The Indian Dream

Learn how DrinkPrime, an innovative water purifier company in India, is tackling the country's water crisis. With millions suffering from waterborne diseases, DrinkPrime offers IoT-enabled purifiers that adapt to varying water quality. Trusted by over 200,000 households in three cities, they are scaling profitably with support from leading investors Alteria Capital, Surge, and Omidyar Network India.Timestamps for Easy Listening: 1(00:30) - Intro to DrinkPrime and Water Purifier Market(02:54) - Why DrinkPrime was started?(07:00) - Decision to build new Water Purifier rather add Subscription to existing ones(11:05) - How water quality in India changes across regions and in different seasons(14:43) - The Current Landscape & History of Water Purifier Market (17:33) - Why Celebrities market water purifiers and how DrinkPrime took a different approach(23:40) - The challenges with doing Hardware Innovation(28:34) - Cost Structure of the traditional Water Purifier Industry(34:19) - STOP over-purifying your water(37:58) - Why the traditional water purifier companies are too big to change(40:49) - How DrinkPrime is supplying free water to government schools(47:29) - If you're buying Water Purifier, here's how you should go about it?

If you're building a D2C Brand or want to build one, do NOT miss this episode! Take my word for it, this will be time well spent! In the last 5-7 Years, we've seen some great D2C Brands scale up to become large profitable businesses. One such brand is Pilgrim, that operates in the Beauty and Personal Care segment, which is estimated to be $25 Billion Dollar Market in India. I speak to Anurag Kedia, Co-Founder at Pilgrim, to talk about how the scaled to Rs. 180 Cr Annual Revenue Run-rate in 3 Years. Anurag shares his insights very candidly and goes deep in topics such as Core Pillars to build D2C brand, Brand vs Performance Marketing, Retention, Scaling up a D2C Brand. Episode Chapters:00:00 - Intro to India's Beauty and Personal Care Market and Anurag03:25 - Core Pillars to Build a D2C Brand06:40 - Growth Hacking for D2C brands, Optimizing Different Marketplaces12:34 - Finding a white space in Beauty and Personal Care segment in 2019, Brand Positioning 20:45 - Understanding Customer Preferences using Research26:15 - Brand Positioning for D2C Brands36:30 - Performance Marketing vs Brand Marketing for D2C Brands, how to evaluate Brand Marketing invesment44:35 - How Pilgrim looks at Retention53:47 - Working with Contract Manufacturers as a D2C Brand58:25 - How D2C Brands have to change between 0 to 1, 1 to 10 and 10 to 100 Journey. 1:08:00 - Entering Offline - Omnichannel Strategy1:12:00 - What kind of investments are right for D2C Brands

The Pet Care Industry in India... It is estimated to be a Rs. 4000 Crores Market in India, growing annually at about 20% which makes it a great industry to start a new business as there is double digit growth! The industry can be roughly broken down into Pet Foods which is about 60% of the market, Pet HealthCare (20% of the market), Pet Toys and Accessories (15%) and Pet Day Cares and Hostels about 5% Currently there are about 30 million pets in the country, which growing at 10-11% annually. And that's why, Varun, Aman, and Vineet Started Supertails in early 2021. Supertails is on track to achieve Rs. 100 Crores in Annual Revenue Run-Rate in the next few months and have raised $10 million last year in a tough fundraising environment. Deepika Padukone is also an investor in Supertails! On this episode, I talk to Varun about: - The Pet Care Industry & it's Value Chain- The Export Potential of Pet Care Products out of India- The focus on Customer Experience at Supertails- How Supertails leverages Content & Community to build Brand Awareness- Why it's important to embrace failure as a founderTimestamps for quick viewing: (00:00) - Overview of the Pet Care Industry in India & Intro to Varun Sadana, Founder of Supertails(2:55) - Why Varun Quit as the Founder of Licious and the thesis behind Supertails(8:54) - How Supertails was able to raise $10 Mn in a tough environment and why fundamentally good business often find the capital needed to scale(21:47) - The Import & Exports of Pet Care Products in India(26:53) - How Supertails focuses on Customer Experience and how they've made it part of their culture (34:56) - The Importance of Embracing Failure as a Founder (48:38) - How Supertails leverages Content & Community to build a BrandIf you want to stay updated about our latest episodes or just want to say hi, you can join our No Spam WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/3Q0To2K

On this episode, we talk to Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO at Masai SchoolPrateek is an IIT Kanpur Graduate, a Teach for India Alum and Ex-Founder of Grabhouse, a real-estate tech startup that was acquired by Commonfloor and subsequently by Quikr. He’s a second time entrepreneur who is picking up his first love of teaching. India has 444 Million People that are in the 0-18 Years Age Bracket. That’s 400 Million people coming into the workforce over the next 15 to 20 years. For them to be contribute to India’s economic growth, we have a mammoth task of giving them the right skills.We have over 45000 College and Institutes in the country and you would think we are slowly but surely building capacity to educate and train the 400 million people over the next 2 decades.But, the grim reality on the ground that a large majority of students graduating from these institutions have NO employable skills. For example, of the 1.5 Million engineers that graduate, only 3% secure high paying technology jobs. The situation is even worst in Business and Humanities courses. The education industry is a money-making, recession proof business that’s being run purely on the fact that every parent wants their kid to hold a ‘degree’. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful or not, the societal shame from not having one is good enough reason to pour money into getting your child through college for 3 to 4 years.The lack of employable talent coming out of college is HUGE problem to solve if we want to achieve The Indian Dream of becoming a large developed economy with a high per capita income. And to solve this problem, whatever we done so far isn’t working. The core reason why colleges suck in India is because there’s no incentive alignment. The college gets their fees regardless of the fact that the student might not even get a decent job after graduating. But, what if colleges got paid only after the graduating students earned.And that’s where I find the model of Outcome driven education or Income Share Agreements very very interesting. It’s a model where the institute only gets paid after students start earning a baseline salary. What this also does is it opens up education to talented students who previously who couldn’t afford high fees of these colleges.On the episode today, we have Prateek Shukla, Co-Founder and CEO of Masai School who is pioneering the Income Share Agreement or outcome driven model of education India. Masai is a 3 year old startup that helps students learn coding for free in a 6 months, military style coding bootcamp. They work with students with no coding or computer science background, and train them through their rigouros program. They have an income share agreement where they can make up to 3 Lakhs as a cost for the education, only and only if the students get a salary of more than 5 Lakhs per annum.There’s no doubt Vocational Training is key to make large sections of society employment ready and productive. Only on the back of skilled talent, can you build large industries that contribute significantly to the GDP of the country. We’ve seen this play out in China where they used skilled labor and technology to build the world’s Manufacturing hub.For India, a similar opportunity lies in being the Software hub of the world. And for that to happen, we need to train millions of students every year. Over the next 50 minutes, I talk to Prateek about the thesis behind Masai School, how they teach students, what are the execution challenges of training 7000 Students, and about their partnership with National Skill Development Coloration.

Mysore Deep Perfumery House (MDPH), popularly known for their brand Zed Black has built an Rs. 800 Crore+ Agarbatti Business from India. We talk to Ankit Agarwal, Partner at MDPH about how he has scaled the business profitably over the last 17 years on this episode of The Indian Dream Podcast. We talk about the following things on the Podcast: (00:22) - Agarbatti or Incense Sticks Market in India & Policy Changes of 2019(05:05) - Start of MDPH in 1992 after 7 Failed Businesses(08:26) - How Zed Black Brand Started and why it became a hit across India(10:09) - Three most important things about the business: Packaging, Distribution and Fragrance. (16:28) - How Zed Black moved to Advanced Payments with Distributors to Unlock Growth(26:20) - Why Zed Black kept uniform pricing in a business that's dominated by Regional Players with different pricing per region(28:52) - Export Market for Agarbattis (30:39) - The Technology and R&D Investment in Manufacturing. World's Largest Manufacturing Plant of Agarbattis(34:18) - Why Zed Black decided to get Mahendra Singh Dhoni & Hrithik Roshan to Endorse the Brand(40:20) - How should Entrepreneurs take advice from experienced people (45:59) - Why Zed Black's Deodrant Business Failed If you want to stay updated about our latest episodes or just want to say hi, you can join our No Spam WhatsApp group here: https://bit.ly/3Q0To2K

In this episode, we talk to Mathew Joseph. He's a 3rd Generation Entrepreneur who was the Marketing Director at Duroflex before he started a D2C Mattress Brand called Sleepyhead. So, mattresses. It’s one of those ‘boring’ and ‘unsexy’ industries and as we’ve often discussed on the podcast, it’s perfect for building a large, profitable business. The mattress industry in India is estimated to be 12,000 Crores Industry of which 60% is still Unorganized. Traditionally, 3 players dominated the industry, Kurl-on, Duroflex and Sleepwell. All legacy companies built over decades. Then between 2016-2018, atleast 10 new D2C Mattress brands popped up. Some of which have survived and grown to more than 200 Crores in revenue in the last 5 years! Talk about Disruption! What makes today’s episode interesting is that we got a chance to talk to Matthew Joseph who not only is the 3rd generation entrepreneur of the family run Duroflex but he’s also the founder of a D2C Mattress brand called Sleepyhead! What makes his journey fascinating is that he saw the upcoming disruption from the online players and instead of fighting to defend the legacy brand of duroflex, he set up a completely new brand and business entity to start Sleepyhead! In the conversation today, we talk about the Mattress industry, the value chain and manufacturing process of mattresses, the different types of mattresses, the reason D2C Mattress Industry scaled so well over the last 3 years, how he has built Sleepyhead’s brand and most importantly, which is his favorite mattress!  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)Follow me on Twitter @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)DM us on Whatsapp------------------------------------------------------We have open positions in Content Writing, Content Research, Video Editing - Please reach out to me on 8886248842 or sidbetala@gmail.com if you'd like to collaborate on building The Indian Dream! 

In this episode, we host Kavita & Anand (Co-Founders at Voiro) to talk about Ad-Tech Industry.Technology has fundamentally changed how we can consume and interact with Sports Content. And that has resulted in a meteoric rise in the value of Sports Leagues and Sports Celebrities. IPL, Formula 1, NBA, NFL, all these leagues have seen tremendous growth in their revenues over the last decade thanks to rising media rights, new ways of monetisation and fan connects! All of this comes down to the evolution of Technology. Smartphones, high-speed internet, social media - everything has snowballed into positive tailwinds for Sports Content and that's the reason why the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Netflix are bidding to get media rights for these sports leagues. In this episode with Kavita and Anand, we'll talk about the trends that have resulted in the rise of the value of sports leagues and sports celebrities.  If you haven't, check out the Voiro Podcast! They talk about the world of Ad-Tech, Marketing, and Social Media on their weekly podcast series! ---------------------------------------As I've mentioned in the last couple of episodes, there's a lot going on at The Indian Dream - some good, some bad. I talk about it all towards the end of the episode.If you want to tune into that directly, skip to (35:11). ---------------------------------------We have open positions in Content Writing, Content Research, Video Editing - Please reach out to me on 8886248842 or sidbetala@gmail.com if you'd like to collaborate on building The Indian Dream! 

In this episode, we host Kavita & Anand (Co-Founders at Voiro) to talk about Ad-Tech Industry. We’re all familiar with how big the Digital Ads market has grown over the last decade. To put some numbers, in 2012, the Global Digital Ad spend was close to $100 Billion. Today, that stands at more than 600 Billion dollars - a healthy 20% growth every year. In the next few years, $1 Trillion dollars will be spent on Digital Ads globally. With the rise of Ad Spends, the technology that supports that industry, often called as Ad-Tech has seen an exponential rise. As we’ve often discussed on the podcast, selling shovels during a gold rush is a great way to build a large, profitable business. Today, Voiro is a SaaS Platform that helps media companies run their Ads business, and in the last 9 years, they’ve had a ring-side view of this meteoric rise of the Ad-Tech market. What makes their journey even more interesting is that they’ve part of the team that runs the Indian Premier League’s Ad’s business! Practically from Day 1 of Hotstar, in fact it wasn’t even called hotstar back then. We’ll first talk about how they went from build a service business to build a software product, then we’ll talk about the landscape shift that’s happened from broadcast to digital technology, then we talk about how the entire world of Ad-Tech come together to form a value chain and lastly we talk about the emerging trends of privacy, regulation and content creation.  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)Follow me on Twitter @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)DM us on Whatsapp------------------------------------------------------**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce businesses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!

This is Part 2 of the series where we discuss India's Digital Infrastructure.Here are our Research Notes for the episode. Open Network for Digital Commerce or ONDC has been in the news lately. Currently, online marketplaces (Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal) follow a platform model. In this model, they have end-to-end control over the entire e-commerce transaction process, right from seller on-boarding, customer acquisition, order fulfilment, complaint redressal, and managing payments. Right now, all these processes are being controlled by a single entity.ONDC's open network will 'unbundle' or break down this complex system of small activities into separate micro-services that can be addressed separately by any entity. These organisations can chooses to perform one or more of these activities. As a result, the proponents of ONDC say that if it is successful, ONDC will democratize e-commerce, increase competition and accelerate growth.If it is democratised, one big change through ONDC will be that it caps referral commissions for platforms that send shoppers to a seller at just 3% – much less than the roughly 30% cut charged by Amazon, Flipkart and others.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)------------------------------------------------------**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce busiensses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!------------------------------------------------------Here are some research notes that we compiled or referred to for this episode:Jefferies Report about ONDC - tonne of details not available elsewhere.Twitter Thread by Aditya Kondawar - helped us structure our thoughts.

The Indian Education System needs an overhaul, especially college education. The current system produces students that barely have the necessary employable skills. In this episode, we talk to Aditya and Raj of Stoa School to talk about the Indian Education System, the problems that exist, how they can be solved and their insights from building Stoa over the last two years. If you haven't already, do subscribe to Stoa Daily. This is one of the best newsletters if you're interested in business and management. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------If you like the content we create, I need 30 seconds of your time to help us reach more people. Do one or more of the following, depending on how much you love The Indian Dream.Subscribe on Youtube (Posting 5 Videos every week)Follow us on Instagram (Posting 3 Reels every week)Follow us on Twitter @sahil071 & @sidbetala (Trying to figure out Twitter!)DM us on Whatsapp------------------------------------------------------**This episode is brought to you by PushOwl.PushOwl is a web push marketing app built for e-commerce businesses. Trusted by more than 25000 brands across the globe, PushOwl lets you turn one-time store visitors into subscribers, send highly-visible web push notifications, and increase customer retention!