{Karthik Venkateswaran, Co-founder & CEO of Jumbotail}

Karthik served with the Indian army in hard combat and had successful stints with marketplaces such as eBay in the US and Flipkart in India before launching Jumbotail along with his Stanford University batchmate Ashish Jhina.

On this episode I chat with why Karthik & Ashish united behind this problem, and we deep dive into the business & the inspiration for Karthik to leave the military service and pursue entrepreneurship.

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→ Go Subscribe to the Newsletter via stars.substack.com so that you can receive future podcast releases delivered to your inbox!

→ Full episode of the podcast is available on my YouTube Channel

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Jumbotail was founded with the objective of enabling the Kiranas or corner stores by envisioning a full stack experience; creating a wholesale marketplace and new retail platform to help retailers with inventory management, a digital PoS, working capital and retail as a service to make them modern convenience stores.

Jumbotail’s endeavour to build products, platforms, and services for the next billion people of India has landed them in over $55 million in funding from Venture Capital funds such as Nexus VP, Kalaari Capital & Heron Rick fund.

Enjoy another classic episode! Jumbotail is hiring massively across verticals, reach out to Karthik & the team via mission@jumbotail.com

Stay safe!

— V {i’m on Twitter @varunvummidi }

Timeline:

00:00 - Introduction to Jumbotail

03:45 - Moving to Entrepreneurship from Military service

06:38 - Challenges building Jumbotail

10:20 - Battling competition in the food & grocery market

15:46 - Distribution is king?

20:28 - Differentiating in a supply rich market

26:45 - Post pandemic user behaviour

31:24 - Managing many business under the umbrella

37:22 - Hiring

39:10 - Learning from combat applied to business

{Jitendra Chouksey, Co-Founder of FITTR}

The latest episode is with Jitendra Chouksey, aka JC, Founder & CEO of FITTR. FITTR has a highly engaged 2 million strong community focused on getting healthy and transforming themselves with the help of FITTR coaches, using the resources available. On this episode we chat about the journey from a small WhatsApp group that was created to assist a few friends and colleagues to becoming the platform it is today.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

→ Go Subscribe to the Newsletter via stars.substack.com so that you can receive future podcast releases delivered to your inbox!

→ Full episode of the podcast is available on my YouTube Channel

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Founded in 2016,  JC a software engineer transformed himself while working a 12-hour a day IT job. He created and shared a training methodology through his free book “Get Shredded” to prove that anyone can get fit with the knowledge of Quantified Nutrition. Now that has spawned into a fitness company that has a vision of making millions of people across the world fit and to create meaningful career opportunities in the fitness industry.

We discuss:

• Building Fittr’s highly engaged community
  
• Growing the user base & finding the missing pieces in achieving fitness goals
  
• Choosing Sequoia’s Surge program over Y-Combinator
  

Please do share the episode, and do spread the word!

Hope you and the family are well.

- V { Twitter @varunvummidi }

Timeline:

01:15 - Introduction to FITTR

05:10 - Journey to getting FITTR

08:39 - Transitioning from a Hobby project to a business

12:10 - Transitioning Groups to the mobile application

15:25 - Managing FB groups

17:00 - Engaging users

27:45 - 60% of coaches were clients of FITTR

33:25 - Joining an accelerator program having positive cashflows

EP54: {Ashish Singhal, Co-Founder of CoinSwitch}

Hi Stars!

Apologies for the sporadic episodes and the long gap between the last episode! Hope you and your family are safe and well during this crazy time. Go get vaccinated, please don’t wait.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

→ Go Subscribe to the Newsletter via stars.substack.com so that you can receive future podcast releases delivered to your inbox!

→ Full episode of the podcast is available on my YouTube Channel

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Founded by 3 friends Govind, Vimal & Ashish, friends from NSIT in 2017, CoinSwitch is now backed by bluechip fin-tech investors like Ribbit Capital, Paradigm and Sequoia India, raising $15 million in their Series A round. In April 2021, they raised another $25 million ( ₹181 crore) from Tiger Global - valuing Coinswitch at more than $500 million.

Buoyed by the massive interest amongst Indians for cryptocurrencies, the platform has witnessed 350% growth in its user base since January this year. The most actively transacting age group on the platform is between 25-35 and the platform is witnessing a huge demand from Tier 2 and 3 cities. Investors from Tier 2 and 3 towns account for as much as 54% of Coinswitch’s user base.

Do spread the word!

- V { Twitter @varunvummidi }