How I Built Two Unicorns After Being Arrested By The FBI | Sandeep Aggarwal (Droom & ShopClues)

"Most entrepreneurs think that insufficient capital goes against them. You die due to indigestion, not due to hunger."

Sandeep Aggarwal's powerful insight challenges the "blitzscaling" mentality prevalent in the startup world. In this episode, he explains why having too much capital can be more dangerous than having too little, leading to a lack of discipline and inefficient spending. It's a hard-won lesson on the importance of capital efficiency, forged from the experience of building two unicorns.

About Sandeep Aggarwal

Sandeep Aggarwal is the only tech entrepreneur in India to have founded two unicorns back-to-back: ShopClues, India's first managed marketplace, and Droom, India's largest automobile e-commerce platform. After a successful 14-year career as a top-ranked Wall Street internet analyst covering giants like Google and Amazon, he moved to India to launch his entrepreneurial journey. Despite losing his first company amidst a personal and legal crisis, he founded Droom in 2014, scaling it to a $1.2 billion valuation. His first company, ShopClues, became India's 5th consumer internet unicorn and achieved that status having spent only $70 million.

Key Insights from the Conversation

• The "Real India" Thesis: ShopClues’ initial success was driven by a visionary strategy to target the millions of small sellers and buyers in India's Tier 2 and 3 cities, a market completely ignored by competitors at the time.
• The Viral Growth Hack: Sandeep reveals how a simple but brilliant marketing campaign—selling an Adidas deodorant for just ₹9—led to an explosion in user growth for ShopClues, taking them from 18 to 200 orders per day almost overnight.
• Engineering Trust with Tech: Droom’s entire business model is built on creating trust in the highly fragmented used-car market through a proprietary tech stack, including an algorithmic pricing engine  Orange Book Value  and a digital inspection service  ECO .
• Resilience as a Superpower: The conversation highlights how Sandeep turned a career-ending crisis, including his arrest and the loss of his company, into the clarity and motivation needed to build his second, even more resilient, unicorn.

Chapters

02:23 - Surviving the Dot-Com Burst & Landing a Top Wall Street Job

07:07 - The "Real India" Thesis: Why We Ignored Cities to Win the Heartland

09:46  - How We Onboarded Our First Sellers  And Created Digital Catalogs from Scratch

15:00  - The ₹9 Deodorant Hack That Got Us 30,000 Users Overnight

22:58  - Understanding the Insider Trading Allegations

29:48  - The Comeback: Analyzing 52 Ideas to Found Droom

32:00  - The Droom Thesis: Fixing Trust in the Broken Used Car Market

38:52  - How Droom's Transaction Model Actually Works

41:09  - Engineering Trust: Building OBV, ECO & Droom History

45:41  - Droom Credit: Fixing the Used Car Loan Problem

53:30  - Path to Profitability & The Economics of Droom

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