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Vision : Internship for every college students across bharat by 2024.

This story is about why real startups are born from personal pain, not pitch decks.

In 2008, startups were not “cool.”

No VCs on Twitter.
No founder glam.

Shashank ND, a fresh graduate from NIT Surathkal, was dealing with something far more real.

His father needed knee surgery; Shashank wanted a second medical opinion.

The doctor asked for past reports, and that’s where everything broke.

Files were scattered, and records were missing, and information was trapped in paper folders.

In a world moving digital, healthcare was still stuck in cupboards.

That moment triggered a question:

👉 Why is it so hard to make an informed medical decision?

Shashank discussed the idea with his classmate Abhinav Lal, and in 2008, they started Practo.

No consumer app first.
No flashy branding.

They launched Practo Ray—a B2B SaaS tool

to help doctors and clinics manage appointments, records, and practices digitally.

Their first customers?

Doctors who trusted them.
Clinics that were struggling with paperwork.
One city at a time.

The early years were brutal.
2009 was not kind to startups.
They were bootstrapped.
Small team.
Limited money.

Shashank recalls nights in Mumbai when he would walk to the coast,
asking himself “what next?”

What kept him going was not funding.

but absolute belief in the problem he was solving.
Slowly, Practo expanded.

From Practice management to Doctor discovery Online consultations Health records Medicine delivery Insurance integration

Practo rebranded into a full-stack digital healthcare platform.
How big is Practo today?

Founded: 2008
Presence: 20+ countries
Users: 18+ crore patients annually
Doctors: 1+ lakh
Partner clinics & hospitals: 70,000+

Practo has raised $200M+ in funding over multiple rounds and at its peak was valued at ~$1 billion (unicorn status).

(Revenue numbers vary by year and are not always publicly disclosed.
but Practo operates at large scale across B2C and B2B healthcare.)

The market tailwind

India’s telemedicine market is projected to reach $4.25 billion in the next few years.

India has 1 doctor for every 1,139 people (WHO).

Access, discovery, and digital health are not optional — they’re essential.

Practo didn’t create this demand.

It arrived early to organise it.

What Indian entrepreneurs can learn

The best #startup ideas come from lived problems.

Start with B2B credibility before scaling #B2C

Healthcare, education, and infra take time — patience matters
Vision matters more than valuation during hard years

POV:

Practo wasn’t built to be a unicorn.
It was built so one son could take better care of his father.
That’s how enduring companies are made.

Abhishek Mall

In 2013, Srijana Bagaria faced a problem most Indian women know too well:
unsafe, unhygienic public toilets.

Instead of accepting it as “normal,”

She asked a dangerous question for that time:

👉 “Why isn’t anyone solving this?”

Along with Vikas Bagaria,

she decided to build a solution —
not a #brand, not a pitch deck,
but a product women would actually trust.

That product was a toilet seat sanitizer spray.

People laughed.

Retailers said, “India is not ready.”
#Investors said, “Too niche.”
But the problem was real.
And real problems don’t disappear.

🚧 Early struggles & rejections

Hygiene was a taboo conversation
Consumers didn’t know they “needed” the product

Zero category awareness

Convincing retailers was harder than building the product

So the founders did what most won’t:

Educated before selling

Demonstrated products personally

Focused on women-first distribution

Used online marketplaces to bypass gatekeepers.

The first customers didn’t come from ads.

They came from word of mouth and lived experience.

How big is Pee Safe today?

FY25 Revenue: ₹82 crore.

🧠 What Indian entrepreneurs should learn

Taboo problems are big businesses
If customers don’t understand the product, educate first
#D2C is not about ads — it’s about trust

Co-Founder at PeeSafe | Enabling better hygiene for you since 2013 | Director at SRV and a Home Chef.

Founder-Pee Safe | Enabling better hygiene for you since 2013

Building Karostartup

Saksham Trivedi

For decades, Bata India owned a significant part of everyday India.

School shoes. Office formals. Monsoon sandals.

Predictable demand. Steady cash flows. Generational loyalty.

Then India changed—fast.

Walk into Bata’s new HQ today, and you don’t see nostalgia.

You see sneakers, colors, and experiments—a brand trying to move faster than its legacy.

But the numbers reveal the pain behind the transition:

Q2 FY26 revenue: ₹801.3 crore (–4.3% YoY)
Gross margin: –155 bps
EBITDA margin: –221 bps
PAT margin: –351 bps
Stock down ~60% from its 2021 peak, back to 2016 levels

This isn’t just a fashion problem.

It’s a math problem.

For years, over 50% of Bata’s revenue came from the sub-₹1,000 segment.

Post-COVID, that consumer was hit hardest by inflation and rising living costs.

Footwear purchases were postponed. Or skipped.

While Bata paused factories, restructured sourcing,
and spent ₹30–40 crore on ERP and merchandising tech to rebuild the future,
The present took a hit.

Inventory piled up.
Discounting increased.

Marketing spend doubled from 1.5% to 3.5% of turnover.

Meanwhile, the next generation walked elsewhere to Campus, Relaxo, Puma, Adidas, and D2C sneaker brands.

Yes, premium brands like Floatz and Hush Puppies are growing.

Floatz is already a ₹100+ crore annualised brand.

But the mass consumer—Bata’s historical backbone—hasn’t fully returned.

👉 This is where the lesson lies.

What went wrong (and what leaders should learn):

Being loved by yesterday’s customer isn’t enough

When the core customer weakens, scale becomes fragile

Transformation hurts before it heals—financially.

Legacy brands don’t fail overnight; they slow down quietly

We’ve seen this movie before —
with Nokia,
with other giants who underestimated the speed at which habits shift.
Bata isn’t dead.
It’s recalibrating.

But this phase proves a hard truth:

Relevance is perishable. Even after 100 years.

POV:

Markets don’t punish effort. #startup
They punish late adaptation.
And in today’s India,
#Brands must evolve before the customer forces them to.
The real question isn’t whether Bata can change.
It’s whether it can change faster than India itself.

Hush Puppies

This is the story of Biryani By Blues—a brand that quietly cracked one of India’s hardest food categories.

Biryani Blues was founded in 2013 by Raymond Andrews and Aparna Andrews a time when India’s food startup scene was still taking shape.

The trigger was simple but painful.

Anyone who loves biryani knows this problem:

Amazing taste one day
Disappointing the next
No consistency, no standard

Most biryani brands depended heavily on individual chefs.
Scale broke taste. Quality dropped. Customers stopped trusting.

The #founders believed:

👉 If biryani could be standardized without losing its soul, it could scale nationally.

🎯 The problem they set out to solve

Biryani wasn’t lacking demand.
It was lacking process.
Biryani By Blues focused on:

Standardised recipes

Centralised preparation techniques
Strong kitchen SOPs
Consistency across outlets.

They weren’t chasing “authentic stories.”

They were chasing repeat orders.

🚧 Early struggles & rejections

The early days were tough:

High kitchen costs
Ingredient standardisation challenges
Skepticism from landlords and investors

Many believed:

“Biryani is too local to scale.”
Unlike pizza or burgers, biryani had emotional baggage.
Everyone had an opinion.
But the founders stayed disciplined:
No reckless expansion
No deep discounting
No compromise on process

🧠 How they won their first customers.

Biryani By Blues focused on office hubs and IT corridors.

Why?

Predictable demand
Repeat lunch & dinner orders
Word-of-mouth inside offices

Consistency became their biggest marketing tool.

People ordered again—not because it was flashy, but because it was reliable.

📈 Where the company stands today

Founded in 2013
100+ outlets across major Indian cities
Strong dine-in and delivery presence

📊 Market opportunity

📌 What Indian #entrepreneurs can learn

You don’t need to invent a new category to win.

Consistency is a competitive advantage.

Food brands scale on process, not passion alone.

Repeat customers matter more than viral launches.

Boring execution builds durable businesses

Final thought:

Biryani By Blues didn’t promise the “best biryani in India.”

They promised the same biryani every single time.

And in India’s food market, that promise is powerful enough to build a brand that lasts.

Biryani Blues

Entrepreneur / Founder of Biryani Blues

Entrepreneur

This is the story of Good Monk — and why some of the most powerful startups are born at the dining table, not in boardrooms.

In 2022, Bengaluru-based entrepreneur Amarpreet Singh Anand  and his wife Sahiba Kaur were dealing with a problem millions of Indian parents silently face.

Their teenage son refused vegetables.
Hated nuts.
Wouldn’t touch supplements.
Calories were enough.
But his BMI dropped into the bottom 5th percentile.

Doctors had advice, and the market had products, but nothing worked long-term.

Why? Because most nutrition solutions don’t fit real Indian life.

Existing products were

Too sugary
Too “medicinal”
Too hard to sustain daily

As Amarpreet realized something fundamental:

Parents know what kids should eat.
Kids decide what they actually eat.
The gap between the two is where nutrition fails.

That gap became the #startup idea.

They didn’t want another pill, syrup, or flavoured powder.
They asked a different question:

👉 What if nutrition didn’t feel like nutrition at all?

That thinking led to GOOD MONK (Superfoods Valley Pvt. Ltd.) 
tasteless, odorless, clinically validated nutrition powders that blend into everyday Indian food.
Dal roti, rice, milk, curd, and even chai have no taste change.

No smell, no drama, Just nutrition—quietly doing its job, The early struggle

Convincing people wasn’t easy.
Consumers asked:
“Nutrition bina taste ke kaise?”
“Is this even real?”
“Daily food me mix karna safe hai?”
The founders relied on:
Clinical validation
Clear science communication
Parents who tried it first — and stayed

Their first customers were parents like them, not influencers.
Word spread from kitchens, not billboards.
Where Good Monk is today
Founded: 2022
Based out of: Bengaluru
Users served: 4+ lakh
Annual run rate: ~₹30 crore

Final thought:

Good Monk didn’t ask Indians to eat differently.
They asked nutrition to behave differently.
And that’s how real consumer #brands are built.

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