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Unforgettable Lessons
Support Calls Are the New Sales Pitches
In India’s SME world, growth often begins with a phone call. A business owner calls when something breaks, and what happens next decides if he continues or if he tells his peers to try something new.
This is the path Biziverse has taken. Co-founded by Ekta Shah in Gandhinagar, the company now works with more than 44,000 SMEs across the country. Its platform brings together billing, inventory, payroll, and CRM in one place, priced at about ₹6,000 a year. From the start the focus has been on a support team that answers calls in minutes, every day of the week.
For many SMEs, a quick reply changes how the product feels. A billing issue fixed on time or a feature explained in plain words makes the software easier to trust. That trust often travels further, passed from one shop to another in daily conversations.
It may not look like a sales channel, but in markets like these, support can quietly play that role. A reminder that in selling SaaS to Indian SMEs, growth sometimes comes from places we don’t usually call growth.
The Solo Founder’s Dilemma
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I started Ridefy Invention to make vehicles safer. We build IoT smart assistance devices that attach to a vehicle, track its health, and also integrate with electric vehicles as OEM.
Behind the product is the reality of a solo founder learning while building. Most days began with self-doubt. Do I really look like a founder? Can I carry this company on my own? Am I building Ridefy or am I building myself into someone who can carry it?
In the early days everything felt random. I did not know design so I learned by doing. I did not know product work so I figured it out step by step. Nothing looked like a system.
Over time the random steps turned into rhythm. One device became the star of Ridefy. When I worked on the next version it did not feel like chaos anymore. I had found a process that worked for me.
That is what I now see as the solo founder’s dilemma. You believe you are building a company. Somewhere along the way you realise you are also building yourself.
The Depth Advantage
When you go deep into one craft, you start noticing things others skip. Small shifts, hidden patterns, details that quietly change outcomes. Over time, those nuances build recall. They shape your personal brand and draw you into networks and opportunities that surface work rarely creates.
That is what stands out in Himani Kankaria’s journey. With Missive Digital, she chose focus over variety and went deep into organic growth for B2B and SaaS. She studied how pages are structured, how clarity builds trust, how the flow of an article can decide whether it is read or ignored. That attention gave her clients compounding growth, traffic multiplying, leads doubling, even billion-visit publishers trusting her to sharpen their content. More than results, it built her reputation. It made her name travel, gave her recall, and carried her voice onto global stages.
Depth doesn’t just improve outcomes. It also gives you an identity. And identity is what opens the bigger doors.
The Power of a Single Insight
Some companies do not begin with a big plan. They begin with a sentence that refuses to leave you.
Ashit Chandaria remembers the exact line. He and his co-founder at Belgrey Waters came across a statistic in a magazine: every minute, people buy about a million plastic bottles, and 91 percent of them are never recycled, reported in Forbes (2017). Most readers would move on. For them, it was impossible to ignore. They kept circling back to it. If almost every bottle was destined for waste, what would it take to make the beverage industry more sustainable?
That single fact became the seed for Belgrey. Today, the company works on creating sustainable alternatives in packaged water and beverages, building products that rethink how bottled water can be delivered and consumed. The one statistic did not give them a finished company. What it gave them was a starting point strong enough to build around. From there came the harder part: pilots that failed, customers who needed convincing, and partners who had to be won over. Over time, the story that began with a single fact gathered its own momentum.
Other founders have described similar beginnings in their own words. Drew Houston told Y Combinator that Dropbox started when he kept forgetting his thumb drive and imagined “a folder that just syncs everywhere.” Joe Gebbia explained on NPR’s How I Built This how he and Brian Chesky rented out three airbeds during a design conference when hotels were sold out, a weekend experiment that became Airbnb. Melanie Perkins told Wired that while teaching design in Perth she saw how hard it was for students to learn Photoshop, and thought design should be as simple as drag-and-drop, the insight that grew into Canva.
Ashit’s line was about PET bottles. Theirs came from frustrations and small observations. In each case, one clear thought was enough to begin. The building, the setbacks, and the persistence come later.
What it feels like to take up a job after starting your business
We often celebrate the leap. Leaving a job to start something of your own. But there is another story that doesn’t get told as much. What it feels like to take up a job after you’ve already begun.
In my Slice of Startup Life conversations, Nadeem Jafri of Hearty Mart shared one such phase. When his business wasn’t yet strong enough to support his family, he went back to a job while someone he trusted looked after the business. “This return changed everything,” he said. “I was back in the grind, but my mindset was no longer the same. Deep inside, I still felt like an entrepreneur… this tug-of-war made things difficult both at work and in business.” Today, Hearty Mart is thriving. That chapter was part of the journey, not the end.
For some founders, taking a job feels like closing a chapter. Locking the office one last time, and the next week walking into another with a new badge and a new desk. At first there is relief. Later, a kind of restlessness.
For others, it feels like carrying two lives at once. The job in the day, the startup at night. Emails at midnight, supplier calls in the gaps, weekends that blur into work. Tiring, but also a way of keeping the dream alive.
Some take a job as a way forward. A chance to learn, to meet people, to prepare for whatever comes next.
And then there are founders whose startups get acquired or acquihired. They continue with their teams and products, now inside a larger company. It brings pride in what has been built, but also a shift, learning to fit into new structures while carrying the same founder spirit.
Sometimes it feels like closure. Sometimes like juggling. Sometimes like progress. A founder trying to honor the responsibilities of today while keeping alive the possibility of tomorrow. All of it is part of what it feels like to take up a job after starting your business.
The eChai Effect - In Their Words
“eChai has been that turning point in my journey. It gave me a platform when I wasn’t looking for visibility but needed direction. Over the years, it became more than just a network. It became my tribe; a place where conversations sparked collaborations, and strangers became trusted sounding boards. What I value most is how effortlessly eChai brings people together - no airs, no filters, just genuine people with shared dreams. I owe a lot to this community and to Jatin, whose consistency and belief in people have shaped journeys like mine. Forever grateful to be part of something so real.”
Rushabh Shah
Managing Partner - STIR Advisors
"After moving back from the USA, eChai became my go-to space to learn how the Indian startup ecosystem works. It offered direct exposure to startup thinking and a community that openly shares business insights. What stood out was how easy it was to connect, learn, and grow through real conversations. As we built our IT hardware rentals business, eChai helped us find our niche and refine our path. Proud and grateful to be part of this amazing community."
Heet Sheth
Growth and Tech, Sheth Info
"For me, eChai is a second home. I've been associated with it since the early days, when it was already setting a different tone for how startup communities could work. As a traditional business owner entering the new-age D2C space, eChai supported me in every direction. Over the years, it became my window to the startup world — and also gave me lifelong friends who continue to show up, for business and beyond."
Pankaj Bhimani
Founder, 58miles
eChai Partner Brands
eChai Ventures partners with select brands as their growth partner - working together to explore new ideas, open doors, and build momentum across the startup ecosystem.
