Rajkumar Saini

OpenAI declared war on Google yesterday and 82% of Indian shoppers are already on their side without knowing it. ChatGPT now has "Instant Checkout." You can search for products, compare options, and complete purchases without leaving the chat window. 700 million weekly users can now shop directly through conversations. Within hours of this announcement: 📌 Etsy's stock jumped 16%.  📌 Shopify gained 6%. The market immediately understood what this means for traditional e-commerce. When people use ChatGPT for shopping, they convert at 4× higher rates than regular websites, and that is because users spend 14 minutes per session on Ai tools like ChatGPT as compared to Google's 5 minutes. India's position in this makes it even more interesting: → 87% of Indian shoppers believe AI tools help them shop faster, with AI-powered interactions showing higher engagement rates (Walmart Retail Rewired Report India, 2025) → 62% of Indians make purchases influenced by AI recommendations vs 30% globally (EY India, Aug 2024) Traditional shopping makes you open multiple tabs, visit different websites, and compare prices manually. ChatGPT collapses this entire journey into one conversation. For small businesses, this could level the playing field. A seller in Jaipur gets the same access to global users as Amazon does. For established platforms, the threat is real. Why would customers visit your website when they can complete everything through a conversation? The companies optimizing for AI discovery today will own tomorrow's market. Is your business ready for AI-powered shopping or still relying only on traditional search?

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90% of startups don’t die from competition. They die from 4 silent traps. Trap 1: No Product–Market Fit Pets.com raised $82M in the 90s and collapsed in under two years. They sold what local stores already offered. India’s quick commerce feels eerily similar. Burning crores to deliver things your kirana already sends for free. Trap 2: Vanity Spending OurBeginnings.com spent $4M on a Super Bowl ad. Their revenue that year? Less than $4M. Today, it’s like a startup with ₹20 crore revenue dropping ₹25 crore on IPL ads. Hype doesn’t pay the bills. Trap 3: Regulation Napster had 80M users before lawsuits shut it down. Closer home, ONDC is rewriting the rules for food delivery. If Swiggy or Zomato lean too hard on data-led cloud kitchens, they could face the same fate. Trap 4: Too Early Z.com tried to be YouTube in 1999, before broadband. It died. YouTube launched in 2005, when the market was ready, and thrived. Being early doesn’t make you a visionary. It makes you broke. Most founders think they’ll die fighting competitors. In reality, the killers are invisible until it’s too late. Which Indian startups do you think are closest to falling into one of these traps?

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Builder.ai's $450M Collapse: The AI Unicorn That Was Actually "A Guy Instead" From $1.5B valuation to bankruptcy in months. Here's what every AI founder needs to know: The Deception Chain: → 700+ human developers in India manually coded apps → "Natasha AI" was just a chatbot collecting requirements → 300% revenue inflation through fake contracts with VerSe Innovation → $60M in circular invoicing without actual services The Warning Signs Timeline: 2019: Wall Street Journal exposes AI claims 2023: CFO position vacant during critical growth 2024: Whistleblower allegations surface 2025: Viola Credit seizes $37M, bankruptcy filed across 5 countries The Brutal Math: ↳ 90% of AI startups fail within 5 years ↳ 75% engage in revenue overstatement ↳ Only 3% achieve successful exits ↳ 1,000 employees lost jobs ↳ 500+ customers lost apps and data Critical Lessons for AI Founders: → Technology Transparency: Build real AI before claiming AI-powered solutions → Financial Integrity: Hire experienced CFOs early, not during crisis → Business Model Reality: Align pricing with operational costs → Governance Strength: Experienced leadership with proper oversight The Ripple Effect: Global AI investment declined 18-45% across regions post-collapse. The hype-driven era is ending. Swipe through our Global AI Forum breakdown → Research shows the AI industry needs substance over spectacle. Builder.ai's failure wasn't market rejection it was self-inflicted through systematic deception. Key Takeaway: Hype can fuel growth, but only substance sustains it.

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Every founder in B2B dreams of selling a huuuuuuge platform. But this can be a huuuuuuge mistake. The almost magnetic pull towards positioning as a platform makes sense: ✅ higher perceived value ✅ bigger ACV ✅ better customer stickiness ✅ greater investor appeal But not all multi-product companies have the makings of a true platform. Whether you position in the market as a platform or a suite of products starts way earlier in the startup journey — beginning with your product strategy. (Yes, ideally your marketing strategy & product strategy should have collaborated since day 1... but they rarely do). The normal flow goes something like this: 1) a founder creates a product that solves a problem related to a use case 2) customers come with adjacent use cases and say, "can you help us too?" 3) not wanting to turn away revenue, founders will say, "yes!" 4) each different customer segment has different needs 5) the founder starts building for all these different segments 6) suddenly, they're left with a collection of disconnected products At this moment, the founder has two choices... 1️⃣ market & sell these products individually 2️⃣ attempt to combine them into one large platform Because of the positive associations with platforms that I mentioned above, most founders will opt for the latter. And yet... a lot of time, no category really exists that makes sense of all these disparate use cases. No company is shopping for a solution that can help them incorporate their startup in Delaware, AND contribute to carbon removal projects, AND set up identity verification (among many other unrelated use cases, as with a product suite like Stripe). Most founders (who are not the Collison brothers) will embark on a multi-year "category creation" process, attempting to cover an undisciplined product strategy with marketing fluff. And yet, the founder would have been much better off keeping these products separate. If each product is doing sufficiently well (as they were/are with Stripe), the startup should (eventually) be able to fully staff each product line and achieve healthy individual P&Ls. On the flip side, some companies DO begin with the end in mind. Companies like Clari started with a simple use case (like forecasting) but then began to own the connected use cases in order to create a true one-stop shop for revenue teams. Their platform angle ACTUALLY makes sense because their ideal customers likely ARE doing forecasting, prospecting, mutual action plans, etc all at once. And so, they likely would consider Clari as a powerful consolidation tool that could replace a handful of tools to solve one big connected workflow. -------- One caveat: → there's another definition of "platform" that is widely used and refers to software that others can build their own software on top of (i.e., Shopify, Salesforce, etc.) I am referring to the other, more colloquial definition of "platform" used in product packaging.

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𝐆𝐓𝐌 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐅𝐒𝐈 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐝 And if you’re building in India, you quickly realize: it’s less about speed and more about understanding how things actually move. 1. There’s no single buyer. Product might love you, but Ops is risk-averse. Compliance wants a legal opinion. Tech wants infra docs. Everyone has veto power, and timelines don’t move till all green lights align. 2. Bottom-up sounds democratic, but is painfully slow. You find a champion, you do a free POC, you show result, and still nothing moves. Because decision-making sits way higher. And often, the folks you start with aren’t even in the room when final calls are made. 3. Top-down works better - if you can get in. Senior leaders care about org-wide impact and risk savings. If your pitch solves a board-level problem, you skip 6 layers of internal selling. Otherwise, you’re just another tool in the pile. 4. Security, infra, and compliance are not “later” conversations. If you’re not enterprise-ready from Day 1, most BFSI players won’t even let you inside the building. 5. Everyone’s overloaded. The risk lead is doing 3 roles. The Ops lead is managing 10 vendors. If your solution isn’t dead simple to understand - and implement - they’ll thank you and never call back. This is a market that tests your GTM clarity more than your tech Get it right, and you build deep moats. Get it wrong, and you waste a year chasing the wrong door. #AI #Founderslife

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A startups journey is defined in these 3 stages: A. 0 to 1 B. 1 to 10 C. 10 to forever. But for the team, the journey is between those stages, not in those stages. When you reach at 1, you have to move from A to B. Moving A to B requires changing gears. It is very very difficult. Lot of failures happen during the gear change. You commit to a higher fuel consumption without immediately seeing any change in revenue. You lose a lot of your team members. You are required to unlearn-relearn a lot of things. But for the outside world you are still at 1. It's even worse when you realise that there is no clear demarcation for when you have arrived at 1. There are just symptoms. The regular growth levers stop working. Fuel efficiency goes down, there is a invisible resistance from all direction. But for the outside world you are still at 1. What helps in this situation? A set of believers, in the team and outside. Be very transparent with them. Albeit small, this set of believers is earned while you are happily running in those stages. When you may not need them at all.

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OpenAI just launched chatgpt go in india at ₹399/month 🙇🏻‍♂️ you get 10x higher message limits, 10x more image generations, 10x more file uploads, and double the memory compared to the free plan. plus, payments via UPI, no more USD conversion headaches. india’s the first country to get this tier, aimed at students, freelancers, and anyone who found the free limits too restrictive but didn’t want to pay for plus. the go plan bridges that gap, making advanced AI features way more accessible. feels like a smart move: affordable, local payments, and more power for everyday users. curious to see how this shapes ai adoption here 🙌

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If a startup had 2,500 new sign-ups a month but 30% churned within 90 days, we’d call it a crisis. That’s exactly what happens in parenting tech. Parents download apps during the newborn phase, and by month 3, most are gone. Not because they don’t need support, but because the guidance (and the design!) rarely evolves with their changing needs, priorities, lifestyle. Across all sectors, nearly 71% of app users stop using an app within three months. Parenting tech shouldn’t follow that pattern. At Joy Parenting Club, we design for the long haul. Not just the newborn “sprint” but the real, stressful, hair-pulling phases that follow, like going back to work, finding childcare, life with toddlers, and everything beyond. Because DUH- parents don’t stop needing help after 12 weeks. They need support that adapts and grows with them.

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How we went from $0 to $1.5M in 60 days — without any growth hacks. Just one painful, pivotal lesson. When we got in Y Combinator in Jan 2024, we were selling AI code reviews to early-stage startups — Seed, Series A, teams under 50 devs. - They were easy to close. - Great logos. - Engaging conversations. But they weren’t the right customers. Why? - Code review wasn’t their top pain. - Quality & security wasn’t yet on the board agenda. - Churn was high — and fast. We realized: to build something meaningful, we had to solve problems for teams who truly felt the pain. So we refocused on mid-market and enterprise — at-least 100+ developers. Where one bad merge can take prod down. Where security, reliability, and compliance are non-negotiable. That changed everything. ✅ We rebuilt the product from scratch — for scale. ✅ Added SAST, SCA, IaC, Cloud Misconfigs ✅ Test Coverage, DORA Metrics ✅ Deep integrations, dashboards, compliance workflows. Overhauled GTM. Every case study, demo, and pricing tier said: “This is built for you.” And then it clicked: The right ICP. The right product. The right pitch. That alignment drove $1.5M in less than 60 days. If there's one thing I’d leave you with: Your customer defines your company. Sell to the wrong ICP → build the wrong product → lose precious time. Sell to the right ICP → everything compounds. We’re still learning. Still iterating. But that shift in focus changed our trajectory. Building in devtools? My DMs are open — always happy to jam 💬

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Ever watched your startup go from calm to chaos in 48 hours? 48 hours ago, Kartik and I thought we had steady growth figured out. Nothing crazy, just consistent users. Boy, were we wrong. Today? Our servers are literally melting 🔥 Yesterday alone, Omnara processed 30,000+ messages. Our single cloud instance? OBLITERATED. We had to emergency scale to FIVE Render instances just to stay online. The catalyst? One Hacker News post hit #2 and triggered an avalanche. Lessons from our first viral moment: → Always have a scaling plan (we definitely didn't) → Server costs can 10x overnight (painful lesson) → Community-driven growth is incredibly powerful Easily the wildest 48 hours of our startup journey. Want to see what caused all the chaos? Check out our open-source repo: https://lnkd.in/gJjjGtVc

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10 startups. $100,000 each. 200+ investors in one room. In India, raising your first cheque is often harder than building your product. Most founders I meet say the same thing: > Building an MVP is possible > Getting the first 100 users is possible > But convincing an investor to back you? That feels impossible. The truth is, funding in India is not just about numbers. It's about access. The right room. The right introductions. The right mentors who believe in you before the world does. That's why events like Hustlers Mela 3.0 by PedalStart matter. This year, they're investing $100,000 each in 10 early-stage startups. And at the end of the cohort, those founders will pitch live in front of 200+ investors, VCs, and family offices, one of the biggest founder-investor gatherings of the year. Exceptional startups could even walk away with up to $250,000 in soft commitments for their seed round. But beyond the money, it's the network, the mentorship, and the exposure that can change the trajectory of a startup. 👉 Founders, apply here [Link in the comments] 👉 Investors, join the network [Link in the comments] Because sometimes, one room is all it takes to turn an idea into a company. If you're building, this might be the room you've been waiting for. #Founders #Seedround #Startups #Entrepreneurs #Investment

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