Alumni Talk: Inside Stories from the Early Days of Building a Startup
Every startup has a founding story. The polished version lives on the website — bold vision, clear mission, inevitable success. But ask the founder what actually happened in year one, and you get something entirely different.
That is what Alumni Talk is for. We sat down with five women founders — all part of the STEP entrepreneurship programme — and asked them one question: what really happened in the early days? What follows are their answers, unfiltered.
Marketing needs to be creative
Poornima Sathyanarayanan, Founder, Rhapso Fashion Tech
Poornima Sathyanarayanan is not a first-time founder. Earlier in her career, she co-founded a building automation company that built automatic parking systems across 17 cities in India. When she exited that venture, she was looking for her next problem to solve — and she found it at a family function, when her clothes arrived from the tailor at the very last minute.
That frustration became Rhapso, a Bangalore-based platform that sends designers to customers' homes to take measurements, discuss designs, and collect fabric — delivering finished garments within a week. To test the idea, she first offered alteration services to women in a local community. The response convinced her to go ahead.
The harder lessons came from the numbers. "I was looking at things from a macro level without getting into the depth of the numbers," she says. Customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value — the metrics that determine whether a business is actually working — were not getting the attention they deserved. She corrected that, and the results followed.
The lesson: Know your unit economics before you scale your ambitions. The numbers will tell you things your instincts won't.
The right time to start is now
Shweta Verma, Founder, Ginny's Planet
In 2019, when most toy brands were still selling dolls with perfect bodies, Shweta Verma launched Ginny — a doll with glasses and a radial club hand. The idea was personal. When her son was born with multiple health conditions, Shweta noticed something missing: there was almost no children's literature addressing disability, and no workshops helping young children understand difference.
After twenty years as a social worker, she decided to fill that gap herself. Ginny's Planet uses dolls, storybooks, workshops, and classroom programmes to teach children about diversity, inclusion, and empathy.
The business challenge has been a stubborn one. People appreciate the mission, but converting that appreciation into paying customers is harder than it looks. "While everyone acknowledges the importance of our cause, few agree to register," she says. "Some do not respond, and even if they respond, they are not willing to pay for it."
She is still working through it. But she has not slowed down.
The lesson: Belief in your idea is not enough — you have to find the people willing to pay for it, and that search takes longer than you think.
Sometimes you see things coming, but people around you don't
Kudrat Dev, Founder, YCM
When Kudrat Dev told people she was building an organisation around conflict resolution in India, the response was consistent: it won't work here. She disagreed — and she had the credentials to back it up. Years as an adversarial lawyer in Indian courts, a Chevening Scholarship to study dispute resolution at SOAS in London, and accreditation as a conflict coach and mediator by the UK Civil Mediation Council.
"Sometimes you see things coming, but people around you don't," she says, "I followed my instincts and decided to go ahead."
YCM — Youth Conflict Management and Mediation — is now India's first organisation dedicated to building conflict resolution skills for young people. The early scepticism looks different in hindsight: India now has a mediation bill in Parliament proposing to make mediation mandatory before filing commercial or civil disputes in court.
The practical struggles were closer to home. Financial planning and projections were a persistent blind spot before she found the right support. One early low point stood out: she was invited to conduct an online training for a government organisation during the pandemic, and nobody showed up. She delivered the presentation anyway, to the organising team. They were moved enough to stay engaged.
The lesson: Dismissal from others is not evidence that you are wrong — sometimes it just means you are early.
There is no alternative to nature
Arti Dhar, Co-Founder, Farmers for Forests (F4F)
India produces just 6% of global carbon emissions but is expected to bear 20% of the global economic burden of climate change. That gap is what drives Arti Dhar. Her organisation, Farmers for Forests, works to restore degraded land, protect existing forestland, and bring farmers into the solution rather than leaving them as bystanders to a crisis they did not create.
The logic behind it is straightforward: forests cannot survive long-term unless the communities living around them benefit from protecting them. F4F converts abandoned rural land into forests and pays farmers to protect existing forestland — creating climate-resilient income while sequestering carbon.
The early road was not smooth. Three months after launch, COVID lockdowns shut down all field operations. Rather than wait it out, the team redirected their budget to provide cash relief to daily wage workers who had lost their incomes. Donations followed. The crisis became, unexpectedly, a moment of visibility.
The lesson: When circumstances force a pivot, move toward people. The goodwill you build in a crisis often outlasts the crisis itself.
Change is possible only when common people adopt it
Hemalatha, CEO and Founder, Hivericks Technologies
While the electric vehicle industry was drawing most of the attention in the clean energy space, Hemalatha was looking at something far more ordinary — the charger on your desk. Laptops, smartphones, tablets: devices that billions of people use every day, drawing power constantly, with no intelligence built into how they charge. In 2019, she and her co-founders decided that was the problem worth solving.
Hivericks Technologies builds AI-enabled charging solutions for lithium-ion devices that adapt to individual usage patterns, protect battery health, and reduce the user's carbon footprint. Getting here was not straightforward.
"There were times when we were going to give up due to financial setbacks and some wrong decisions," she says, "But our conviction towards our purpose kept us going." Her advice to founders reflects that experience directly — avoid external investors until you have traction, build a support system early, and do not start a company just to raise money.
The lesson: Conviction is what keeps a startup alive through the mistakes — and there will be mistakes.
What the five founders agree on
Across different industries and founding journeys, certain truths kept surfacing. Here is what every founder, in their own way, came back to:
• Your first plan will be wrong. Not flawed — wrong. The founders who survived weren't the ones with better plans; they were the ones who moved faster when the plan broke.
• The numbers matter more than the narrative. A compelling vision gets you in the room. Unit economics determine whether you stay.
• Scepticism is not a stop sign. Every founder here was told their idea wouldn't work. Each of them built it anyway.
• The unglamorous work is the actual work. Cold calls, spreadsheets, showing up to a training where no one came — this is what building looks like before it becomes a story worth telling.
Why these stories matter
Startup culture has a mythology problem. Social media surfaces the wins; the struggle is edited out. For a first-time founder, the gap between what they see and what they experience can feel like personal failure — when it is, in fact, just reality.
Alumni Talks exist to close that gap. When founders who have been through it speak plainly about what went wrong, what surprised them, and what they wish they had known, it changes the way the next generation thinks about risk, resilience, and what progress actually looks like.
These are not cautionary tales. They are honest ones.