Chai with Shai

Shubham Kanojiya is 21 years old and this is his third business. He dropped out of his bachelor's degree to build IndiRepair, a startup promising laptop repair in 24 hours in Mumbai. His father does not know he runs a company.In this episode, we talk about why he interviewed 500 strangers before making a single sale, the night an investor pulled out and how he recovered from that and came out stronger, how a Sunday evening plate of Maggi turned into his first outside investor, and why he believes India is not a trust-deficit country but a knowledge-deficit country.

Avanish Agarwal gained 25 kilos on purpose. He wore a continuous glucose monitor, documented what it felt like to be obese in India, and only then started building a simpler, photo-focused nutrition app focused on local eating habits. Nutriiya identifies 70,000 Indian dishes from a single photo, for free, while competitors charge Rs 3,000 a month. In this conversation, we talk about validating before building, building AI with no technical background, and why free is a go-to-market strategy.

Chef Mehul Sabharwal (Sabb) is the co-founder of Hearth on the First, a fire-led restaurant inside Mumbai's Eros Cinema building that took seven years to go from idea to opening night. He and co-founder Dhriti quit their senior kitchen jobs with no income and no investor lined up, spent a year raising funds, and built a restaurant around a concept most people told them India wasn't ready for.We talk about protecting your vision when nobody believes in it, what his first chef taught him that had nothing to do with food, why he refused to charge more than his margins needed, and what it really takes to go from dreaming about your own restaurant to actually opening one.

Adwait Mardikar's first startup didn't fail because the idea was wrong. It failed because he couldn't find affordable marketing tools. So he spent a decade inside global strategy firms learning exactly how the best marketing in the world works, came back to Mumbai, and built Snappin AI with $40 and three co-founders. In this episode we talk about why he thinks building a startup is actually the easy part, what it cost him emotionally to leave a stable salary, how he taught himself to build an AI platform without writing a single line of code, and what his first customer said that surprised even him.

Arpita Salve is the co-founder of TrendSync by Kridinify Tech, an AI tool that automates what SEO agencies charge Rs.25,000 a month to do, for Rs.2,000 a month. After watching her first blockchain startup die overnight from a government tax law, she pivoted into AI, won a government grant of Rs.15 lakh, and built her second company with the same two co-founders she has worked with since junior college.In this episode, we talk about why she thinks launching before your product is ready is a mistake, the government grant every woman founder in India should know about, why bad product with good marketing beats great product with bad marketing, building credibility before you can sell, and how building a business quietly is a waste.Subscribe on Spotify for a new episode every week. Follow @chaiwithshaii on Instagram for daily founder content between episodes.