The Indian Dream

On this founder journey, we speak to Rohit MA, co-founder and CEO of Cloudnine Hospitals. It is a chain of maternity hospitals that's spread across 9 cities and has 20+ hospitals. We speak to Rohit about his journey, how he raised capital for the business, how he scaled and the focus on customer experience. Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupHere's an episode outline: (03:39) - The Thesis behind starting a Speciality Maternity Hospital(10:05) - The Pros & Cons of having experience in the industry you start your business. (14:29) - The Business & Economics of running a hospital(22:24) - The Genesis of the idea of building a chain(30:24) - The Investment required to setup hospitals and how Cloudnine raised capital for it(43:21) - The Journey of Scaling Up & Building Processes (01:07:09) - Rohit's relationship with Money and how that's evolved Hello and Happy New Year! Hope 2022 is 100x better than 2021 for each one of us! At The Indian Dream, we’re excited to bring you business content that’s worth your time. And we’re kicking off 2022 with an amazing founder! We have Rohit on the show today, the Co-Founder of Cloud Nine Hospitals. For those of you who don’t know, Cloud Nine is a chain of Maternity hospitals. In fact, they were the pioneers of dedicated pregnancy hospital when they first launched in 2007. Since then, they’ve expanded to 9 cities and built more than 20 hospitals. Along the way, they’ve raised close to 500 Crores from investors like Matrix Partners, Sequoia, and True North!We speak to Rohit about how they came up with the idea to build a speciality hospital when Multi-speciality hospitals were the norm, the economics of a hospital, their customer focus and the innovations that have come out of that. Here’s an example of one such innovation: If you’ve been a parent, you would know that back in the day, the cost of delivering a child through natural birth process vs a C-section were different with the latter being more expensive. This resulted in mis-aligned incentives where hospitals often pushed for C-Section, if when not needed, because they made more revenue. Cloudnine was the first hospital to standardize rates and improve the experience for the to-be parents. Just like this, they’ve done a bunch of innovations across the process of pregnancy as well as scaling operations. We talk to Rohit about his entire journey, inflection points and the learnings from building a large business in the healthcare industry! 

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated!This episode is a look back of 2021. This is our first full calendar year of creating podcasts and newsletters for The Indian Dream. Just this year, we've produced ~80 podcasts and written ~30 newsletter talking about Founder Journeys, Market Trends and various opportunities. In this episode, we look back and make sense of the year that's gone by:Top Episodes (01:19)a) Space-tech episodesb) Blockchain with Nischal Shetty from WazirXc) Mushroom & Seaweed Farmingd) OfBusinesse) Business of Hotels & Restaurantsf) Abhishek Goel Biggest learnings (12:02)a) Focus on doing less but doing that betterb) Don't monetise too early in your content journey - it's a labour of love that will monetise eventuallyc) Courses are really hard to do even if you know the subject really well.d) Collabs and inviting people to munchies was harder than I thought.e) It's really tough to motivate people in this kind of setting - got a lot of people who wanted to contribute for free but it just didn't work.f) Follow your curiosity - will lead to great episodesPersonal Lives (26:04)a) Portfolio of small betsb) Siddharth having a babyc) Rollercoaster of habit buildingd) Change in my worldview on entrepreneurship and life in generalPlan for next year (33:59)a) Do less but moreb) focus on distribution for the podcast.c) Keep experimenting with stuff on the podcast and in personal life. d) Keep trying to build it into an asynchronous organisation like AJVC

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated!Click here to help TID part time with LinkedIn & TwitterJob Description for the Content Associate Job at Blume VenturesClick here to apply for the Content Associate Job at Blume VenturesTimeline(00:00) - Introduction with two Job Announcements(02:30) - Defence Indigenisation in India(24:00) - DAO to fund Scientific Research(36:00) - Teaching Taxation to FoundersBusiness IdeasDefence Indigenisation in IndiaHere's a link to our Notion Page with a bunch of research that we did about defence indigenisation.Defence manufacturing and anciallary services is a complete white ocean at the moment - there is huge growth potential for businesses that enter this market right now.The Indian government has done a great job over the past 20 years to shift procurement of defence from imports to domestic manufactuers and this trend is going to continue over the next decade as the government focuses even more on improving its domestic manufacturing.Part of this is exports, from FY17 to FY19, in just 2 years, India was able to increase its defence exports from just 1,500crores to 8,300crores. That is an insanely fast growth rate and the benchmark for FY24 is to reach 35,000crores of exports. India cannot reach these crazy numbers without some really good incentives by the government to first build a thriving domestic manufacturing base but also one that can stand against the international market. There are a bunch of schemes by the Indian government to promote defence manufacturing in India. MSME's also have a big part to play in this indigenisation. They can manufacture for the big PSU's like HAL, Bharat Forge and all the others. There is a lot of manufacturing capacity in India such as composites, precision manufacturing, sheet metal work, naval work and others that can be used by the armed forces.However, this is a complicated network to get into. You either need capital or contacts.DAO to fund Scientific ResearchDAO's are Decentralised Autonomous Organisations that are operated based on the votes of the members who own the tokens.A big problem in the scientific world is the funding of research by large companies that then biases the results that come out of that.DAO's could be a solution that help fund scientific research without any biases.Teaching Taxation to FoundersUnderstanding taxation is critical to a founder's success, especially in the complicated tax structures of India.However, there are few to no courses to help teach tax at a founder level - MBA's don't teach enough and founders can't become CA's - we need something in between.Social Media can be great to teach stuff like this - Miss Excel makes $100,000/day by teaching excel on TikTok.

We're doing a Book Give Away! We'll be sending copies of 'The Minimalist Entrepreneur' to folks interested in building a profitable internet business. Just follow us on Twitter or  Instagram & tell us about what you want to building using the framework laid out in The Minimalist Entrepreneur book. On the episode, we host Sahil Lavingia, Founder of Gumroad and the author of The Minimalist Entrepreneur. We talk to him about the roller-coaster ride of building Gumroad to a profitable internet business with $10 m in revenue and $1m in profit, and some concepts from the book. Timeline:(00:00) - An Introduction to Sahil & Gumroad's journey(02:52) - Why the name 'The Minimalist Entrepreneur' and the intended audience (05:34) - Differences between a VC backed startup and a small profitable internet business (14:09) - Sahil's journey of coming out of the Silicon Valley/Unicorn bubble (20:55) - Leveraging Communities to discover problems (28:55) - Framework to identify ideas within a community(35:06) - Starting with Manual Valuable Process even before building a product (40:45) - How to start a business without worrying about all the skills you need(47:52) - Sahil's 20 Yr plan to becoming a Sci-Fi Writer(53:23) - Gumroad's recent Crowdfunding round of $5m and how is it different from VC (58:51) - Sahil's Experience of being an Angel Investor(01:03:44) - Sahil's relationship with Money

On this founder journey, we speak to Abhishek Goel, co-founder and CEO of Cactus Communications. Abhishek & his brother Anurag have built a culture of excellence into Cactus. They have an on-time delivery of 99.63%! How many other Indian businesses can boast of numbers like that?Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupOn this podcast, we've often spoken about how the best place to build a business is where everyone else avoids. Abhishek and Cactus' journey is a testament to that. Cactus communication is in the business of helping science researchers and PhD candidates have greater impact through scientific services and various products  and tools. For example, you're a researcher in Japan and your English isn't great so you can just use Cactus's services to improve your paper and get it ready for publication.This is as niche as it gets! All of this was made in India, but for the world.Now, you'll probably think, sure, it's niche, but I doubt there's enough demand to build a big business in this market. It seems like a small market on the face of it and hard to build a differentiated product. Well, let me tell you some numbers. Abhishek and his brother started Cactus in 2002. In the first decade of being in business, Cactus was doing $15 million or Rs. 100 Cr in revenue! In the next 10 years, they've grown exponentially and will soon be 10x of that with a team of 1200 people.Our jaws dropped when we understood the scale of this niche that looks tiny from the outside. That's the power of niche businesses, they can be outside limelight and build a large, profitable business without the madness of the large consumer markets where VC subsidises the market and makes it into a discounting race!And throughout the years, they've also been leaders in tech in their industry. Through the story you'll hear how they used tech scaling and D2C before those words even existed in our vocabulary. Now, they've been leading the AI/ML/NLP race globally through acquisitions and organic growth.In addition to the usual discussions on the episode on how Abhishek and his brother built Cactus over the past 20 years, we also speak in depth about the emotional journeys that entrepreneurs go through. Despite building this behemoth of a company, Abhishek talks about how we went through his own insecurities and the imposter syndrome he faced even after he had built a business doing more than $10m in revenue. Abhishek speaks very openly about his own experience, the emotional challenges and how we worked through them to build this large organisation!Before jumping into the conversation, we'd like to invite you to join our WhatsApp group where we already have 3000+ other likeminded entrepreneurs and knowledge seekers. We promise a no-spam group so that you can stay up to do date with our latest episodes.Now, onto the episode!

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated!Timeline:(00:58) - Revenue Based Financing(22:56) -  Translation Services for Movies, TV Shows on Netflix, Prime Video(33:54) - Life Skill Courses for TeenagersBusiness IdeasRevenue Based FinancingCapital is an essential commodity to grow a business. The traditional way of growing companies was Debt & Equity Investments. Debt generally comes from Banks, but they obviously don't like to take risks with unproven or unprofitable businesses. Plus putting up collateral, personal guarantees and what not.The other option is equity. In the recent years, Early stage/Growth equity has become popular thanks to the various Venture capital firms. However, you end up giving up too much equity and it prevents you from building a sustainable/profitable business. This type of equity works for ideas that don't really exist, and if they're successful, they can capture or create LARGE new markets for themselves.But, this leaves behind businesses that are profitable, but maybe not that can grow exponentially. Think D2C Brands, or SaaS businesses. How do you give them access to capital that prevents them from diluting too much equity?Enter Revenue Based Financing - This is where you get access to non-dilutive capital that can be used to grow your business and you pay a fixed fee as well as a share from the revenues to pay off your credit line. It's an interesting new lending product and we discuss the various opportunities around this. Translation Services for Netflix, Prime VideoLast week, we spoke to Abhishek Goyal, Co-founder of Cactus Communications about the large business he has built in the niche of research paper translation. We then applied the same model in the content industry where Netflix, Prime Video and other OTTs are producing so much foreign content that needs to be translated in English and also to other languages. Last year, Netflix had a shortage of agencies who could help them with this and hence had to rely on freelancers. This is an industry growing in double digits, year of year, and hence an interesting place to build a niche business. Life Skills for TeenagersOur education system is messed up and it ends up teaching A LOT of stuff that's never going to be relevant in your life and skips teaching essential life skills like Personal Finance, Health & Nutrition, Sex Ed. The idea is simple, can you build a gamified product that teaches teenagers these essential skills?

In this fascinating conversation about the journey of building a Rs. 100 Cr business from a seed capital of Rs. 64,000, we talk to  Suveer Bajaj,  Co-founder of FoxyMoron & Zoo Media. FoxyMoron is one of India's premier Digital Marketing & Advertising agency. Suveer started FoxyMoron in 2008, when he was just 19. 13 years later, he has been able to scale up the business to 500+ people and built an Advertising Network (Zoo Media) which is 7 agencies under it.  Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupIf you like what we do, please consider following us on Spotify, rating us on Apple, checking us out on Twitter and Instagram. Here's what we speak about in the episode: (03:52) - How was FoxyMoron born and what was the thesis?(08:28) - What was the concept of Digital Marketing back in 2008-09?(11:51) - How do young kids, aged 19-20, go present themselves to win contracts from Cadbury, L'Oreal, Force India Racing?(16:44) - How has the hiring journey evolved over time and how important was Culture? (21:46) - Importance of Knowledge Management and the Digital Marketing course at Symbiosis Institute. (30:03) - How is the advertising industry structured globally?(38:36) - Getting a term sheet from a large Advertising Network, the decision to not take it, and the inflection point after that?(42:10) - The Birth of Zoo Media and building/acquiring specialised Agencies(49:45) - The various Business Models of an Advertising Agency(57:57) - The Future of Zoo Media(01:01:54) - How has Suveer's role evolved as the business grew?(01:07:00) - How Suveer's relationship with Money evolved over a period of time?

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated! Timeline:(2:15) - Environmental, Social & Governance standards for big businesses(24:30) - Fractionalization of Real Estate(35:40) - Influencers working with State Tourism Boards(41:50) - Review Website for Cohort Based CoursesBusiness IdeasESG Investing & Business ideas - ESG stands for Environemtal, Social & Governance standards that the biggest companies in the world need to follow. More and more large fund houses are directing the flow of their investments based on businesses meeting ESG standards. There have also been big shifts in the rules in India that are forcing the 1000 biggest businesses in India, as per market cap, to publish annual ESG reports. As a result, the largest auditing firms in the world - PWC, KPMG, etc. - are predicting that the ESG reports will be as big as their financial audits in the next few years. Hence, there is a huge money making opportunity for these huge auditors but also for small businesses that want to enter this field. Interesting linksMckinsey ReportIndian ESG RulesFull Document on Indian ESG GuidelinesESG SmallcaseESG Ideas:Boutique ESG Consulting or Auditing firm that helps businesses with the Auditing and also meeting ESG requirements that have been missed.Content website that lists all the ESG standards and benchmarks that have been set by different businesses so that people can track progress.Countless B2B and B2C opportunities based on different industries. For example, one our previous podcast guests has built a full supply chain with traceability for recycled plastics so that his customers have full traceability on their plastics' origin.Fractionalization of Real EstateReal Estate is a great hedge against inflation and is also a great low risk investment for someone's barbell investment strategy. However, the ticket size to enter Real Estate investment is too high for the average retail investor. Is there a way to democratise this so that smaller investors can also add real estate to their portfolio? Some businesses who are already doing this:Property ShareStrata PropMyre CapitalIntern Army for Tourism BoardsState Tourism boards, on average, are terrible at building User Generated Content. Authentic UGC will drive social media growth in the long run. State Tourism Boards can think of hiring an intern army for a month and send them on a tour of the entire state with the sole job of creating as many instagram reels as possible. Review Website for CBC'sCohort Based Courses, at the moment, are being sold by influencers who are themselves reviewing their own course. A website that's generating User Generated Reviews would help sort the wheat from the chaff in their crowded but fast growing market.

Welcome to a really exciting episode of the Indian Dream - we've wanted to talk to this founder for the past 1 year at least. In this episode, we speak to Vivek Sahni, co-founder and CEO of Kama Ayurveda. For the few listeners who haven't heard of Kama, they are an Ayurveda based Hair & Beauty brand that now has 59 retail stores across the country.Join our No-Spam WhatsApp GroupThe reason we love Kama Ayurveda so much is that they started in 2002 at a time when nobody spoke about Ayurveda or even cared about it. They are pioneers who saw the early signals of the clean beauty movement and the resurgence of Ayurveda in India and staked a claim. This 20 year journey has culminated in Kama becoming one of the best known beauty brands to come out of India with a reported 100cr investment by a Spanish Luxury brand.I'll give you a quick history about Kama and Vivek before we jump right into the conversation with him.The journey to Kama started in 1993 when Vivek moved back to India after studying Design at the Parson's School of Design in New York. After coming back, he started a design studio called Vivek Sahni designs with his partner David Chang. Fun fact - Vivek and Dave ran this design studio all the way to 2013. For the first 10 years of Kama Ayurveda's existence, it was just a side hustle.In 1998 - Vivek worked on a 2 year project to design gift packaging for Khadi India, a government organisation set up to promote the development of Khadi and village industries in rural areas. During this project, they helped create a range of products, protocols, worked with manufacturers, and helped train people to source the best productsThis experience with Khadi India drove the founding of Kama Ayurveda in 2002 as an authentically Indian brand that was steeped in the traditions of Ayurveda. Kama had 4 founders, Vivek Sahni, Dave Change, interior designer Vikram Goyal and Padma Shri awardee Rajshree Pathy. It was Rajshree's connection with Ayurvedic doctors in Coimbatore that led them down the path of Ayurveda.The actual product development took them nearly 2 years and in the end, they started with a range hair and skin products that were authentically Ayurvedic. From 2002 to 2012, Vivek spent about 30% of his time on Kama while the rest was spent on his design studio. The brand grew organically increasing its distribution across pharmacies and hotels in Delhi.We now jump into the conversation with Vivek around 2005 2006, when they got distribution as in-room amenities at Oberoi and The Park hotels and how that impact the brand.Before getting into the episode - please join our No Spam WhatsApp group where we post information about the latest episodes. We already have more than 2500 members in our groups and we'd love to see you there.

Sahil (@sahil071) and Siddharth (@sidbetala) hang out and discuss various ideas on this episode of Business Munchies. We're now actively sharing interesting snippets on Twitter and reels on Instagram. Follow us there to stay updated! Timeline:(00:0) - Introduction(1:59) - Video & Livestream E-commerce (21:43) - Tiger 21 - Peer Network for High net worth individuals (36:54) - No-Code & Low Code Automation Teams at Enterprises & SMEs(41:12) - Indian wear but for OfficeIdea Details: 1. Video & Livestream E-Commerce: Two streamers in China sold $3B worth of products over 24 hours on their livestream. China is seeing a surge of products being sold through Video/Livestream E-commerce. Taobao, the largest e-commerce player in China, saw $65 billion worth of products being sold in 2020 using Video e-commerce. We talk about the opportunities to build around this emerging trend in India. 2. Tiger 21: A peer network of high net worth individuals (HNI) where a group of 15 HNIs come together and transparently share their portfolios and defend the same in front of the other members. The goal is to collectively make good investment decisions. We talk about the opportunities to build this in India and how Social Investing could be done by current Investment platforms. 3. No-Code, Low Code Automation Teams: Software is truly eating the world, thanks to no-code tools that have led to democratisation of technology. In 10 years, every company will be a software company, in that it'll be operated by a combination of different software tools. We talk about how training at enterprises & SMEs for No-code tools, or building an agency to help implement these no-code tools at businesses. 4. Indian wear but for Office: Office wear is primarily dominated by formal wear that's part of western culture. What if there was a dedicated line of Indian clothes for office wear? We discuss this business crazies!