Core responsibility
Found and run a two-sided fashion aggregator end to end, product, team, fundraising and go-to-market, and learn, the expensive way, what actually makes a venture survive.
EntrepreneurshipFundraisingProduct StrategyEarly Lessons
TrendTalk India was my first venture, started at 21: a fashion aggregator app connecting shoppers with fashion retailers, built with a team of 12 and $60K in seed funding. Two years later, we closed it. This page exists because the closing taught me more than most successes have.
We built good technology, and as first-time founders we put most of our budget behind it. What we underestimated was how much sales and distribution would need: the customer base and retailer side of the platform grew more slowly than the product did, and by the time we understood where the money actually had to go, the runway was too short to rebalance. We wound the company down.
$60K
Seed funding raised at 21
2 years
Of lessons that shaped everything after
Notes from journey
01
Building Was Never the Hard Part
Unit EconomicsCapital AllocationFounder Lessons
As first-time founders, we put most of our capital behind engineering, assuming a good product would pull the business along with it.
The app worked. The team was good. What we lacked wasn't engineering, it was a financial plan that matched the business: knowing what growth costs, which spending compounds and which just burns, and when to shift money from building to selling. Product-market fit isn't only about the product fitting the market; it's about the company fitting its runway.
02
A Platform Needs Both Sides
Marketplace DynamicsDistributionResource Allocation
An aggregator lives on liquidity: enough shoppers to matter to retailers, enough retailers to matter to shoppers.
Growing both sides at once needed far more distribution spend than we had left. I've thought about resource allocation differently ever since, every product decision is also a decision about which side of the marketplace you're feeding.
03
The Lesson That Built the Next Company
JudgmentSecond VentureApplied Learning
Turning an expensive failure into judgment that actually changes the next decision.
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
Where money goes matters as much as what gets built. Every product decision is also a capital allocation decision, and the discipline to fund distribution as seriously as development is what separates ventures that get a second act from ones that don't. I learned it the expensive way, once, and never needed the lesson again.
What this role proves
That I've carried real risk, made real mistakes, and turned them into judgment. When I say I think about whether a product pays for itself, this is where that thinking was earned.