Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to come up with a product? Manish Jethani: This is very interesting. We signed an agreement with one customer that if we deliver that product, they will pay us $50,000. Sramana Mitra: What kind of customer? Manish Jethani: This was the largest food-tech delivery company in India.
This feature from The Wall Street Journal looks at how consumers are finding a new balance between online and in-person shopping post the pandemic. In March, online spending dropped by 3.3%, the first year-over-year decline since November 2013 while spending in bricks-and-mortar stores was 11.2%. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
Sramana Mitra: When you launched this, how did you get it off the ground? The problem you’re describing is a very large problem and there are a lot of people working on this. Data, as you know, has become one of the biggest categories in which people are doing startups. The combination of data and
Sramana Mitra: You were doing a hosted product until recently. Francis Dinha: Yes. Even Bloomberg came to us. They said, “What about if we license your software? We pay you half a million dollars one time.” I said no. Our model is subscription. Google was our customer for three years. They used our self-hosted solution.
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 572nd FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, April 21, 2022, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
Anupam Rastogi is General Partner at Emergent Ventures, a firm focused on B-to-B tech investments.
Sramana Mitra: What did you do next? Manish Jethani: It was a very comfortable role, but that comfort was making me uncomfortable. I was used to solving problems. I wanted to go back and do a startup again. Being well-positioned in a well-funded startup didn’t bring any additional challenge of sorts. I wanted to go