The Indian Dream

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We're joined by a special guest today,  Saurav Arya.  Saurav is the founder of Small World, WorkStays and Impressive Infographics. He's a digital nomad and has travelled to 90+ Countries.

Timestamps:
(0:35) - Hacker House in Tier II/III Cities
(12:00) - Airbnb for services targeted towards Digital Nomads
(20:45) - Building Global Media Properties out of India
(28:00) - A Service to Settle in a new city

Business Ideas:
Hacker House in Tier II/III Cities: There is a lot of untapped potential in Tier II/III cities of India. Often, the young kids don't get the same opportunities and exposure due to limited resources. What if you could setup Hacker House where you bring talented folks, teach them necessary skills and give them a platform to participate in Gig/Creator economy. This could be applied to Gaming, Content, Coding and various other skills. The way to make money would be take a certain share of the earnings they make once they are trained (Income Share Agreements) and ready to monetize their skills. The Soul Gaming Clan has done this with a Gaming house. Check it out.

Airbnb for Digital Nomads: The Pandemic has resulted in the rise of Digital Nomads, people who work remotely and travel. These people generally stay in one location for a few weeks/months and then move to another place. They have specific requirements in terms of Internet speeds, Cafes in walking distance, Gym etc. What if you build a curation service where you list out these places basis crowdsourcing this information from other digital nomads.

Building Global Media Properties out of India: India has all the resources and Infrastructure to become a global media hub. We have the talent to create content, animators, and a large section of English speaking population that could be leveraged to build Global Media Properties. If American Media is about Glitzy Shit, what if India could be about Aspirational content that is relatable to other developing countries? Around uplifting sections of society, career progression, entrepreneurial ecosystems etc.

Service to settle in a new city: Relocating to new cities is hard. It's hard to meet the right set of folks, understand how the city functions, and can be a difficult experience overall. What if you had a service where you could have an assigned person helping you settle into a new city. A website where you can choose the right person basis their profile and interests. This could be a way for Airbnb Hosts or Couch surfers to earn additional revenue while a great way for new people to settle in a new city. 

Welcome to The Indian Dream podcast! Our goal is to help entrepreneurs build profitable businesses. We've spoken to more than a hundred founders & investors - our biggest lesson is that we should focus on niche markets to find profitable opportunities. 

Here's how we do it - we have Trends episodes where each week, we do a deep dive into a business trend that is exploding in India and find the opportunities for you to build profitable businesses. We've dug deep into the hemp industry, seaweed farming, blockchain, and many more niches to help YOU find your next big business.

Every week, we also host Business Munchies where we discuss business ideas across domains and how they can be profitable businesses. We've gone deep on opportunities in the helicopter rental business, the toy industry, virtual exhibitions and many more.

Lastly, on our Founder Journey episodes we showcase playbooks that were used successfully to build profitable businesses. We've hosted the founders of Tally Solutions, Naturals Ice Creams, and several other succesful entrepreneurs to learn their secrets!

So click on that play button if you want to learn the latest business ideas, trends and playbooks.

Second episode in our series about Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain - I highly recommend that you listen to the previous episode first to get the understandings of the basics of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

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Blockchain Newsletter
McKinsey Report on Blockchain including a graph showing the ease of implementation and impact of Blockchain on various industries. 

We have Abhishek Singh with us in this episode - Abhishek is the CTO of Comdex - a trade financing and trade settlement platform that's based on the blockchain technology. They've used blockchain to finance millions of dollars of commodity trading the South East Asian market over the past few years.

My biggest takeaway from this episode is that blockchain can disrupt any industry where a middle man is used to build trust. Blockchain takes out the trust equation by using Smart Contracts which automatically execute when certain conditions are met. You can read our newsletter about Blockchain to learn more about Smart Contracts and how they can be used - the link will be in the show notes.

The first 10-15 minutes of the conversation are an introduction on some basics of blockchain including the difference between private and public networks, the difference between proof of work and proof of stake and other blockchain basics.

After these first 15 minutes, we get into how the current supply chain for global commodity trading works and how Comdex is reimagining this global system using blockchain. Around the 30 minute mark, we discuss the gaps in the industry and how a new entrepreneur can enter the blockchain industry.

If you like what we do, consider supporting the The Indian Dream Project at this link. 

We're joined by a special guest today,  Alexander Hogeveen Rutter. Alex works at the IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank, where he specialises in increasing renewable energy penetration in Indian power grids.

Timestamps:

• Agriculture Crowdfunding & Community Supported Agriculture (01:26)
• Solar & Battery Powered Mobile Gensets (15:18)
• Thrift Store positioned for Sustainability (21:42)
• Fractional Ownership of High Value Assets (31:30)

Business Ideas:

1. Agriculture Crowdfunding & Community Supported Agriculture - Most farmers in India today live hand to mouth - they do not have enough capital to increase their standard of living by planting high yield or higher value crops like mangoes, etc. The idea of agricultural crowdfunding would bring in funding from a variety of sources to provide the capital for the farmer to plant new crops and then split the profits amongst the investors. This same idea can be extended to buying large plots of land, subdividing them and selling them to individuals who can then decide what they'd like grown on that plot for them with the produce sent to their home - Farmizen does something like this in Bangalore.
2. Solar & Battery Powered Mobile Gensets - Replacing diesel gensets used in weddings & other events with a combination of solar and batteries. With the fall in battery prices and the rise of diesel prices, this model is commercially viable - you'll just be replacing the operational expenses of buying diesel with the capital expense of buying the batteries & solar panels. If anyone wants to actually implement this - Alex is happy to help with his expertise.
3. Thrift Store positioned for Sustainability - Nowadays, most people just sell their old clothes to the raddiwala - this idea is to collect those old, used clothes and sell them from an angle of sustainability. The profits of this organisation would be used for environmental causes. And this doesn't need to be only for used clothes, it could even be used board games, books, or anything else that can benefit from being sold one more time.
4. Fractional Ownership of High Value Assets - The conversation started with Masterworks, a US based company that sells small parts of really expensive paintings. However, this idea can be taken forward with any high value asset - for example, a Croation Tennis player recently sold part of her arm as an NFT and as ad space for anyone to advertise. HumanIPO lets you invest in people (starting to get creepy) and a portion of their time (I don't fully understand the dynamics of this one). 

We've been creating these podcasts and newsletters for the last 9 months and if you like what we do, consider supporting the The Indian Dream Project. Link below.

If you want to support us, you can contribute here.  

In the episode today, we host Nishchal Shetty of WazirX to talk about the world of Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies. We avoid speculating on bitcoin prices and instead focus on the fundamentals of blockchain. 

Blockchain and Crypto are often misunderstood. In order to understand it better, Nishchal broke down the four primary blockchain use cases: 

• Asset: These are store of values, deflationary in nature. Bitcoin is the perfect example for this. 
• Currencies: These are equivalent to digital currencies, inflationary in nature. A Digital INR will fit into this category. 
• Utility: These are blockchains that are used to run various different programs and smart contracts. For example: Ethereum is a blockchain used to run different blockchain programs and Ether is the token used to run these programs.  
• Security: This is when the blockchain is used to back real world securities like stocks and properties. 

We also discuss the various applications of Blockchain from Decentralised Finance, NFTs, and Supply Chain Traceability. 

And we touch upon the regulatory environment of Crypto and Blockchain in India and the future of this technology. 

If you're curious about the world of blockchain, highly recommend you listen to the episode. If you're not curious, well, this IS the future, might help learning about it now! 

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with the folks from Dine With Data, Vedika & Armaan, to discuss some great new ideas that we wouldn't have thought up on our own.

Dine with Data is an amazing daily WhatsApp newsletter that introduces you to a new startup everyday so that you're always aware of the latest business trends.

Join Dine with Data WhatsApp newsletter here.

While you're at it, join The Indian Dream WhatsApp newsletter as well!

(00:00) - Introduction
(00:33) - Swiggy + Tinder
(08:07) - Personal Stylists
(20:19) - "Vibe Curation" - Service business to make your cafe more instagrammable
(27:15) - Micro Private Equity
(37:45) - Memes as a Service

The Business Ideas we discussed

1. Swiggy + Tinder  - Ordering on food delivery apps these days is a chore - the Paradox of Choice makes it so difficult to choose a restaurant or an item, especially when you're in a group setting. The idea is to make Tinder like tiles where people can just swipe right or left on pictures of food that they find attractive or unattractive. If you're not able to get API access from Swiggy or Zomato - you can create a UI layer getting data from other sources and then linking the backend to Dunzo. 
2. Tinder + Swiggy - Swiggy has so much data on our eating habits - why not make a dating service which uses this data on eating habits to make predictions on possible matches?
3. AI Personal Stylists - Today, only the rich and famous can afford personal stylists - why can't we democratise this service? You can build an AI powered recommendation engine which looks at your closet of clothes and makes recommendations on clothes matches that you would've otherwise never thought of. This plays into the same long tail game that Netflix uses to always keep content fresh. 
   • You could also build this as a B2B service which integrates with existing ecommerce store and makes it easier for them to recommend clothing to existing customers based on past buying trends. 
   • A Lenskart like model which scans your body would be able to show you how different clothes would fit your body and give you exact size recommendations as well. 
4. "Vibe Curation" - Whether we like it or, the Instagrammability of café's & restaurants determines their success these days. You can build a service which helps make the physical spaces and the individual dishes more instagrammable to drive the social virality of the space. It could even be a monthly subscription where the decor is changed each month. 
5. Micro Private Equity - A new movement led by companies like Thras.io & Tiny Capital where you build a portfolio of small internet business - SaaS products, Amazon FBA, DTC brands - in a particular niche and use economies of scale on marketing knowledge, etc. to help scale up your portfolio. 
6. Memes as a Service - Inspired by a listener building Marque Berry (the website is incomplete). He has built a Meme Influencer marketing business where he'll help you make your product 'viral' on various instgram meme pages. A great marketing tool for D2C brands & anyone who's looking to reach Gen Z audiences. Send me a mail if you want to talk to him.

A couple of weeks back, we covered the Trend of Paid or Private Communities. We explored the rise of these communities amongst millenials and Gen Z and looked at the opportunities that exist in this space in our Trends Newsletter.

Today, we have Vivek Narain, Founder of The Quorum, a Member only lifestyle club in Gurgaon with close to $1m ARR. Lifestyle clubs have always existed across the major cities in India. Think the Gymkhanas and Golf Clubs. But, these clubs are now fairly saturated and the philosophy there is to now keep people out as opposed to letting them in. These clubs have been designed for quote , unquote Old Money. And that left space for likes of Quorum to cater to the needs of new money and evolving tastes. 

Quorum offers a high end luxurious space for a wide range of services, starting from Hospitality, Wellness, Cultural events and even co-working spaces. The focus is on diversity within the member community and the pricing structure has been designed to keep it more accessible for a wide range of demographic. 

This is an asset heavy business, but if done right, can be extremely profitable. We talk to Vivek about the thesis behind Quorum, the economics and what it takes to make a physical private community work. 

This was an interesting episode for us, as one of our primary goals with The Indian Dream Project is to build a community of knowledge seeking entrepreneurs to help each other build profitable businesses. And if you have any aspirations to build a community, even a digital one, I recommend you listen to the episode. 

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) announce a new Referral Reward - you can be invited onto this podcast if you get enough referrals to our newsletter. Here's the link that you can use to generate your referral code!

(0:00) - Referral Campaign Thanks
(0:45) - Decentraland
(3:20) - Regional Newsletters - The New Tropic
(14:52) - The rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages
(21:00) - PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies

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1. Decentraland - A new virtual world that's combining two hot topics: NFT's & the Metaverse. You can buy pieces of land in the game that are permanently yours using NFT's and then you can use that land to showcase everything else you've bought on the metaverse like your Gucci bags or whatever else. This is the direction of the future and we should keep our eyes on it. 
2. Regional and Niche Newsletters - First saw this as a Tweet by Tanvi Dessai. Regional Newsletters are basically a digital version of something that's existed for centuries - local newspapers. People always want to know what's going on in our surrounding areas and there's no reason why this can't go digital. The New Tropic does $1.5 million in ad revenue just by focusing on Miami - it's now branched out to several other smaller cities in the US. There's no reason to just bifurcate by region - you can also do it by topic. One WhatsApp newsletter charges Rs. 11,000 per year for giving daily commodity prices updates on commodities not easily found in the exchanges. Another idea is to take Business Updates (government mandates, commodity prices, etc.) and just simplify it without any Business Gossip (who raised how much, etc.). 
3. The Rise of Plant Based Foods & Beverages - Amul placed a full page ad in several leading newspaper about the Myths & Facts of Plant Based Milks/Beverages. This move by Amul is an indication of the rise of Plant Based products in general such as meat alternatives, plant milks, Tofu, Tempeh, etc. Plant based milks already do about 150 - 200 crores of revenue in India and one of our community members also launched a brand called Oat MLK (please support him). Another community member is building Better - an amazing vegan food company - I highly recommend their spreads.This is a huge topic that we'll cover in a future trends series. 
4. PE Fund for Regional Profitable Companies - My favourite idea from this episode. Siddharth met a CA who invested early in several regional snack brands (like Bikaji, Yellow Diamond, etc.) and helped them professionalise and expand their reach. He is now set to make a bonanza as all these snack brands have matured and are planning IPO's. A PE fund can be built to focus on a particular sector (snack brands, industrial products, ice creams, whatever else) and tries to find regional players throughout India and help them scale up. 

This episode is a deep dive into the business of Restaurants.

Hunger Inc. 
Sameer Seth
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We talk to Sameer Seth, Co-founder of Hunger Inc. They've created brands such as The Bombay Canteen, O Pedro & very recently, The Bombay Sweet Shop. 

Now if you're not from Bombay, you might not have heard about these places. But, ask your friend who lives in Bombay, and they'll most probably have good things to say about these places.

We talk to Sameer about his journey of moving from a Banking career to the F&B space, how he went about entering a new Industry and the experience that he gathered before starting Hunger Inc. 

We also talk about a wide range of topics, all within the purview of building a profitable F&B business. We talk about the thesis behind The Bombay Canteen, what it takes to start a restaurant focused on providing great experience at affordable prices, how they think about the menu, pricing and customer service and the economics of a restaurant business. At the end, we talk about the thesis on starting a Direct to Consumer New Age Mithai brand in The Bombay Sweet shop, something we've discussed in our previous Business Munchies episode.

Talking to Sameer, I realised Story-telling is a big part of getting food right and it was interesting to hear some of Sameer's stories of building Hunger Inc. If you're curious about the F&B or hospitality space, don't miss out on this episode.

This episode is a homage to Chef Floyd Cardoz, Co-founder of Hunger Inc and a bunch of other top class restaurants in New York. He passed away last year due to Covid-19. We thank him for everything that he has done and backing Sameer and Yash to create Hunger Inc.

We're doing our first Giveaway! We'll be sending the book 'Psychology of Money' by Morgan Housel to 5 people who help us get the highest number of referrals for our Newsletter. Here's the link that you can use to generate your referral code.

Sahil (@sahil071) & Siddharth (@sidbetala) munch on these ideas during the episode:

(00:50) - The Indian Dream Book Giveaway - Psychology of Money
(02:06) - Gumroad Investment & Equity Crowdfunding
(09:05) - Biostimulants & Sea6 Energy
(16:25) - Manufacturing & Warehousing as a Service (MaaS, WaaS)
(28:52) - High end locks

Li Jin's article on Passion Economy and Future of Work

1. The Indian Dream Book Giveaway - Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel - One of the best books both of us have ever read about Wealth Management & Accumulation.  We'll be giving away 5 copies to the people who get the most people to sign up to The Indian Dream Newsletter. Here's the referral link that you can use for this campaign.
2. Gumroad Investment & Equity Crowdfunding: As per SEBI guidelines, equity crowdfunding is still illegal in India - despite India overall being much more lax in its rules than the US SEC. Equity Crowdfunding is basically a chance for retail investors to invest in early stage startups - think Kickstarter but you actually get Equity in the company in which you invest. Gumroad - the creator platform - raised $5 million on the Republic.co platform which itself raised $35 million. The same day, the SEC had raised the maximum allowable capital raise from Equity Crowdfunding from $1.07 million to $5 million - expect a lot more companies use this method for raising early money but also expect a lot more fraud.
3. Biostimulants & Sea6 Energy: On this podcast, we are obsessed with anything related to agriculture and especially Seaweed. India has become the first country in the world to pass legislations about Biostimulants and Sea6 Energy has become one of the first companies in the world to receive a patent for a Seaweed based biostimulant. And Sea6 Energy is raising a $5 million Series A round right now. On a previous episode, we spoke to Mr. Abhiram Seth from AquaAgri Processing about the future of Seaweed biostimulants and he said that this is just the start - there's a lot of room for growth in this industry. 
4. Manufacturing & Warehousing as a Service (MaaS, WaaS) for D2C companies: D2C companies are good at Marketing and they try to outsource everything else. Warehousing is a growing and profitable part of this changing business model. Can you build a warehousing marketplace with a software layer on top that helps D2C companies find the best warehousing space for their products. Same thing can be done for manufacturing. 
5. High End Locks