The Indian Dream

 Heads Up For Tails is India's leading Pet Care ecommerce business and we're super excited to share their story on The Indian Dream. Whoever has heard enough episodes of this show will know that I'm a huge animal lover and have an adopted street dog named Lola. That's why Heads Up For Tails has been on our target list for a long time and we're super excited to speak to its founder Rashi Narang in today's episode.

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Just a week ago, Heads Up For Tails received $37 million in series A funding. Before you guys get up in arms and send us angry emails that we're now covering venture funded startups instead of bootstrapped businesses - let me explain why HUFT is an exception. Rashi actually started HUFT as a single store in Delhi in 2008, along with an e-commerce website, and ran it completely bootstrapped for 8 years until she merged with another pet store in 2016. We've realised that some of the best Direct to Consumer founders are the ones that stay bootstrapped for several years as they figure out customers and product market fit.

Listen in if you want to learn how can build your own Pet or D2C business.

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to look back at the 100 Episode journey of The Indian Dream.

Yes, we've now release 100 Episodes of content around profitable businesses.  Support us and show us your love by buying us a some beer/chai on this link.

Timeline:
(00:18) - Discussing the learnings from 100 Episodes of TID
(10:00) - Update on Business Digitisation Course
(21:00) -  Brand Stickers to hide Stains on Clothes
(26:58) - Aggregator of Govt Service Agents
(32:05) - Sustainable Textile Certification Body in India

In this episode, we talk to Shrey Badhani to talk about the journey of Building Kapiva.

Kapiva is an Ayurveda 2.0 Brand that combines the two trends that we've written about previously: Ayurveda & Direct to Consumer. 

We talk to Shrey about the initial thesis behind Kapiva, the pivot to becoming a consumer brand, their process in creating products and how they've scaled up the brand using a combination of D2C + Marketplace approach. 

Do check out the episode if you're interested in D2C, Ayurveda or Consumer Brands. 

A journey that started 33 years ago has resulted in a company that does over Rs. 1250 Cr in revenue and has a public market cap of more than 10,000 Crs. This is the story of Mr. Dinesh Thakkar, CMD of Angel Broking.

Before we start, let;s define a stock broker. These are entities that act as the middlemen between stock buyers and the stock exchange. And that's how Mr. Dinesh Thakkar started his career back in 1998. This was a time that the stock market was extremely small and so were the number of players participating in it. As popularized by the show Scam 1992, the market was also open to being rigged by a few powerful players. For 9 years, he learnt the ropes as a stock broker and saw the industry go through the tough phase of early 1990's. As the market was getting bigger, so were its participants, and in order to serve the new market participants, Mr. Thakkar set up Angel Broking in 1996.

Leveraging new age technology and the ability to take long term strategic bets have been a key reason for the success that Angel Broking has had. The company has seen major transformations from introduction of real-time trading over computers to trading over mobile apps. The company has evolved with the times and continued to expand into new business verticals to create this behemoth today.

As the company reaches it's 25th Anniversary, it's laying the foundation for next decade's growth. Considering that only 5% of Indians invest in Equity, the headroom for growth is still quite huge. And to capture this market, Angel Broking is being rebranded to Angel One with a bigger focus on customer education and helping them end to end.

We talk to Mr. Thakkar about his journey of building Angel Broking, his thoughts on technology, customer centricity and building a sustainable organisation.

Before we jump into the episode, please take a moment to drop us a review on Apple! We're reaching 100 episodes and if you like what we've done so far, please drop us a review!

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to discuss some business ideas.

Timeline:
(00:40) - Latest regulations surrounding Bill Discounting
(6:11) - Vitamin D & B12 Deficiency Epidemic
(16:40) - Disrupting Water Purifier Market
(27:30) - Prediction Gambling 
(34:00) - Unbundling of Upwork

Business Ideas from the episode

1. Regulations in Bill Discounting Market: Recently, the Lok Sabha passed a Factoring Regulation Amendment Bill that allows NBFCs to participate in the bill discounting marketing without any minimum % of business committed to Bill discounting. The earlier bill required Bill Discounting NBFCs to have 75% of their business dedicated to Bill Discounting and therefore there were just 7 NBFCs that had this license. This should inject much needed liquidity in the market and we expect huge growth in this segment in the next few years. 
2. Vitamin D & B12: 90% of Indians suffer from Vit D Deficiency. And more than 40% suffer from Vit B12 deficiency. Both these result in various day to day energy and mental health challenges amongst other things. There is an opportunity to build an education/content led business around creating awareness of these deficiencies and then building a business around it. 
3. Disrupting Water Purifier Market: The water purifier market in India is ~$400 Million (Rs. 3000 Cr) and is expected to be ~$1 Billion (Rs. 7500 Cr) in the next 5 years. The current market is dominated by a few players (Eureka Forbes, Tata Chemical, Kent RO) and they tend to rely on information asymmetry to confuse the customers and make them buy products they might not need. Add to this, the after service market for this Industry is huge and currently filled of scams. There is a great opportunity to build a D2C Subscription service around Water Purifiers. 
4. Prediction Gambling - In the absurd idea for the week, we discussed how there could be gambling service built on top of Shaadi.Com to predict how the matches fair in the overall journey to get married. We also discuss the blockchain platforms that are coming up around prediction gambling (Polywork, Augur). 
5. Unbundling of Upwork: Upwork is a marketplace to connect freelancers to end customers. It's a horizontal marketplace, i.e it targets freelancers across different skill sets. Last few years has seen the unbundling of Upwork into individual niche marketplaces like TopTal ($200 mill in Revenue) and the homegrown, Flexiple. We talk about the various opportunities in unbundling Upwork. 

Before moving on to the episode, we're looking for an intern to handle our LinkedIn marketing. Our previous intern got a job and is moving on to the real world and we're looking for someone new to take over that role! If you enjoy writing content about business ideas, trends and SME founders, shoot us an email! 

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out to discuss some business ideas.

Timeline:
(00:00) - Intro and some updates
(1:30) - No Code WhatsApp Automation
(11:15) - Marketplace & Funding for Franchises
(24:05) - Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies

Links from the Episode:

1. Sanjeev Jain YouTube Video
2. Sanjeev Jain's website to buy the WhatsApp Automation Template
3. How to Send WhatsApp Messages from Google Sheets with JavaScript and Node.js
4. Hubspot WhatsApp Integration
5. Chat.api
6. YouTube video on Connecting Google sheets with WhatsApp using Chat.api and Pabbly
7. Soulful/Rasika Episode Link
8. Software SuggestAnkit Dudhwewala episode link
9. Frog Ideas/Jatin Modi Episode

Business Ideas from the episode

1. No Code WhatsApp Marketing Automation: While we were researching for our No Code course, we realised that there is no affordable and No Code tool that can easily automate WhatsApp marketing and lead prospecting. We found Sanjeev Jain's template but the website and tool can be improved upon with better UI/UX and design. A few roadblocks for this business model are that WhatsApp charges $0.05-0.20 per message that is sent automatically and also that WhatsApp has a very strong Spamming filter. However, threads that are initiated by the user are of cost for the business. We both think that this tool can be very useful for marketers and there will be a quick uptake for this tool if built well. 
2. Marketplace & Funding for Franchises: Taking a franchise is one of the quickest way for someone to become an entrepreneur for themself. All they need is the capital to get started. However, banks don't really provide that capital to start a franchise, even if the franchise is a pretty solid brand like McDonald's or Domino's. 
   • Idea #1 - start a financial services company that focuses on giving loans to people taking on a franchise.
   • Idea #2 - Marketplace for franchises so that brands can find new entrepreneurs and also so that these businesses can find new franchises. 
   • The key to success to idea #2 would be to start in a niche where there aren't too many players and dominate in that niche before spreading to other niches.
3. Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Digital Marketing agencies don't need to be generalists anymore, there is enough of a demand for their services that they acn now start specialising in niches that they couldn't when this entire industry started 10 years ago. Specialising in a niche will allow agencies to become well known for their services and focus on their strengths instead of spreading themselves thin. 

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out with Chinmay Bhogle and Patanjali Pahwa who are currently building The Signal

Timeline

• (00:20) - Introduction to Newsletters & The Signal
• (03:00) - The Zomato IPO
• (11:30) - Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Focused on Newsletter Growth
• (18:15) - Bundling Subscriptions
• (28:50) - D2C Brands Collaborating to share cusotmers.
• (33:30) - What is Kabuki Studios?

Business Ideas in this Episode

1. The Zomato IPO: This IPO is one of the biggest events in the startup ecosystem in 2021. It will provide exits to a lot of investors and early employees and show the rest of the startup ecosystem the route to make money in the long run. However, Zomato is still a loss making entity and retail investors may not be the best investors for this kind of entity. We provide our take on the Zomato IPO in this episiode. None of us are accredited investment advisors so please make your own judgement on what you believe you should do with these securities. 
2. Unbundling Digital Marketing Agencies - Focused on Newslettter Growth - There has been a proliferation of Newsletters in the past few years. Many journalists have left top newspapers to start their own newsletters and a few of them have done incredibly well for themselves with this model. However, a great writer and journalist might not be great at promoting and distributing their newsletter. Why not unbundle newsletter growth from Digital Marketing agencies and have an agency completely focused on growing newsletters for writers. Everybody hates this idea, I was very sad. 
3. Bundling Subscriptions - Bundling all of your OTT, Music and Newspaper subscriptions in one place so that you have full visibility of all your subscriptions and so that they're easier to handle. Every.to has bundled some fantastic creators in a newsletter subscription, allowing them to grow their audience by collaborating with others. 
4. D2C Brands Collaborating to share cusotmers

We speak to Rasika Prashant, co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Soulfull Foods which is now a part of Tata Consumer Products. We've also changed the format of the episode a bit - the last 10 or 15 minutes are a Business Munchies discussion where we discuss an idea with Rasika.

So what is Soulfull? It's a food brand that's build entire around Millets, aka Ragi or Nachni - they have cereal, instant dosa mix, and other products that are all made from Ragi. The discussion with Rasika starts from a realisation that Millets or Ragi are a healthier alternative than wheat and rice and ends with Soulfull's acquisition by Tata Consumer Products for 150 crores.

We also discuss how they got their initial set of customers, how they thought about offline distribution before the pandemic and how they quickly pivoted to an online focused model after the pandemic. One incredible story in this discussion was how Rasika and her co-founders personally interviewed 300 customers for 2 hours each to gain more consumer insights. That's 60 days of interviews if they did 10 hours of interviews everyday. No wonder Tata wanted to buy them.

Big Announcement!

We've just launched the first batch of our course on Digitisation of Business Processes using No Code tools. We interviewed more than 30 entrepreneurs to figure out why digitisation and automation is so difficult for SME's today and we've used that to build a course focused on automating your business using super easy to use and easy to learn tools. If you're interested in automating your business to get more time to focus on long term growth - click here to learn more.

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) take a trip down the SME Business Landscape rabbit hole. And they discuss the state of SMEs, the opportunities and what the modern day SME will look like.

We've also launched 'Digitise your business using No-Code Tools' course with the launch of our first cohort. Only 10 spots for the first cohort. You can read more and apply here.

Join The Indian Dream WhatsApp group here.
The Indian Dream Website

Ideas Discussed: 
1. SME Landscape and Opportunities: We go deep in the SME ecosystem to understand the different types of SMEs that exist. Some numbers: 6.34 Cr MSME's in India. 6.3 of those are Micro Enterprises with turnover less than 5 Cr, 3 Lakh Small Businesses (Turnover: 5 to 75 Cr) and ~10,000 Medium sized businesses. Most of the venture capital funding has gone to focus on the Micro Segment with helping these businesses digitize. However, there are profitable, niche opportunities in serving the Small and Mid-sized businesses. We discuss all these opportunities and what a modern day SME should look like. 

2.  Compliance Services for US Businesses: Recently, Sahil received a message from someone who runs a small podcast hosting website that has a lot of Indian listeners. He wanted Sahil to become the Chief Grievance Officer for India. This was due to the recent law that was passed. We discuss how there be might be a niche opportunity here to build a profitable business.