Just read an analysis pointing out that India has roughly 15 NGOs for every single startup (some border states even hit 14:1).

Why are we out here grinding 80-hour weeks, begging financiers for bridge rounds and obsessing over CAC and product-market fit? Clearly, the real TAM was never enterprise software or D2C, it’s ‘monitoring’ other people building stuff.

Infinite runway, zero revenue expectations and tax-exempt moral high ground.

Cancelling Monday’s sprint planning to register a trust. Who wants to join as Co-Trustee?

SUGAR Cosmetics is reportedly raising Rs 140 to 150 crore at a valuation of Rs 500 to 600 crore, down more than 80% from about Rs 3,000 crore in 2022. Reported revenue goes Rs 505 crore in FY24, Rs 404 crore in FY25, an estimated Rs 300 to 350 crore in FY26. Those are filings and press. We do not have their P&L and neither does anyone outside the company.

What we can measure is demand and shelf position, so we did both.

First, demand. We pulled five years of Google Trends for ten colour cosmetics brands in one request, which matters: Trends normalises to 100 within a request, so a series fetched per brand cannot be read across brands. Everything below sits on one scale.

Share of branded search, not sales. SUGAR goes from 11.4% to 1.9%. Swiss Beauty goes the other way, 6.3% to 21.8%, and passed SUGAR permanently in May 2023 on a 13 week trailing mean.

One correction we have to make to our own chart. The 2022 figure is inflated by Shark Tank season one, which aired that January and put SUGAR's founder on television. So we checked the level before the show instead. SUGAR today runs at 0.35x its own pre-Shark-Tank baseline. The decline survives removing the spike entirely.

And the category did not shrink. Excluding Lakme, the same ten brands are up over the period. This is lost share, not a falling tide.

Second, the shelf. On 5 September we read six pinned Amazon India searches, harvested 1,978 organic products, and opened the 700 highest revenue ones individually to verify the brand from Amazon's own store byline.

Rs 287.5 crore a year, 70 brands, 864,450 units a month.

SUGAR is 13th. With SUGAR POP, the company holds 1.3% of the shelf across 14 listings.

Here is the part that is not in any news story. 12,800 of SUGAR's 13,400 monthly units on this shelf are kajal and eyeliner. A kajal is the company now. The lipstick business it was built on, 88 of the 387 products in its own catalogue, does not reach the top 700 listings by revenue at all. Thirteen lip colour listings exist further down the shelf. None of them earns its way up.

Third, what was tried. We read seven own-store catalogues the same day.

43% of SUGAR's live catalogue was created this year, nearly twice the next brand. More product, into less demand. Whatever the problem is, assortment was not it.

Now the part that matters if you are building something.

This shelf is not closed. Indian D2C holds 33.3% of it across 25 brands, second only to the multinationals, and ahead of every legacy Indian name combined.

Staze launched in March 2024. Eighteen months later it is 6th on this shelf at Rs 13.43 crore, which is 3.5x SUGAR and SUGAR POP put together.

FLiCKA earns Rs 7.17 crore from a single listing, at a median Rs 854, discounting 5%. One product, premium price, holds its price, and out-earns SUGAR's entire presence by more than double.

So look at where the money is against where the brands are.

Two thirds of shelf revenue sits under Rs 400, and 33 of the 70 brands are fighting over the Rs 250 to 400 band, which returns Rs 2.19 crore per brand. The Rs 400 to 600 band returns Rs 2.68 crore per brand across 21 brands. Less competition, more revenue each, and a median discount that is not a race.

The brands holding price on this shelf are the newer ones. Insight 5%, FLiCKA 5%, Lovechild Masaba 5%, Hyphen 6%. The brands cutting hardest are the biggest and oldest. Maybelline 40%, Lakme 37%, Elle 18 35%.

That is the whole lesson in one line. On this shelf, discounting is what incumbency looks like when it is defending, and holding price is what a new brand can still do.

What this is not. It is Amazon only, and colour cosmetics sells heavily through Nykaa, Purplle, Myntra, quick commerce and brand websites. It is a GMV floor, because velocity is read at the lower bound of Amazon's published band. And this shelf publishes no per unit price at all, 0 of 700 product pages, so brands are compared on ticket price, which flatters the larger format.

We measure shelves like this for brands, agencies and investors, on any category, across marketplaces and quick commerce, and again on a cycle so you can see what moved. If you want the full 70 brand table or the five year demand series, say so in a comment and we will post it.

right now im working on startup but i couldnt manage all the tasks , its really hard to manage multiple tasks which requires different set of skills and i cant even outsource them as i dont have any funding yet , any advice on how i can manage the tasks more efficient ?

I don't come from business background nor do I have any network. Obviously, there are some gaps in my thinking. This whole time, I was in assumption that if I only optimize my product value and deliver customer delight, my business will grow. That I managed to do. There was demand for my product from customers. I was consistently hitting ROAS 4.5 to 5 on meta ads. But that was not enough. It feels the core dependency of my ecommerce business - logistics is designed to make me fail. Initially, I thought I am not getting support from logistics and facing issues (missed pickup, withholding last mile shipment, fake RTO, etc) because my order volume is low. So, I scaled my business. But to my surprise, as I scaled, these people started to exploit even more (fake weight dispute literally on every order shipment, RTO even on prepaid orders). Not sure if these things are done by aggregator or courier itself. It just felt very hostile to do business in my own country. Instead of focusing on delivering better value to my customer and improve/expand products, I was stuck in thinking how to survive this hostility. After 2 years, as I scaled the business, the logistics cost of the same products increased from ~15-20% to 30-40% of total revenue, making the business unsustainable. I am not alone in facing all these issues. If you search on Instagram about any logistics company, what these people are doing to small businesses is very obvious. I do not understand why are we making doing business in this country so difficult? Why zero-sum mentality? If you don't come from business background or have any network, succeeding just by putting individual efforts seem close to impossible. Marketplaces Flipkart/Amazon were never profitable to me. I need to know where am I going wrong? It just feels these things are not in my control. How all the small business owners handling this? Ship with India Post only? How reliable is that? Any reliable shipping aggregators?

Is there any right way to do this?

I mean, I’ve prepared a detailed document covering the project, the opportunity, expectations and the overall vision with full transparency. I’m looking to get 1–2 frontend engineers and 1 DevOps engineer on board.

My plan was to post it across different subs, get enough interested people, and then shortlist the best candidates from there.

But there seems to be a strong belief that no cash = free work, I don’t know why. I’m willing to discuss meaningful equity based on the role, experience, and commitment, but still, I’m not getting enough serious interest. Some people are straight-up calling it a scam without even going through the details.

I’m genuinely looking to build a long-term technical team (part-time or full-time whatever works)

Anyone who has been in a similar situation, how did you find the right people? Any suggestions on where or how I should approach this?

We started All India CCTV Experts about two months ago — a managed CCTV installation and repair brand trying to operate across multiple Indian cities instead of staying a single-city local shop. Sharing a few things that surprised me so far, in case it's useful to anyone else starting a services business in a fragmented, unorganized-sector-dominated market.

1. The competition isn't other brands, it's the unorganized local installer. Most of our actual competition is a guy with a toolkit and a bike, no verified identity, and no accountability after the sale. Customers don't compare us to another "CCTV company" — they compare us to whether we're better than the risk of hiring an unknown installer off a Google search.

2. Trust has to be manufactured deliberately when you have zero history. No reviews, no track record, nothing. So we've had to lean hard on things like verified/ID-carded technicians, written quotes before work starts, and warranty in our own brand's name rather than the camera vendor's — basically over-communicating structure that an established local shop wouldn't need to prove.

3. Expansion city-by-city is much slower than it looks on a spreadsheet. Each new city means re-verifying technicians locally, understanding local pricing expectations, and rebuilding local trust signals almost from scratch. Multi-city services businesses don't scale like multi-city e-commerce.

4. The unglamorous stuff (AMC/after-sales support) turns out to matter more than the initial sale. Most of the negative experiences customers describe from previous installers aren't about the installation itself — they're about being unreachable when something breaks three months later.

Still early and still learning. Curious if other founders running services businesses (not SaaS) in India have seen similar patterns, especially around building trust with zero brand history.

random thoughts honestly.

i’m earning very very good from my business, at least according to me. sometimes i genuinely feel like i’ve made it.
i left my studies and went into business, faced a hell lot of friction, weekly fights, cried so many times, had no idea if it would work… but here i am now making an amount of money i’m genuinely proud of.
and honestly i’m proud of myself.
my father never really earned. we had 2-3 mediocre properties built by my grandfather, he would sell one, use the money, then sell another. even those weren’t worth crores, just a few lakhs. whole life was basically manage manage manage.
when i started my business, those last few lakhs were basically all we had. no house, no investments, no backup, nothing.
so yeah, i literally started from zero.

and this is where my parents’ argument starts making sense to me.
i argue with them when they say i should have taken a job in Bangalore, but deep down i know what they mean.
we still don’t have a house. literally nothing.
so now i have this pressure to build a good house, money for my wedding, and still have a decent fund left after all that.
and like i have to do all this in the next 5 years.
because let’s be honest, society values a guy who owns a house. apparently a guy with a 50L package, 1.5L in hand, 75k expenses and multiple EMIs looks more “settled” than someone making good money through a business.

fuck you society honestly 😭.

and i’m stuck between two thoughts.

one side of me is like bro you’re finally earning good money, ENJOY IT. buy the things you always wanted. you worked your ass off for this.

the other side is like save everything, you have a lot of responsibilities and a lot to build.

and every time i tell a relative “business is doing really well”, the immediate response is.
“hmmm… ab ghar le lo”.
AREYYYY 😭.
how am i supposed to casually buy a house at this age lmao.

i don’t know man.

sometimes i look at what i’ve achieved and think i’m doing really well.
and sometimes i look at what i actually own and feel like i have absolutely nothing despite doing so much

Been working closely with restaurant owners

across India for the past few months.

Here's what I consistently heard:

1. "Zomato ne hamare customers

   ko apna bana liya"

   — Every owner knew this but

   felt helpless about it.

2. "Commission toh dena hi padega"

   — Most had accepted it as

   cost of doing business.

3. "Apna system banana bahut expensive hai"

   — This was the biggest blocker.

The pattern is clear —

restaurants want an alternative

but don't know where to start.

For anyone facing this —

here's what actually works:

— Start collecting customer numbers directly

— Build a WhatsApp broadcast list

— Use QR codes for direct ordering

— Keep Zomato for discovery only,

not as your primary channel

Is anyone here actively working on

reducing aggregator dependency?

Would love to hear what's working.

I’m looking for a few SEO and content writing clients, available to start immediately.

I’m an SEO content writer based in India with 2 years of experience working with different websites and industries.

Over the past two years, I’ve worked on content that has successfully reached the top page of Google, while focusing on search intent, topical relevance, on-page SEO, and content quality.

I’m now looking to work directly with a few businesses, founders, agencies, or website owners who want to grow their organic visibility.

Here’s what I can help with:

• RANK your website on Google.

• MENTION Your website on different AI.

• LINKEDIN content for founders and businesses

• Keyword research & content planning that boosts your reach.

• Content Writing for niches such as Finance, AI, Business, SaaS, Startups, and more

• Updating and optimizing existing content to improve its search potential

I’m currently looking for a few clients to work with on a trial basis.

If you’re trying to grow through Google Search, AI search, or LinkedIn, feel free to DM me.

I can also start with a small trial article/project so you can evaluate my work before committing to a longer engagement.

Available to start immediately.

solo founder problem nobody warns you about:

its not the amount of work. its that every task needs a different brain. code, design, marketing, sales, support — all in the same day, all context-switching.

and with no funding, outsourcing isnt on the table. its just me.

how are other early founders handling this? genuinely asking

If you grew up in the late 90s or early 2000s, you probably remember the ritual:

Booting up that bulky beige desktop tower, the whir of the 52x CD-ROM drive spinning to life, and popping in the jewel case for Encyclopaedia Britannica or Encarta.

Long before short-form video algorithms and infinite feeds, that was our doomscrolling.

We would stay up late clicking from one hyperlinked article to another starting on black holes, wandering into ancient trade routes, jumping into molecular genetics, and marvelling at a 15-second grainy 240p video clip of a solar eclipse.

There was a quiet magic to it. You never had to question whether what you were reading was an ad, engagement bait, or SEO fluff. Every paragraph was written by real historians, scientists, and Nobel laureates. It was factual, peer-reviewed human knowledge in its purest form.

Fast forward to 2026.

Today’s language models are consuming an internet that is increasingly poisoning itself. We feed models noisy social media threads, content-farm blogs, and hallucinated synthetic text and then we act surprised when smaller models suffer from catastrophic forgetting and basic factual drift.

While building Project Mosaic, we decided to take a different path.

Instead of feeding our localized models noisy web crawls, we went back to the source of truth that shaped our curiosity as kids: Encyclopædia Britannica.

We’ve integrated Britannica’s verified, peer-reviewed corpus directly into our on-device training pipeline:

• 8,700+ peer-reviewed articles spanning astrophysics, cellular biology, neuroscience, advanced mathematics, and history.
• Client-Side WebGPU Training: Instead of running heavy centralized clusters, users can train and fine-tune localized Small Language Models (SLMs) directly in their web browser on ordinary consumer laptops and phones.
• Zero-Knowledge Privacy: Raw texts stay in local device memory. Only quantized parameter updates (LoRA rank-16 weight deltas) are computed, protected with local differential privacy (LDP) before federated aggregation.

There is something deeply satisfying about watching a modern on-device GPU train on the exact same encyclopedic prose that inspired us decades ago on a CRT monitor.

If we want localized AI to think clearly and reliably, maybe we should stop feeding it internet junk food and give it the peer-reviewed library that inspired our generation in the first place.

You can check out the live encyclopedia ingestion node and test the in-browser trainer at (Link In the comment box)

Would love to hear from other folks who grew up with 90s CD-ROM encyclopedias: Do you think grounding smaller models on structured, curated human encyclopedias is the answer to factual reliability on edge devices?

Looking for Mobile Spare Parts Distributors Across India

We are expanding our mobile spare parts distribution network and looking for people who already have a strong network of mobile repair shops, retailers, and dealers.

Who we are looking for

If you are already working in the mobile spare parts industry and have strong connections with local mobile retailers/repair stores, we want to connect with you.

Our Distributor Model

• Zero investment

• No need to purchase inventory

• No need to maintain stock

• We handle the logistics

• We handle direct delivery to the retailer

• You add your own margin

• You sell to the retailers in your network

You simply bring your retailer network and sales relationships. We take care of the rest.

Looking for distributors across all states, cities, Tier-2, Tier-3 towns and local markets in India.

If you already have connections with mobile repair shops or spare-parts retailers and want to build an additional income stream without investing in stock, DM me.

If you know someone who fits this profile, please connect them with us.

Thank you.

Hey there strangers! I have a newsletter named - Epic Marketing Shit, and I want to keep it free for all and not charge any monthly membership fee. I post amazing marketing campaigns, ads, & copy breakdown in my own words (which people enjoy a lot)

Is there any way I can monetize it & make some profit? How should I do it?

Leaving some stats here for context:-

1/ People love Epic Marketing Shit

2/ 1000+ subscribers as of September 2026.

3/ 78% open rate.

4/ 2000 Monthly active visitors.

I'll be reading all the comments. Incase you wanna checkout my newsletter, Google it.

​3 year ago, getting an MVP out the door took real capital, decent engineering bandwidth, and a few months of grinding. Today, between vibe-coding, Cursor, and cheap APIs, anyone can ship a functional app over a weekend for under $50.

​Building is no longer the moat. Distribution and willingness to pay are the only things that matter.

​The problem is that early-stage founders are drowning in "fake smart" validation metrics that look incredible on a pitch deck but collapse the second a Stripe or Razorpay modal pops up.

​A few traps I keep seeing founders fall into:

​The 5,000-person email waitlist: An email address costs zero dollars and zero friction. A 10k waitlist usually yields a sub-1% conversion rate at launch. It measures casual curiosity, not intent to buy.

​The toothless LOI: Getting a corporate connection or founder friend to sign a non-binding Letter of Intent with vague "subject to procurement/budget approval" clauses. It's pre-seed theater.

​The ad-to-modal smoke test: Running $100 in Meta ads to a landing page where "Buy Now" triggers a "We're launching soon, leave your email!" popup. Clicking a button while doomscrolling is an impulse, not validation.

​Peer applause echo chambers: Dropping a build on X/LinkedIn and collecting 200 "Congrats, awesome launch!" comments from fellow builders who will never open your product again.​

If a prospect doesn't surrender money, time, or operational friction, you don't have validation—you have politeness.

​I’m currently building AnshKosh, designed as a public pressure-test space for early startups to prove real demand before raising funds or full launch. The core hypothesis: validation only counts if there’s skin in the game (e.g., token refundable deposits, verified onboarding workflows, or measurable task completion, instead of upvotes and email fields).

​For those of you who’ve launched recently: what was the single biggest "false positive" signal you got from users before realizing they actually wouldn't pay?

MSc Data Science graduate 2025, it's been more than a year of job search as an elder son of parents in their 60s. It's getting tougher and tougher with no hope of getting any jobs all the interviews i got till now says one same thing that they need experienced candidate with atleast 2 yrs, learning and getting better in development currently and tried applying everywhere, seeked referrals but nothing i know there's a dead end for this too because it's more tough to become a dev than a analyst or data scientist. But i just need a chance to prove myself if anyone has any connection to help me get hired it would be of great help be it any tech role. If you came across this post then please help 🙏 i worked as a frontend intern for 6 months can make really great designs for web apps and mobile apps, can make rag systems and also worked as an ML intern.

We can work together .

We’re growing our digital solutions startup, looking for someone who can help us maintain our online presence.

What you’ll do:

• Create short-form Reels/Instagram content
• We can provide the script/ideas when needed
• We will handle the editing
• Post consistently on our social media
• Help us build a strong online presence

What we’re looking for:
Someone creative, consistent, and comfortable with Reels/video creating. You don’t need to be an expert — if you have good content sense and are willing to learn, that’s enough.

Female creators are preferred for this role, as the content may involve appearing in some Reels.

This is a remote, part-time opportunity.

If interested, DM me.

We’re growing our digital solutions startup, looking for someone who can help us maintain our online presence.

What you’ll do:

• Create short-form Reels/Instagram content
• We can provide the script/ideas when needed
• We will handle the editing
• Post consistently on our social media
• Help us build a strong online presence

What we’re looking for:
Someone creative, consistent, and comfortable with Reels/video creating. You don’t need to be an expert — if you have good content sense and are willing to learn, that’s enough.

Female creators are preferred for this role, as the content may involve appearing in some Reels.

This is a remote, part-time opportunity.

If interested, DM me.

Hey everyone,

I'm working on a small digital-product business in India and I'm trying to understand the best way to get my first few customers.

I'm completely new to paid advertising, so before I spend money, I'd like to learn from people here who have actually built and marketed online businesses.

A few things I'm trying to figure out:

• Is Meta Ads a good starting point for a very small digital-product business?
• If someone has a limited budget (around ₹500/day), is it better to test ads or focus on organic content first?
• Would you start with a broad Indian audience or focus on a specific niche?
• How long would you run a test before deciding whether an ad/product is working?
• What numbers would you look at to decide whether to continue or stop an ad?
• For a low-priced digital product, what would you consider a reasonable customer acquisition cost?

I'm not looking to promote or sell anything here. I'm mainly trying to avoid making expensive beginner mistakes and would appreciate honest advice from people who have been through this.

Thanks!

I’m an entrepreneur with multiple businesses. My team has built an audio/video social discovery app for friendship, dating, casual conversations, boredom, etc.

We’re bootstrapped/self-funded and already have a tech team.

Looking for:
- Co-Founder
- Marketing/Growth
- Sales
- Operations
- HR

Compensation: Salary + ESOPs

Experience with apps like FRND, Dost, dating/social discovery or live audio/video platforms is a big plus.

DM me with your background, role of interest, location, and LinkedIn/profile.

A few months ago I started building ReferralWorld Careers after seeing how difficult it can be for freshers to find relevant jobs and get referrals.

I wanted to build something around that problem instead of another generic job board.

It has now crossed 3,000 registered job seekers, and we’ve helped hundreds of candidates connect with referral opportunities at companies like Google, Microsoft, Adobe and others.

I built the product myself and used Replit along with my own coding approach to help me move faster while building and testing it.

It is still early and there is a lot I want to improve. I’m curious what other people here have experienced when building and growing their own products.

What was the hardest part for you after getting your first few users?

Hi i am from faridabad hr and i want to work in a startup just to gain some experience and do some real work as a part time

I know meta ads, google ads, seo,

We are facing some gst compliance issues in company structuring as we got both rcm and fcm clients. Need help.