another one, after another. Someone could have done faster, but I did my best for three, four years. This is the time when I learned there are so many frameworks, like everything is a framework. Everything is like, if you don't do it right, you will fail. And I was like, there are too many frameworks in the world. People have a lot of yarn to give, but
00:43:29
Speaker
They are helpful in their own way, but the moment you depend on frameworks, everybody is just fitting in a framework. VC is fitting in a framework, everybody fits in a framework.
00:43:41
Speaker
frameworks only work on LinkedIn. They help you get more views on LinkedIn in that century. Yeah, exactly. So this is going on. And on the personal side, suddenly I've come from a place of, you know, 700 people in my team talking to me saying, you know, good morning, good evening, whatever to a place.
00:43:59
Speaker
where I'm just having my two suitcases and my wife, I'm scared. And I'm not even talking to anybody. Your wife was working by then. You told me she was studying in the US. So she got a job here. She got a job in the US and she has been a brother in my patient brother for the house for last four years. And she has given me the freedom to do what I want to do.
00:44:20
Speaker
And I'm like doing this and suddenly it's a big change for me, right? It's a big change from this vibrant, high-energy thing to a very doing-yourself, feeling, feeling, feeling kind of a place. I remember going to play a volleyball game here and I don't play it well. I never played it well. And I was like the Gadda of the team. And you know, that was the first time it dawned to me that I was the Alpha. And suddenly, you know, I can also be a Gadda.
00:44:50
Speaker
That was the fourth stage for me. A rejection handling machine, praise handling machine, then insecurities of who big stakes. The fourth stage is when you go through all of this, as a founder, you invariably get a security complex. The biggest learning for me is how do you keep your calm and keep
00:45:13
Speaker
hitting on the wall. Behaviour change is hard. We all know it. Emotion intelligence is hard. You all know it. Now, that's the personal journey. On the professional side, finally our 8th iteration worked. We have 80%. It's helping sales teams.
00:45:30
Speaker
closing more deals, by negotiating better with clients, more being more accountable, by doing better discovery with clients, by driving critical behaviors like negotiation and others. Fundamentally, it happens by learning your limiting beliefs. I'm not negotiating because our lack of self-confidence or our free customer will go away, our fear, anxiety,
00:45:53
Speaker
And as a result, whenever the negotiation happens, I leave money on the table or I end up work committing, and I can learn to do a women conversation, keep my voice equally. And all of these things are happening via memes. That's the today's language of communication, which is Instagram content, which is how people are engaging. So you remove, so you make your learning so fun, inspirational, and so personalize for every person that it picks up your feedback from Zoom calls, we indicate with Zoom, we identify
00:46:23
Speaker
what all you are doing wrong in the call and change behaviors with the memes. Personalize for your limiting beliefs, personalize for your root causes and that product has 80% plus retention after 12 months. Every month employees are reporting, I am
00:46:40
Speaker
not procrastinating anymore. I am doing better planning. I am negotiating better with my clients. I learned for the first time I can discuss a friend with my manager. I am appreciating my team better. I am not thinking work during sleep, at dinner. I am not thinking work and I'm talking to my wife. I'm in that present moment or my spouse. Every month we have thousand plus stories like these companies are seeing that they are improving their
00:47:08
Speaker
performance, KPIs, the mid-low performers are becoming top performers in six months. Their KPI is in Salesforce going up. That's what we have built now. Okay. Fascinating. It sounds like sales is just a wedge here, right? It is essentially how to be more productive at work app.
00:47:27
Speaker
Correct. Now, out of our users, 40% of our sales, the idea is salespeople are the primary buyers, but after some time companies also give it to the engineering teams and other teams, and we have similar results there. So we have worked with now seven companies, every company they have seen improvements, they've expanded from sales to the entire company.
00:47:49
Speaker
And we have closed eight companies last month in this down market, all complete in US. So basically after the editions, I have the product I want to have. Amazing. So I want to dig a little deeper into the product. How do you read what somebody needs? How does that data enter the system that this is what he needs? This is like that root cause analysis you'd be doing, right? Like what is the intervention I want to run or what is the message I want to give? How does that data enter that this is what is needed?
00:48:18
Speaker
We are talking on Zoom. I am interrupting you after every five minutes. My transcripts know that, and that's the feedback loop for me of what I'm not doing right. I am saying burnout and I am setting up 10 PM meetings day on day, and many of these use cases. For these use cases, we have interviewed thousand plus sales team members, understood what are their limiting beliefs, fears, anxieties, in what categories, and that's what they learned with our najis. And for each different root call, what is the right intervention that they get?
00:48:48
Speaker
How can I listen better, not interrupting this conversation? How can I be more patient, more mindful, not have an anxiety? I have to ask, I have to talk. And again, each of these are emotions fitness. They're all changing us the conscious track. Okay. Okay. Fascinating. So like, okay. How many times you interrupted what time you're setting the meeting are relatively easier ones, but what else do you do? Like to make someone a better negotiator, you might need to go deeper also.
00:49:12
Speaker
That's a problem identification was what I explained to you. Then we have, you know, as a coach, our dreams come, which help you reflect every day of what are your subconscious tech problems, how do you relate to them? You become aware of the sphere.
00:49:27
Speaker
And then we have established interventions to overcome that fear. You start doing that, practicing it every day. Then once you practice it, you see a benefit, you start pinning it down. So then after it is pinned, we remind, we make it a habit for you. And then after six months, we make sure you don't relapse and you continue to build it. Okay. So it's essentially coaching only, except it's coaching through an app.
00:49:52
Speaker
That's happening here. The data input is only Zoom calls. In a Zoom call, there would be a third participant who would be transcribing that Zoom conversation.
00:50:03
Speaker
And I think a lot of companies anyway use like Gong and some of these products which do this. So you are taking it through an integration with a Gong kind of a product. Correct. We integrate with Salesforce, Gong, Calendar, all the CRMs, all the HRMS tools. What do you get from HRMS?
00:50:22
Speaker
your employee NPS performance reviews, what feedback your manager gave to you. Right now, let's say, Akshay got a feedback that negotiate better. Akshay is like, yes, it's a good feedback. I will improve it and it's my next reviews. Then Akshay goes back to his work and what happens? Nothing happens. There's no support. So we take that and help you improve that and then next performance reviews show that you have improved it and you have moved up in your performance review. So we help you ace your next performance review in reality.
00:50:50
Speaker
Fascinating. Yeah, so what typically you need a good boss to do for you that the app is able to do. Typically, a good boss would constantly tell you that, OK, last time your negotiation skills are rated low. And these are things you need to start showing me that you're doing and all that. So all of this, then through the app, you are telling people this is what you need to do. And then you also need to show the app that you're doing it through some kind of unit to check in and maybe input something that you've
00:51:17
Speaker
Yeah, but just 10 seconds per day. And we become a sidekick of manager, doing manager's sidekick job of coaching his entire team.
Future Growth of Inafit
00:51:25
Speaker
And that frees up manager to do more. Oh, wow. Okay. So the manager can like also give you data on which team member is in need of what? Okay. Okay. So the manager has their own dashboard where they can talk about their team.
00:51:42
Speaker
Yeah, they can talk about their team. They also get tips on what to coach their team in one-to-ones. Because if Akshay got a feedback to improve negotiation, Akshay's manager doesn't know how to coach Akshay. So we also help him. So we become a comprehensive tool for it.
00:51:59
Speaker
how did you find it like you told me you did thousand interviews and so obviously you won't have done them personally you must have a team with you which is working or personally oh wow okay and how did it also personally or you worked with a vendor or something the initial footing was mine now in last two years i built a property
00:52:19
Speaker
I have an amazing team who is more passionate than me to solve this problem. We have my partner in crime, Pooja, who is the psychologist and the coach, she's the product team. We have a tech team member who was my first high-level travel triangle. He is back here. So that's the team I rely on. And you're a distributed remote team or you're all working out of an office? They're all in India. I'm in the US.
00:52:48
Speaker
built from India selling U.S. I'm within cost efficiency. I can do all the experiments at very low burn. So far it's bootstrapped. You've not raised anybody. It's bootstrapped. I've raised $700k. All the Indian good founders have invested in the company. Kars 24, Bikram, Lead Squared, Nilesh, Faruk from Find, Capillary CEO, Anish, Avanti Akshay, Cover Fox, Devendra,
00:53:17
Speaker
And many more founders are part of my captive. These were like your friends who you reached out to. Not friends, but second level connects. They all relate to the problem I'm solving. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Because founders would understand the, like the value of getting an executive coach to discover your unknown unknowns. So what do you price it at? It's one lunch per month, $10 per month per employee.
00:53:43
Speaker
Yeah. I'm just wondering in the long term, what is the play here? Are you looking to build it like a, like a multi, like a Swiss army knife, where companies can also use it for performance appraisal, for example, like instead of doing performance appraisal on a different app, this becomes the performance appraisal. This becomes the employee engagement app. So like a full stack employee engagement app, which can also do rewards and so on and so forth. Or do you want to be focused on just coaching?
00:54:12
Speaker
Okay, just focus on coaching. We are a behavioral change company. You can identify behaviors from all the OKRs, PMIs, employee engagement, GONG, chorus of the world. We just change those behaviors. So I'm just wondering, isn't there a risk of app fatigue? How many SaaS subscriptions will companies take?
00:54:33
Speaker
So sales started with Salesforce and then you have some apps which are on top of Salesforce like say Gong and now on top of Gong you have another coaching app and I'm just wondering like is this sustainable or would there eventually be consolidation and say like an HR tech company acquires you and it becomes like a single solution.
00:54:54
Speaker
Consolidations will happen over time, right? I think all of these companies will try to go in the direction I've gone. I have the data of three years of the psychology of three years. It's hard to build. Now we understand data very clearly. 78% of people in India don't negotiate because they think customers are high hierarchy like parents.
00:55:16
Speaker
42% of people in the US don't negotiate because they will only want to speak to a customer when they think they're 100% right. And otherwise they will not negotiate and speak. So we have this data and we got them to optimize for these kinds of nuances. And your algorithms are constantly getting better based on what you're seeing in terms of the way the behavior is changing of the users. Yeah. So we are seeing a lead time there. Now, of course, we'll compete.
00:55:43
Speaker
and we'll see where that happens or we shake hands, but that's the later thing. So, people self-identify also that I want coaching in this area. Yeah, we have a lot of assessments to self-identify.
00:55:55
Speaker
problem identification is easy, behavior change is hard. That's what we have solved. So you would be like doing daily notifications to remind people to check in and so on. Like say what, like a dual lingo. Yeah. We had dual lingo for learning emotional fitness. And what's the plan in terms of further fundraise? Do you need to do what kind of revenue are you currently at? Are you like breaking even right now or?
00:56:20
Speaker
We have signed up several more companies in the last few months. So we'll rapidly move up on the revenue, getting to 1 million ARR in 12 months from now. And we have raised 700K from very close group founders. We'll raise our next round 2 million to 4 million dollar round soon. So why do you need to raise this 2 to 4 million to hit 1 billion ARR?
00:56:47
Speaker
to hire more tech team members to one million year I'll hit no matter what. I want this money to do it in a faster way by not just doing all sales by myself but hire sales people and also invest in product tech to build a lot of integrations.
00:57:01
Speaker
Right. Integrations is key here because you need to get a 360 degree view of the employee. So for that, you need multiple sources of performance indicators about that person. Okay. Got it. Okay. So do you want to raise a lot of money for this one? Or do you think that based on your travel triangle experience, you just want to do a little bit of raise, reach a place where you are comfortably growing without burning too much?
00:57:31
Speaker
It has to be balanced. I don't want to be on treadmill again. I want to grow fast in a healthy way by which I can create a company for a decade. What is your advice to other founders?
00:57:42
Speaker
Advise to founders. Humbly, I'm not the one to give advice, but they can see what phase they're in. Are they in the rejection handling machine phase, or trace handling machine, or insecurity machine, or post euphoria phase? If they can relate to anything from my journey, they can see because they're all unknown unknowns, I identify it after a year into the phase.
00:58:04
Speaker
And the more balance you are, it can get accentuated 1000 times with your team. But start with yourself. If you want to meditate, I have an open calendar, we can set up some time and it's a 30 minute feedback loop. It's again pure pro bono I do with friends, I learn from a friend.
00:58:21
Speaker
And that brings us to the end of this conversation. I want to ask you for a favor now. Did you like listening to this show? I'd love to hear your feedback about it. Do you have your own startup ideas? I'd love to hear them. Do you have questions for any of the guests that you heard about in this show? I'd love to get your questions and pass them on to the guests. Write to me at adatthepodium.in. That's adatthepodium.in.