The Indian Dream

In this episode, we talk to two brothers about their journey of setting up and selling a packaging manufacturing business in 10 years. We discuss Market Research, Positioning, and
Customer Centricity as it pertains to a Manufacturing Business. This episode is relevant for folks who have interest in Packaging as a product and/or run manufacturing businesses. For others, check out last week's Business Munchies Episode :)

Creative Stylopack Acquired by Essel Pro Pack - News Article

Reachout to us here if you're listening to us from PodLP. 

Detailed Synopsis:
We have a story of two brothers who scaled a packaging manufacturing business to close to ~100 Cr in Revenue in 8 years by focusing on niches. Bhavik, and Darshan started out their journey by setting up Creative Stylopack - a corrugated box manufacturing plant - as an extension to their family business in 2008-09. However, early on, they realized the importance of being ahead of the competition in terms of technology as well identifying and serving the niches. Their market research and the curiousity to find new niche products led them to a trade show in Germany which eventually led them to set up a Tube Manufacturing unit. These are tubes that are used for medicines as well as personal care products. They took a contrarian bet and invested in the significantly more expensive european machinery rather than the chinese machinery. This bet would prove to be pivotal in them finding marquee clients and scaling the business.

The reason I wanted to speak to them is because one of our listeners shared the news of Creative Stylopack being acquired by a publicly listed Packaging Manufacturer called EPL. It was great to see M&A activity in the SME Manufacturing space and we immediately reached out to Bhavik and Darshan to talk about their journey. 

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

Happy New Year Y'all! Thank you for supporting us and allowing us the room to experiment with different content styles around profitable businesses in India.

Business Munchies (Yet to finalize the name) is now going to become a more formal part of the content that we create. New Business Ideas, across industries depending on the emerging trends. The idea is to look at the business ideas as an optimist and see how to make it work. Most of our ideas will probably be bad, but we are sharing a point of view on what the future could look like if these businesses work out. And it's fun developing this point of view and finding some interesting things along the way.

Sahil and I are on a journey to figure out how to build profitable businesses in today's business health and geo-political environment. We are open-sourcing our learning journey through this series. We are really excited for 2021, and while 2020 has been a tough year for all of us, we're still grateful to have to to the opportunity to build The Indian Dream.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

And drop us a text us here to tell us what you think about the content - we'd love to talk to you and get to know your expectations better. We're still figuring out how to build The Indian Dream and all kinds of discussion and feedback goes a long way to help us think through this. So we'd love to talk :)

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Update on E-Com Acquisition (0:20)
2) Brand Licensing for SMEs          (1:34)
2) High Margin Businesses             (9:00)
3) IPL Trading Cards                           (29:55)
4) India's Mini So?                                (39:00)

Happy New Year! 

This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

Business Munchies is our attempt to explore different business ideas while discussing the underling trends that make these ideas interesting and potential go to market strategies. This is by no means supposed to be a deep dive on each business idea as these haven't been discussed earlier.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Personal Leverage (Nate's Article) (1:02)
2) Our Journey of evaluating an acquisition of an online business (6:57)
2) Online First Sweets/ Mithai Brand (8:55)
3) E Sports (18:18)
4) Make in India Marketplaces (28:24)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at [email protected]

In this episode we speak to Pranav Mehra, Co-Founder of Brew Whale – a craft beer brewing company based out of Bombay.

Craft Alcohol Newsletter
Pranav Mehra
Brew Whale Website
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I'm a big fan of good beer and could not resist doing a few episodes about the changing environment in the beer and alcohol industry in India. Craft beer has become a huge industry in the US in Europe - when you go to grocery store there you will see a number of bears from small breweries. With the advent of microbreweries in Maharashtra in the early 2010’s, with Doolaly at the forefront of this change, the entire beer industry in India has seen a radical shift. Young people like me have many more options drink a casual beer then just Kingfisher. However the biggest hurdle holding back the shift in the alcohol industry in India is regulation. Government regulations hold back this industry at every turn whether it is manufacturing, distribution or marketing.  

In this episode with Pranav, we explore the how he first conceptualize the idea of building a beer brand in such a tightly regulated market, how he executed it and what he thinks is the future for this market. There were a few things that really shocked me through this conversation - number one, you have to build your entire brewery before you can apply for manufacturing license. Building the brewery is not cheap it can be as much as 1 crore. Number 2, Distribution is also a big hurdle where you have to apply for license for every restaurant with whom you want to partner. 

 Personally I think regulations are both good and bad for the entrepreneurs that work in that industry. They’re bad because they make your everyday life so much harder. however it's good because it dissuades people like me from even thinking of entering tightly regulated business like this. however the laws are changing and the winds are shifting - the alcohol space in India is going to look very different 10 years from now.

This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

At The Indian Dream we have a dozen ideas that we discuss everyday but are not able to share with our listeners. This episode is an experiment that we've been planning for months. The idea really took off a few weeks ago when Sahil and Siddharth met up with Saransh in Goa. We started bouncing ideas off each other and realised that it would be great to record this and share with our listeners.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following topics in the episode:
1) Means of Wealth Creation (0:48)
2) Our Journey of evaluating an acquisition of an online business (5:10)
2) Mushroom Farming & Processing (12:02)
3) Zoom and Notion Apps (18:35)
4) Zero Fee Marketplaces (25:00)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at [email protected]

Earn in Dollars, spend in Rupees. That's one way to build a bootstrapped, profitable business. Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon Program) is a great way to target the global consumer. We talk to Rishiraj about building his Amazon FBA business, the playbook and what is he planning next.

Listener Survey Link
Republic of Sellers

The global e-com marketplaces coupled with digital marketing reach have enabled Indian businesses to target their products to the global customer base. It presents a great opportunity for people to build profitable businesses. Manufacturers can look at selling their products in various countries via platforms like Amazon, Etsy, Alibaba. Individuals who can figure out market gaps can contract manufacture these products and sell to the global markets. 

And our guest today has been on the journey to figure exactly this out. Rishiraj started his entrepreneurial journey back when he was in his college, BITS Dubai. Rishiraj started a drop-shipping business leveraging his college friend's manufacturing business in Indore. They had multiple SKUs in the Bedding category with products like bedsheets, bedskirts, bed covers etc. After tinkering with Amazon listings and learning about how it works, in 6-7 months he was able to figure out how to make Rs. 50k in profits every month without spending too much time on the operations of it. Eventually, as competition grew and sellers started hijacking the listing, a common Amazon seller issue, Rishiraj decided to focus on his Product Management career and close the listings. He would go on to work as a PM at startups like 1Mg, Online Tyari for a couple of years. One fine day, on his vacation back home, he had the realisation that the money he was making compared to the effort he put in was actually lesser compared to his dropshipping business. And if he put similar kind of effort on the ecommerce side, maybe he'd fetch returns. And he decided to take the plunge once again and focus on this full-time. 

We talk to Rish about building an Amazon FBA business, the learnings, the challenges and the profits that he made along the way. He also runs a community called Republic of Sellers where he posts content about how to build an Amazon FBA business.We discuss the playbook for Amazon FBA businesses. 

In today's episode we have Himanshu Arora from Social Panga again bringing us a D2C Marketing Playbook. We promised in our last episode with Himanshu that we would go deep into the digital marketing aspects of Direct to Consumer (D2C) brands  and that's exactly what we do today.

D2C Playbook Newsletter
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In this episode we discuss various parts of Direct to Consumer (D2C) digital marketing  that are being used by all the biggest modern brands such as Mama Earth, Yoga Bar and others. We start by talking about the foundations of marketing and brand building for online for brands and how consumer loyalty is the key to long term success. One of the themes that we've been speaking about for several episodes is about the importance of community building for any modern brand - this is the essence of building customer loyalty. 

With Himanshu we also go deeper into the metrics that define success for performance marketing performance marketing, how we can think about organising our influencer marketing campaigns and several other topics. if you are thinking of building, or already have, a DTC brand then you should not miss this episode. 

If you’re interested in D2C, don’t forget to read our newsletter which has all the information  and tips on how to build your own D2C brand. The link will be in the show notes. 

This episode is a pure exploration of business ideas.

At The Indian Dream we have a dozen ideas that we discuss everyday but are not able to share with our listeners. This episode is an experiment that we've been planning for months. The idea really took off a few weeks ago when Sahil and Siddharth met up with Saransh in Goa. We started bouncing ideas off each other and realised that it would be great to record this and share with our listeners.

If you enjoy this content, please join our WhatsApp group, we are already 500 strong!

We explore the following ideas in the episode:
1) Leasing/Buying Vacation Homes and renting them out on AirBnB, Saffron Stays, etc. (0:50)
2) Co-working 2.0 for remote workers combining long stay rentals along with a connected co-working space. (7:32)
3) Turning online communities into physical communities in vacation hotspots or Tier 2 cities. (10:32)
4) Community Building for brands on websites just as Tribe.so (12:38)
5) Software products for Sport Teams for Scout Management and recognition of young talent. (27:49)
6) Software for Fund Managers to rank companies based on Environmental, Social or Governance metrics. (32:05)
7) Online Marketplace for Buying/Selling Small Online Businesses - Micro Acquire (32:56)

We would love feedback on this episode - please email us at [email protected]

Listener Survey Link
Email us at [email protected]

Thank you for supporting us on our journey of 
building The Indian Dream Project. 

This episode is just Sahil and Sid talking about Why started The Indian Dream, the journey so far and the plans for our future. 

We're focused on creating content around Profitable Entrepreneurship in India. 

We look at the past to create playbooks of building successful businesses through our Founder Journeys episode. 

We look at the future to identify opportunities to build profitable businesses through our Trends Newsletters & Podcast Episodes. 

In the episode today, we have Navjor Kaur, Vice President at a Venture Capital firm that provides growth capital to early stage consumer brands.  We go through the playbook of building a D2C Brand covering functions such as Marketing, Logistics, Manufacturing, Hiring.

D2C Newsletter

Direct to Consumer Business Model: In this business model you cut out all the middlemen that exist in the traditional supply chain - your wholesaler & retailer primarily. You leverage the internet and build your presence online to directly sell to the consumer. You save up on the margin that would've to be distributed across the supply chain and can utilize that to build your brand and generate traffic on your website.

Given the role, Navjot ends up advising and evaluating a lot of D2C companies. She has looked at D2C companies across different phases of growth and has provided us with a playbook of what it takes to build a D2C brand. We look at how to lay down the fundamentals for a D2C business and talk about functions such as marketing, logistics, manufacturing, hiring to really understand the nuances in relation to building a D2C brand. If you run a D2C or have aspirations to build one, this is a must listen for you.