2014 to 2016 · India

TrendTalk India.

Founder · Fashion Aggregator App

Core responsibility

Founded and ran a fashion aggregator application end to end: product, team, fundraising and go-to-market. Two years of decisions with real money and real consequences.

EntrepreneurshipFundraisingProduct StrategyEarly Lessons
  • This was my first venture, started at 21: a fashion aggregator app connecting shoppers with retailers, built with a team of 12 and $60K in seed funding.
  • We invested most of our energy and money into building a good product. Over time we came to understand that aggregator businesses depend just as much on sales and marketing, and that both the retailer network and the shopper base need steady investment for a long while before the platform can carry itself.
  • By the time this became clear to us, we had a product people liked but not enough runway left to grow the market around it.
  • Looking back, that experience taught me more about how businesses actually work than anything since.
$60K

Seed funding raised at 21

12

Team members

2 years

Of lessons that shaped everything after

Notes from journey

01

The Product Was Ready Before the Market Was

Unit EconomicsCapital AllocationFounder Lessons
Challenge

As first-time founders, we put our faith in engineering, believing a good product would naturally draw in both shoppers and retailers.

What I did

The product itself did fine. People who found it used it. What we slowly understood is that an aggregator really lives on having enough shoppers to matter to retailers, and enough retailers on board to matter to shoppers. Getting there takes patient, steady spending on sales and marketing, sometimes more than on the product itself. We learned this while running the business rather than before starting it, and that timing shaped everything that followed.

02

Every Product Decision Is Also a Capital Allocation Decision

Unit EconomicsCapital AllocationPrioritisation
Challenge

As a young team, our focus was on building. Understanding what each investment should return, and by when, was a discipline we still had to develop.

What I did

TrendTalk shaped the commercial instincts I use today. I learned to weigh acquisition cost against the value a customer brings back, to separate roadmap work that drives retention from work that only adds features, and to treat runway as the constraint every prioritisation call answers to. That ROI lens now comes before a build, not after.

03

The Lesson That Built the Next Company

JudgmentSecond VentureApplied Learning
Challenge

Turning an expensive failure into judgment that actually changes the next decision.

What I did

Three years later I co-founded The Funnel Hill Creamery, and it started exactly where TrendTalk ended: unit economics first. That business scaled to four outlets and survived COVID. The straight line between the two is not a coincidence.

Skills applied

EntrepreneurshipFundraisingProduct StrategyEarly Lessons

Key learnings

Building something good is not the same as building something that lasts. Every product decision is also a decision about money, time and focus, and I learned to ask what an investment returns before making it, not after. That discipline has followed me into every role since, from my second venture to the AI products I lead today.

What this role proves

That I have taken real risk, made mistakes with real consequences, and tried honestly to learn from them. TrendTalk taught me to look at products the way an owner does, not just a builder.

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