Startup to shutdown: One story of the silent majority

This is the story of how we built something from nothing, scaled it up with a lot of user love, and eighteen months later, shut everything down. Not all startups shut down because they run out of money. Sometimes, what made sense once just stops making sense.

This is that story of entrepreneurship that doesn’t get talked, written or shared much. There's no hero's arc here. No big success at the end of the struggles. We all know that majority of startups fail. Yet no entrepreneur starts up thinking this could be their story. I never thought it would be mine.

The INSPIRATION

May 2020. Covid first wave had started hitting India and lockdowns were becoming our new reality. As a resident of a gated community in Bangalore, the community had become the focal point of our lives. Several Whatsapp groups had sprung up. Farmers, bakers, makers were all trying to reach out to people directly.

This life was a complete contrast to my last year of sabbatical. We were on the road for over a year. I went for many Airbnb experiences. From behind-the-scenes of perfume making from a perfumer in France to understanding merino wool production from a sheep farmer in New Zealand, I was hooked with the elevated experience an expert creates. An idea snuck in. What if we could bring these elevated experiences to products? What if instead of buying from a faceless platform, we could buy straight from the makers? Not just buy the products but stories of who, why and how they were made. I filed this idea in my diary along with other inspirations from the travels.

Back home now, I could not believe that what I had written and imagined in pre-covid world was happening all around me. I asked a farmer of exotic produce how he landed into these communities. “I ask the security guards about the rent of a 3 BHK. If it is more than 40K, I know they might like to eat kale, cherry tomatoes and avocados.”

I was beside myself. The resourcefulness and creativity of these makers was deeply inspiring. The spiritual Vartika also took this as a sign of a divine hand at play. This is exactly what I am meant to be doing.

The INCEPTION

This farmer was not alone. We had hordes of makers reaching us directly through Whatsapp. Providing a semblance of social connection from the unlikeliest of places through the tribulations of time we were living in.

The Whatsapp commerce model in communities had its pros and cons.

Pros:

• Get in business fast = create a Whatsapp group
• Bulk deliveries = save logistics cost
• Direct connect to makers = see videos, photos, audio stories
• Whatsapp group of folks with similar lifestyle = an 'instant hyperlocal high trust space'
• +1 = order placed. ‘Me too buying’ at its best.

Cons: Mostly emanating from the fact that Whatsapp is not purpose built to be a social commerce platform.

• Payments are broken = “Here’s my payment screenshot”
• Delivery and tracking is broken = “Where is my order”
• Customer support is public and unstructured = “See this photo of my rotten palak (spinach)”
• Ordering is broken = “What is available to order this week?”
• Accounting is broken = “Have you paid?” “Where is my refund?”

I joined 100s of Whatsapp groups in many cities and saw the same story repeat across all of them. We knew exactly what to do - build a purpose built community commerce platform. A Disneyland of recommendations, discovery, makers and commerce.

Thus, PING was born.

Ease of commerce x Trust of social = PING.

The ROCKETSHIP

June 2020. The timing could not have been more right.

We started by giving a Shopify link to a farmer and he got 20K+ worth of orders in 8 hours. He sent us the following message that made me walk two feet above the ground all day.

Next day, I got calls from more such makers who all “wanted a link”. We were in business.

Once we had 20+ makers, we started a common Whatsapp group for a community - making it the place for recos and discovering new makers. Then we started getting calls “Can you also service my mom’s community, she wants to PING” “My friend can help start PING in her community”. We were really in business.

I have experienced customer love before, having built businesses at OYO and Uber Eats, and knew that this was special. It does not happen often and it does not happen this fast. Word of mouth here was next level. We launched many more community groups and attracted thousands of members without spending a single marketing dime. And it didn’t seem to stop.

We needed to scale ourselves to run the groups, track the orders, build better tech, etc. etc. Ah, the sweet sweet pains of growing 😊

We started getting inbound interest from VCs (yes, 2020-21 were different times :) ). I was very energised after I spoke with Mukul, he had seen Meesho disrupt another kind of Whatsapp commerce before as a seed investor and truly shared my enthusiasm and belief.

We closed our seed investment in Aug 2020. Now we were really really in business.

We started building our team, a bunch of crazy and stellar people put their trust and time in me and came onboard. And together, we dreamt, built, launched, grew, experimented and felt all the feelings of building our own company. We also saw a lot of competing startups emerge, felt super validated and took pride in being category leaders.

Next many months were an exhilarating haze. We launched our tech platform, grew business to new cities and with summer of 2021, learnt that the market for mangoes in India is absolutely nuts! Our favourite Discord channel kept us going every day.

The VASTNESS of SPACE and the RACE to the moon

Dec 2021. The timing could not have been more wrong.

As the G-shocks of our rapid ascent subsided and we were getting our wits together to steer this ship, Space wars had started.

We had started with the food category first as there is a lot of trust deficit in the supply chains. In the last few months, we saw established businesses like Udaan and Swiggy launch new grocery ventures. Dunzo pivoted to DunzoDaily, Grofers to BlinkIt. Quick commerce became a thing. Several large companies raised close to a billion dollars together to fuel this newly manufactured race of speed at all costs. Compared to our dinghy spaceship, other well-capitalized spacecrafts looked galactic. When you throw that kind of money in acquiring customers, everyone gets anchored to speed, no delivery costs, discounts and whatever is the buzzword agencies suggest for Instagram ads.

The grocery delivery wars were being fought at a different scale, on different ethos. There was no room for “buy straight from makers”, “order ahead if you want it fresh from the oven”. This was not the time to march to a different beat. I know this because I was there in 2018, having a front row seat in the famous food delivery wars. That was not the time for a seed stage company to throw in their hat with a very different value prop.

We saw our growth stagnate. People expected the same performance and delivery standards from our makers and us, they didn’t care anymore that our bread came from the city's bespoke bakers, not from Britannia. We realised that Covid had also accelerated a lot of market behaviour, which was now getting stabilised. The community group chatter wasn’t the same decibel it used to be.

The POINT OF NO RETURN

We were at a crossroads - To keep growing, we’d have to drastically change: start warehousing, own logistics, work only with makers who could scale. Essentially, become a full-stack marketplace like others, and over time launch our own white label products as that’s the only business model that works. But hasn’t BigBasket and others already done that? We are just going to be 7-8 years late. Where is the fun in that?

OR - we could persevere on our vision, because we do have a set of customers, even if niche, who love us. Because every day our makers tell us how they started and grew their dream via PING. Because we know quick commerce doesn’t have strong legs, it is only a matter of time. But that’s the one luxury early stage startups don’t have - time. We have a runway today, but we don’t want to run it to the ground.

OR - for the first time, a thought started creeping in my mind - we could call a spade a spade and do something else. This last one, was a curveball. As a straight A’s student who always came first in school, who studied hard to get into an IIT, who toiled to get promotions at work, who dreamed and made it to Stanford, I was used to a very “input = output” equation in my life. I had never quit anything big before. Heck, I didn’t even quit bad relationships because being the fighter that I was, I always thought there was a way out, if you just fight a little more.

I judged myself for weeks for even having this thought. I brooded around seeing the state of my business. I felt like a sham trying to inspire my team when I was losing confidence in what we were building. When I constantly became snappy and mentally exhausted, I took a weekend off just with myself and my journals. I kept writing about not wanting to quit but that it made no sense to persist. Finally, I asked myself “what would you tell your friend who was in your place”. Bang came the answer on the page “just do something else, there is no judgment but your own. start over”.

I was willing to tell this to my friend, but not to myself. I was willing to extend this compassion to someone else, but not to myself. That did it. I HAD to be this compassionate to myself.

Not so soft LANDING back into the ground

Once I came back from my solo-cation, my husband was the first one to know. “I have decided to do something really radical with PING, I have decided to shut it down”.

“That’s great! I have seen you struggle with it for a while now. It’s very brave of you to change this status quo”. Thankfully, I am blessed with the world’s best support system. My family and close friends gave me the space to open up, bare my fears and dilemmas.

Next: Sharing with the investors, who put a lot of trust in me. Last year, over Zoom, I was telling the whole IC why this is the next big thing waiting to happen. This year, I am making a trip to Delhi to tell them why it’s not.

I met Mukul and not only did he agree with our decision, he asked “How can we help you?” I was prepared to explain everything about our business. This was the only question I had not prepared for.

“Can you please introduce me to other founders who have been here?”

Apparently there are a lot of founders in this club that no one wants to be a member of. They all welcomed me with open arms. I had some of the most raw, honest, and elevating conversations with them. They all told me some versions of the following:

• If you have come to this decision, don’t second guess yourself. Trust your instincts.
• Don't jump to your next thing, take your time. Disassociate with sunk costs.
• Absolutely don't think about log kya kahenge (what will people say). Be kind to yourself.

Next: Sharing with the team

I shared the whole truth with my team over an All Hands. Nothing I shared was news to them. All of us had lived the ups and downs of our journey together. This was the last slide:

After this was Q&A. The first question I got from my team was “How are you V?” I am so honoured to have met and worked with this team.

Next: Sharing with our communities and makers

When we shared the news with all our 500+ communities and thousands of makers, we received an outpour in some shape and form like this:

Of course I forwarded every single message to myself for keepsakes. One of our customers offered to buy PING. Few of the makers proposed to form a consortium to keep PING going. It was an inexplicable feeling - tears mixed with fear mixed with gratitude mixed with wonder mixed with despair. It was easily the most emotional week of my life.

ONTO THE NEXT FLIGHT

We wrapped up PING in early 2022. All my Pingmates are making magic at different companies. I am solving a new problem, the dream is still alive. Our investors continue to back us.

Why am I sharing this story now - for those builders, who are looking for stories like this, like I once was. I know it feels really lonely, but you are not alone. Hard pivots are hard. Over the last year, I have become the one to welcome many founders to the aforementioned club. I call it the Rebuilders Club.

There is no playbook for changing your mind or changing your market or changing your conviction. Each of us has to find her own path, but it definitely becomes easier with a selfless sounding board. If you are at a crossroads and I can help, DM me and let's jam.

And

It is 2023, remember, log bas yahi kahenge (People will only say this) .. you are down but not out my friend!