In this episode of Startup Strategies, Juliana sits down with Ish Jindal, the engineer-turned-entrepreneur who spent four years not knowing what MRR meant while bootstrapping TARS to $1M ARR. After discovering the internet in his second year of college, Ish went from building education websites in cyber cafes to travel hacking conferences across five countries, eventually stumbling into entrepreneurship through sheer curiosity rather than ambition.
When his travel startup Padharo got featured by BBC but he couldn't afford the flight to Delhi for the interview, Ish realized operations-heavy B2C wasn't his path. Meeting technical co-founder Vinit through LinkedIn led to building what they wanted to be "ChatGPT in 2015" - a conversational AI that started as a single WhatsApp number serving 40,000 users manually before evolving into the chatbot platform TARS.
Ish reveals why being completely ignorant of SaaS best practices became an advantage, how they built their early growth entirely through content marketing and 2,000 handmade chatbot templates, and why choosing marketers over support teams as their first customers nearly killed them during COVID when marketing budgets disappeared overnight.
This conversation challenges the venture capital playbook and shows how patience, curiosity, and building something you'd actually use can create sustainable growth over nine years of bootstrapping.
Ish shares:
- How travel hacking conferences led to his first startup idea
- Why he couldn't afford to appear in his own BBC feature
- The transition from manual WhatsApp support to automated chatbots
- Building 2,000 chatbot templates by hand for SEO-driven growth
- How complete ignorance of SaaS metrics became a competitive advantage
- The 10-year co-founder partnership that started on LinkedIn
- Why targeting marketers over support teams was a COVID mistake
- How content marketing drove growth without advertising budgets
- Why most customer support bots still deliver mediocre experiences
- The mindset shift from building for fun to building for business
Links and resources:
FREE Startup Marketing Cheatsheet
FREE $1M ARR SaaS Marketing Playbook
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