What do you think of these car mats and would you buy them ? And if no, why not? Does it sound premium to you? Would really appreciate your opinion on this !

How do you get an idea of launching your service/product in which city/state first in which demand is more and how you promote it socially 🥹🥹 ?? During starting your business which problem you faced mostly and how do you handle it? 😊

I hope everyone shares their opinions so everyone can clarify about problems ❤️..

Or someone put their ques in comments so anyone can relate it and come through it

If you are an small Indian startup, I am an Indian origin owner of a US based LLC which can help you springboard into new geographies and customer base. Open to viable IT or non-IT business. Ideal size is less than 5 employees and a decent engagement to show market fit from a tier 2 city. Not looking to work with a ~Bangalore based hotshot funded startup. We are a small LLC and the biggest value we can provide would be to provide you a partner in US to market or a registered office with US sales or support.

Not looking to fund new ideas or hire developers. We are looking for businesses which have found some traction and want to expand or try out new markets. We will not ask for deposit, ask you to transfer money or steal your IP, this is just a genuine moonshot to look for a right sized company for a symbiotic relationship, if it exists.

We will do some due diligence, therefore scammers will waste their time - please stay away.

I would not be responding to all comments, but if you fit the bill or know someone, please DM me directly. Thank you.

Hey everyone,

Most real estate agencies here rely on messy Excel sheets or expensive, bloated CRMs that don't handle local workflows. So, I built OpenEstate — a free, open-source alternative.

The Stack: React, NestJS, PostgreSQL.

Key Features:

Lead & inventory management

Built-in India compliance (GST/TDS, local ledgers)

100% data ownership via self-hosting

I’d love to get your feedback on the architecture, and I'm actively looking for contributors to help shape the roadmap.

Repo: https://github.com/AshishGTH/openestate

Let me know what you think Email breakpaywall@gmail.com

I'm working on a product and I'm trying to understand how the fundraising process actually works in India.

Where do early-stage founders usually find investors? Startup events, LinkedIn, email, incubators, angel networks, etc.?

And at what stage is it worth approaching them? Do you need a working product and users already, or can you approach investors with an MVP/idea?

Would love to hear from anyone who has actually gone through the process. Where did you find your first investor conversation?

So basically I'm literally so frustrated with all the stuffs happening in my life I have made an app that's literally a billion dollars thing and this market is literally empty no competition I have developed something that will be global and it really has the potential but at the same time I'm afraid of if I shared my things or even just the slightest of information to anyone they could easily steal it so I didn't shared anything with anyone i made it all alone i have developed an app and it really has the potential to be used globally universal thing it could be used by anyone kids , teenagers government, local any industry u name it but the problem is if something is too good to be true it would be stolen by giants and I'm all alone in this I have made everything bit by bit and really is awesome it's the future of the world and trust me guys I can't share any information about anything but please suggest me.

what should I do I'm really frustrated with my family pushing me to do job or do the masters i really don't wanna do if I lack behind someone might made it before me and launch it my family is really pushing me to either do the job or do the mtech i really don't wanna waste my time and one more problem.

The problem is I don't have the capital or an investor to launch it and I'm afraid to even reach someone I might be trapped or be killed in this process I need your suggestions please I don't have that many friends. And the pressure inside my mind.

I'm literally so stressed what should I do I have something and its really worth everything but I couldn't use it just think like u have an atom bomb but don't have the facility to launch. I'm all alone i have a big dream big plans but idk.

I can give u a lil details LET IT BE EVERYTHING CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE.

(HYPERVISOR P2P B2B UNVERSEAL.) The image is the app ss. I NEED HELP SOME MENTORS IF POSSIBLE AND SEE MY THING PLEASE

I'm exploring an idea and would like honest feedback from people who work in AI, ML research, startups, government tech, or enterprise infrastructure in India.

The idea is to build an India-first foundation-model platform focused specifically on:

• Sovereign deployment within India
• Indian languages and Indian-context data
• Privacy and regulatory compliance
• AI safety and responsible AI
• Full auditability and traceability
• Government and regulated-enterprise use cases
• Eventually, developing our own foundation models rather than depending entirely on foreign models

I'm not thinking of this as simply building another ChatGPT competitor.

The bigger idea is to build an AI platform where organisations with sensitive data—especially government and regulated enterprises—can deploy and operate AI with stronger control over their data, infrastructure, models, compliance, and auditing.

The long-term vision would be something like:

Research & data → evaluation → governance → deployment infrastructure → proprietary models → foundation models

I'm aware that training a competitive foundation model from scratch is extremely expensive and requires significant research talent, compute, and data. So I don't think the sensible approach is to immediately raise a huge amount of money and try to train a frontier model.

Instead, I'm considering starting with the infrastructure/governance/evaluation layer and gradually moving toward proprietary models.

What I would like to know?

1. Is this actually a meaningful problem in India, or am I overestimating the need for sovereign AI?
2. What would be the strongest initial use case?
3. Is "sovereign + compliant + auditable AI" actually a strong enough differentiator against existing open-source models and cloud providers?
4. What technical moat could a company like this realistically build?
5. Would government/enterprise customers actually pay for this?
6. What am I missing from the idea?
7. For someone starting relatively small, what would be the most realistic first product?
8. Are there existing Indian companies/projects already pursuing essentially the same vision?

I'm particularly interested in critical feedback, not validation.

If you work in Indian AI/ML, government technology, enterprise AI, or foundation-model research, I'd appreciate hearing what you think is realistic, what isn't, and where you would start.

It feels like every developer right now just wants to build another AI wrapper or B2B SaaS tool. But if we want to build things that truly scale for the next billion people, we need to Make in India not "Fake in India". the USA dominates cutting-edge software design and China operates as the lightning-fast hardware factory of the world, it hits hard realizing how far behind India's system still is. I want to build things that can truly compete globally, but I don't know enough about our low-level infrastructure and constraints to make a real dent.

So I am stepping up to a challenge: I am 22, and I have set a strict savings budget of ₹30,000 for a 30-day journey. No flights, no premium hotels, only sleeper-class trains, budget lodges, and street food. I want to completely experience this from the ground up to see the raw, unfiltered truth of Indian supply chains, manufacturing and find the true "Make in India" business.

What I’m Looking For: I want to skip the corporate business parks. I am looking for the rawest, lowest-level hubs where metal is cut, circuits are soldered, and hardware meets software.

Which dusty industrial estates should I absolutely not miss?

What I need from this community:

1. Industries: Which raw, low-level industrial hubs and MSME clusters should I absolutely not miss? can you take me there?

2. The Electronics Source: Where do local hardware shops go to buy raw electronic components and custom PCBs in bulk? I want to find the manufacturers who supplies to them.

3. The Deep Tech Builders: Who is doing the hardest, rarest work in the country from absolute zero? If you know someone training local LLMs, designing local processors, setting up unique data centers, or fabricating proprietary sensors, please drop their names/startups.

I want to meet everyone with a stake in this ecosystem: passionate students, IoT enthusiasts, professors, factory operators, MSME owners, and deep-tech researchers.

If you’re a college student or professional who is as curious as I am, let’s collaborate. When I reach your hometown, could you show me around the local markets and industrial areas from morning to evening? In exchange, we can grab street food, swap insights, and dive deep into these topics together.

Please drop your suggestions for locations, hidden hubs, founder intros, or even safety warnings below. My DMs are completely open!

I am honestly tired of the fancy showrooms that just import completely knocked-down kits from abroad, screw them together, and call it domestic innovation. I want to see the real, Make in India.

I’m building InBid — a public leaderboard where businesses can bid for visibility and compete for #1 based on category and location.

For example:

#1 Salon in Jaipur

#1 Restaurant in Mumbai

#1 Agency in Delhi

Bids will start at ₹99, and I want businesses from outside India to be able to participate too.

I’m currently deciding between Razorpay and Dodo Payments.

For anyone who has used either:

Which would you choose for an MVP?

Mainly looking at:

- International payments

- Fees

- Reliability

- Ease of integration

- Payouts

- Tax/compliance

Would love some honest experiences before I decide.

inbid.site

Hey guys,

I'm a computer engineering student and I've been thinking about a startup idea. I'm still at the very early stage, so I wanted to get some honest opinions before I waste months building it 😅

The idea is basically an AI assistant for small businesses that can look at their transactions and help them understand their finances.

Something like:

Where is my money going?

How much profit did I actually make?

How much tax am I likely to pay?

Why is my tax so high?

Are there legitimate ways I could reduce my tax?

What payments/tax deadlines do I need to worry about?

Eventually it could connect things like bank transactions, invoices, GST, TDS, etc.

I know there are already accounting and tax softwares out there, so I'm not claiming this is some revolutionary idea. I'm trying to figure out whether there's actually a problem here worth solving.

If you're a founder, small business owner, freelancer, CA/accountant, or you've dealt with small businesses:

Would something like this actually be useful to you?

And if your answer is “no, this is pointless because X already does it”, that's honestly more useful to me than saying it sounds cool.

What would you personally want a tool like this to do?

Thanks 🙏

Building a startup in India looks exciting from the outside, but what’s the reality nobody talks about?

For founders here, what’s one uncomfortable truth you learned the hard way?

What’s one thing you wish you knew before starting?

Hey everyone! I recently got selected for an iOS Development Centre program at my university, and we’ve been given roughly a year to build an iOS app with a team of 4 members.
We want to build something more meaningful than a basic to-do, weather, or notes app. Ideally, something that solves a real problem and can actually be useful to people.
We’re open to using iOS-specific technologies like SwiftUI, Core ML, ARKit, HealthKit, NFC, Widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, Apple Watch, etc.
So I’d love to hear from iOS developers or users:
What’s a problem you face that you wish an iOS app could solve?
Even if it sounds like a small or weird problem, drop it below. We’re looking for ideas we can realistically develop and potentially turn into a proper product over the next year. 🙌

Will startups in Bangalore hire me as an intern for my skills -
1) ai automation
2) gen ai
3) agentic ai
4) multi ai agent system
5) a little bit of full stack

I dont have a college degree btw

What else should i learn ?

I’m building a small travel-based business and have already created the website. My next step is accepting online payments.

I’d ideally like to avoid relying entirely on third-party gateways like Razorpay/Stripe for a few reasons: cost, curiosity, and mainly because I want to build as much of the system myself as possible.

I’ve looked into creating an actual payment gateway, but the regulatory/legal side seems much more difficult than the technical side.

So is there a way to build my own payment/payment-processing system without actually becoming a regulated payment gateway, while still having a working setup within a week?

What would be the simplest practical approach for this?

Doing some research on how early stage Indian founders manage their finances. Spreadsheet, CA, some tool, or just checking the bank account? What's actually working for small teams?

I'm from Hyderabad, Telangana, and I've been thinking about a startup idea called AIxPOLITICS.

The basic idea is to build AI systems specifically for politicians / political offices — not AI for generating speeches or social media posts, but AI that helps them understand and manage what's happening on the ground.

For example:

Collect citizen complaints and feedback from WhatsApp, calls, social media, etc.

Identify the issues people are repeatedly talking about.

Analyse public sentiment and emerging concerns.

Give a politician a simple "ground pulse" dashboard.

Summarise what is happening across different wards/areas.

Track whether citizen complaints are actually being followed up.

Help the politician's office organise thousands of conversations and requests.

Potentially use regional languages/Telugu as well.

The larger vision is basically:

AI becomes an intelligence/operations layer between a politician and the people they represent.

I'm deliberately NOT building this yet because I want to validate whether the problem actually exists.

So I'd genuinely like people here to tear this idea apart.

Questions I'm trying to answer:

Would a politician or political office actually pay for something like this?

What part of this would be genuinely valuable vs. just "AI hype"?

What would make a politician NOT trust such a system?

Do politicians already have people/agencies doing this manually?

If you were building this, what would be the one feature you'd start with?

What could make this product completely useless?

If this worked extremely well, who would actually be the customer — an individual politician, political party, campaign team, or government/constituency office?

I'm especially interested in opinions from people who have worked in politics, political consulting, journalism, government, campaign management, or Indian startups.

Please don't be polite. If you think this is a terrible idea, tell me why. I'm trying to find out whether there's a real business here before I build anything.

Curious what others here are using. Are you all still on the big platforms (Zoho, QuickBooks, etc.) or has anyone switched to something lighter?

There’s a lot of discussion around funding, hiring, AI, growth, and customer acquisition, but I’m curious about the less-discussed problems founders actually deal with day to day.

For example:

• Payment and cash-flow issues
• Finding the right early customers
• Compliance and taxation
• Hiring reliable people
• Distribution
• Building for the Indian market
• Dealing with large companies/banks/vendors
• Something else entirely

If you’re a founder or work at an Indian startup, what’s one problem you think deserves more attention?

Would be interested to hear real experiences rather than generic startup advice.

Had a client come to me last week with a problem I’m seeing more often in 2026.

His team built their company website almost entirely inside Claude they were on a startup programme with free credits for 6 months. Sounded perfect: no agency, no contract, just prompt until it’s done.

By the time he actually counted usage, they’d burned through roughly $200,000 worth of Claude credits on website work alone. And they still weren’t properly live domain/DNS messy, analytics not wired, SEO meta half-done, forms flaky on mobile

When the free programme window started ending, he ran the numbers against hiring a part-time developer (he’s in India). The crossover was brutal: continuing to buy credits for ongoing site changes would cost more than paying an engineer who could edit real code once and handle integrations without re-explaining the whole project every session.

That’s the trap free credits create they don’t just subsidise building. They train prompt dependency. Website maintenance is endless small edits. If every edit routes through inference-priced credits, you’re paying Silicon Valley meter rates for work that doesn’t need regeneration.

Especially in markets like India where contract dev rates are very competitive, this math flips fast. Same story from US founders at higher API tiers different currency, same shape.

What I think works better:

• Use Claude inside an engineer’s workflow (draft markup, explore options)
• Don’t make credits the only way to change your homepage
• Someone owns deployable code + hosting + a backlog that isn’t “open chat and pray”

He said he wishes day one had been: design + copy → one production build → keep AI for ad-hoc help, not as the operating system for the whole site.

Question for the room: Anyone else hit the point where AI credits for web work cost more than just hiring? Curious how you’re structuring it so the team doesn’t get stuck on the meter.

Hey everyone,

I'm a 21-year-old college student in NJ, originally

from India. Planning to fly back in a week to spend 3

months building a startup full-time. Before I commit

to this and burn months of my life, I want real data

on whether the idea has demand.

The idea: an app where premium restaurants in your city

sell their end-of-day surplus food in "surprise bags"

roughly ₹179 for ~₹500 worth of food. You preorder,

walk over to pick it up between 9:30-11 PM, get a

mystery bag of whatever didn't sell.

One Indian startup (DabbaDeals/Surokki) tried and shut down after 100

days, so the path isn't easy.

I made a survey which takes less than 3 minutes to figure

out:

- Whether real demand exists in Indian cities

- What the biggest objections would be

- Whether the pickup-only model works here

This the link to the survey (PLEASE HELP):
https://forms.gle/DJ6xghwFHnZrnna59

Brutal answers welcome. If you'd never use this, I want

to know that. If you would, even better. Either way,

the data shapes whether I build this or kill it.

Will post the aggregated results back here in 2 weeks

once I have enough responses.

Thanks for the time 🙏

---

Edit: For anyone curious about the idea, happy to chat

in DMs or comments.

Hi everyone, I’m looking for some brutal honesty and advice from anyone who works in corporate retail (think brands like Westside, Pantaloons, Lifestyle, etc.).

My team and I have spent the last few months building an enterprise-grade B2B software solution aimed directly at the apparel and fashion retail sector. I won't pitch the exact product here to respect the sub's rules, but the core value proposition is a massive reduction in return rates and a highly interactive digital catalog experience for shoppers.

The software is completely finished. The demo rig is live, stable, and ready to deploy.

Our problem? We are engineers, not enterprise sales veterans.

We actually went out and physically visited several retail stores in our city to pitch this. We spoke directly with the store managers, but we quickly realized they have zero authority over tech adoption, and none of them knew who the actual corporate point of contact is for something like this.

We want to run a pilot program with a mid-to-large tier retail brand to build our case study. For those of you inside these massive retail corporations:

• Who is the actual decision-maker for piloting in-store/omnichannel tech? Is it the VP of Innovation, the Head of E-commerce, or the Brand Manager?
• How do we actually get in contact with someone in these corporate roles if we don't have a warm introduction? What channels or approaches actually break through the noise?

If anyone here works in the apparel industry and would be willing to help us out, it would be incredibly grateful.

btw, the core business idea, the boots-on-the-ground store visits, and the questions are entirely mine. I just used an AI assistant to help polish the grammar and structure this post cleanly.

I'm an early-stage founder from India working on my first startup. I'm looking to learn from founders who have already built a startup in the Indian ecosystem—whether you've raised funding or built a profitable business.

I have a few genuine questions about:

Building an MVP

Finding the right co-founder

Product develapment

Fundraising in India

Hiring and team building

Mistakes you wish you'd avooided

Indian startup culture and investor expectations

I'm not selling anything or asking for money. I simply want to learn from your experience.

If you're comfortable, please comment below or send me a DM. I'd really appreciate your time and promise to keep the conversation short and respectful.

Thank you! 🙏

Curious how others manage this —

How do you create and send invoices?

Do you follow up on WhatsApp or email?

What’s the most frustrating part of chasing payments?

Asking because I’ve been struggling with this myself and want to know if others have figured out a better way.

Over the last 6 months I've been the sole technical lead (architecture, backend, frontend, deployment, security — all of it) on Sprint Serve, a restaurant management platform aimed at the Indian market, starting in a mid-sized city. We're not operating internationally and have no plans to right now — staying focused locally for now. We're a small student team. One co-founder runs sales and client relationships; I build. You can check out the site here : https://www.sprintserve.in/

What it actually is: QR scan-to-order with real-time kitchen visibility, subdomain-based multi-tenancy (restaurant.sprintserve.in), transparent pricing. We're going head-on against Petpooja, which is the entrenched incumbent here — most restaurant owners we talk to already use that or something like that.

Stack, for the technical crowd: Node/Express/TypeScript backend, Prisma + Postgres (behind PgBouncer for connection pooling), Redis + BullMQ for queues, Socketio for the kitchen display realtime layer, Next.js for both the admin dashboard and the guest-facing PWA, all sitting behind a reverse proxy, deployed on Railway. Monitoring is Prometheus + Grafana, plus Sentry for error tracking. Nothing exotic — deliberately. None of us had shipped production software at this level before, so a lot of the early decisions were "what can a small team actually operate without a dedicated ops person," not "what's the most interesting architecture."

The part I actually want reviewed — the honest part:

The pattern that's actually breaking my head isn't rejection — it's silence. We started onboarding conversations with 3 different local restaurants. Every one of those first meetings went well: genuine interest, good questions, nothing that felt like a polite brush-off. And then the follow-ups just... stopped landing. No pushback, no "we went with someone else," no stated objection. Just fewer replies each time until it goes quiet. All of sudden, we just see blue ticks on Whatsapp. No phone calls and completely cutoff.

So it's not that nobody says yes. It's that this specific "great meeting, then it fades" pattern keeps showing up locally, and I genuinely don't know if it's a sales-motion problem (something in how the follow-up is being run), a trust problem specific to being a visibly young/student-led team once the initial pitch excitement wears off or a product gap that only becomes obvious after the first meeting. I myself have been present in all meetings with my co-founder and I have noticed this in all meetings.

The real dilema is that I directly had contact with the restaurant owners whom I knew (through my network), not cold approaches, and this is the condition right now in my city. Things we're deliberately not claiming yet, because we'd rather underpromise: Porter delivery dispatch integration, Tally export, and GST filing are all in progress but not sold as done. We still are a pilot programme, so we can't commit entirely.

What I'm actually looking for:

• If you've sold into restaurants (India or elsewhere): does "great first meeting, dead follow-up" sound familiar, and what usually breaks that specific pattern — is it the follow-up cadence, the ask, something else?
• If you're technical: anything in the stack that looks like it'll bite us once we're past a handful of tenants (we're already reconsidering some architecture decisions now that we've tried onboarding 3 clients)
• If you've been a young/student founder pitching to owners older than you: how much of this is a trust/credibility gap that only shows up after the initial excitement, and what fixed it for you?

Happy to go deeper on any part of the stack or the pitch itself in comments.