Chai with Shai

Avanish Agarwal gained 25 kilos on purpose. He wore a continuous glucose monitor, documented what it felt like to be obese in India, and only then started building a simpler, photo-focused nutrition app focused on local eating habits.

Nutriiya identifies 70,000 Indian dishes from a single photo, for free, while competitors charge Rs 3,000 a month.

In this conversation, we talk about validating before building, building AI with no technical background, and why free is a go-to-market strategy.

Chef Mehul Sabharwal (Sabb) is the co-founder of Hearth on the First, a fire-led restaurant inside Mumbai's Eros Cinema building that took seven years to go from idea to opening night. He and co-founder Dhriti quit their senior kitchen jobs with no income and no investor lined up, spent a year raising funds, and built a restaurant around a concept most people told them India wasn't ready for.

We talk about protecting your vision when nobody believes in it, what his first chef taught him that had nothing to do with food, why he refused to charge more than his margins needed, and what it really takes to go from dreaming about your own restaurant to actually opening one.

Adwait Mardikar's first startup didn't fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because he couldn't find affordable marketing tools.

So he spent a decade inside global strategy firms learning exactly how the best marketing in the world works, came back to Mumbai, and built Snappin AI with $40 and three co-founders.

In this episode we talk about why he thinks building a startup is actually the easy part, what it cost him emotionally to leave a stable salary, how he taught himself to build an AI platform without writing a single line of code, and what his first customer said that surprised even him.

Arpita Salve is the co-founder of TrendSync by Kridinify Tech, an AI tool that automates what SEO agencies charge Rs.25,000 a month to do, for Rs.2,000 a month.

After watching her first blockchain startup die overnight from a government tax law, she pivoted into AI, won a government grant of Rs.15 lakh, and built her second company with the same two co-founders she has worked with since junior college.

In this episode, we talk about why she thinks launching before your product is ready is a mistake, the government grant every woman founder in India should know about, why bad product with good marketing beats great product with bad marketing, building credibility before you can sell, and how building a business quietly is a waste.

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Anurag Meena is the co-founder of NeoDocs, a healthcare startup building smartphone based diagnostic tools that allow people to run medical tests instantly using just their phones. A third time founder in the healthcare space and someone who grew up in a family of doctors, he was drawn to solving one of India’s biggest healthcare gaps: affordable and accessible diagnostics.

The idea behind NeoDocs was simple but ambitious: bring lab grade testing closer to people’s everyday lives by enabling instant results at home, in clinics, or even in low access regions where traditional diagnostic infrastructure is limited.

In the early days, the team built their first prototypes inside a 100 square foot office using their own savings and validated the idea through conversations with clinicians, athletes, and patients before navigating the long process of regulatory approvals. Over time, Anurag learned that early traction doesn’t always translate into real demand - people may like a product but still not pay for it and that founders cannot outsource this core learning so hiring for senior roles too early can impact the founders' learnings.

Today, NeoDocs focuses heavily on clinical validation, regulatory expansion, and sales led growth while building a team first culture rooted in ownership and experimentation, guided by one consistent belief: founders need to stay closest to the problem before they try to scale the solution.

Suraj Shamnani is the founder of Dang!, a beverage startup building what he describes as a healthier alternative to traditional diet sodas by introducing prebiotic fibre based soft drinks tailored for Indian consumers. His journey into beverages began after working with fermentation in Michelin star restaurants like Gaggan and GAA, where he developed an interest in gut friendly drinks.
He funded early R&D partly by liquidating personal investments, tested product stickiness for nearly two years before scaling efforts, and chose to prioritize formulation and packaging over performance marketing. Before arriving at prebiotic sodas, he spent nearly a year attempting to build a kombucha brand. He pivoted only after realizing the category’s limited demand in India and the need for something more accessible and scalable across the country.
Since then, Suraj has focused on building Dang as a long term beverage brand rooted in product experimentation, distribution first thinking, and consumer feedback. Along the way, he learned difficult lessons about trusting people too quickly, chasing grants that rarely materialize for consumer brands, and the realities of building in India’s high-GST beverage category, but continues to approach the company with a long horizon ambition: to build an Indian beverage brand that can eventually compete globally while staying accessible domestically.

Akshit Mehta is the co-founder of Evolucion, an Indian based, premium athleisure brand for women focusing on versatile, comfortable clothing for daily wear, travel, and workouts. Instead of chasing trends, the team focused on solving practical problems, by designing comfortable, movement friendly clothing tailored for Indian settings while keeping quality comparable to global brands but at a more accessible price point. The idea took shape after Akshit decided to finally act on his long standing goal of building a consumer brand, narrowing down from multiple categories to athleisure as a fast evolving space with strong manufacturing momentum in India.
The journey to launch took nearly nine months of product testing, supplier discovery, pricing decisions, and brand positioning. This includes setbacks like forgetting to order an entire product category just weeks before launch and losing early orders due to a checkout failure on day one. After launching in March 2025, the team saw 120 orders on day one followed by zero on day two, a reminder of how unpredictable early traction can be. Since then, Akshit has focused on building narrative driven brand positioning instead of relying purely on marketing spend, experimenting with community building, learning where influencer led growth fails to convert into revenue, and emphasizing a realistic expectation for consumer startups because most D2C brands take 18 to 36 months to become profitable if they survive the early learning curve.

Shambhabi Raha is the founder of Fieldmobi, an enterprise SaaS startup making ERP accessible to the 99% of people who have never been trained to use it.

In this episode, we talk about choosing entrepreneurship after an MBA, surviving the slow months when nothing seems to happen, hiring the right people early, avoiding the wrong customers, and what building a company really looks like behind the scenes.

Anshul Khurana is the co-founder of Entitled Solutions, a startup providing financial and health services to gig and blue collar workers such as security guards, drivers, and cleaners, where nearly 70% of the workers rely on informal borrowing and most have little to no savings. The idea emerged when he noticed frontline workers and the high churn driven by financial instability. Instead of waiting for full certainty, he began building when he was only “20% sure,” validating the opportunity through conversations with employers and early partners before landing his first client within two months by cold outreach across his network.
In the early years, the team focused on solving real access problems through simple distribution, running loans, insurance, and health services entirely through WhatsApp instead of building an app, and repeatedly refining the product based on employer needs. Funding was not immediate, after pitching hundreds of investors and facing frequent rejection, early support from friends, family, and eventually HDFC Capital became a major confidence boost. Through COVID disruptions, hiring challenges, and multiple near quit moments, Anshul credits persistence, strong mentor relationships, and a clear value proposition for helping the company grow, while emphasizing one lesson he learned the hard way: raising money isn’t the milestone; proving value to real users is.

Pooja Gupta is the co-founder of NapChief, a direct-to-consumer children’s apparel brand built around the idea that clothing can help kids feel confident, expressive, and capable of anything they set their minds to. After completing her chartered accountancy exams and working as a consultant in Mumbai, she teamed up with her brother to explore the fast growing D2C opportunity in India’s underserved kidswear market. Backed by their family’s deep manufacturing experience supplying global fashion brands, they took a leap of faith into entrepreneurship. They recognized that children today have stronger personal preferences than earlier generations and that the category had space for a premium yet accessible Indian brand.
In the early days, the journey was a mix of excitement and uncertainty, from launching their website and waiting anxiously for the first real customers beyond friends and family, to pivoting during COVID from specialty infant fabrics to nightwear before gradually expanding into casualwear for ages up to 14. It took nearly four years to break even, but momentum became real when the team began spotting kids wearing NapChief in everyday places turning a small internal celebration into a symbol of brand validation. Pooja credits their growth to staying flexible, learning marketing hands on through platforms like Meta and marketplaces, being frugal early on, and trusting that conviction matters more than perfect timing, because in her words, the moment you start is the right moment to start.