Day 72 · Ninety Days of Runway · Pulse Beat
Meera had a rule: never ask for money before you have asked for advice. So she spent a week asking. A founder in Bengaluru who had built a restaurant inventory tool. A professor at IIM who studied…
Meera had a rule: never ask for money before you have asked for advice.
So she spent a week asking. A founder in Bengaluru who had built a restaurant inventory tool. A professor at IIM who studied food waste. A cousin of a friend who worked at a supermarket chain. She sent them each a short, polite note and a link to the new Today screen, and waited.
Four replied. The founder said, bluntly: Your market is real. Your problem is distribution. Kitchens do not search the app store for planners. The professor said that food waste was a public good, and public goods were rarely well funded. The supermarket cousin said nothing useful.
But the fourth, a woman called Padma who ran a catering company in Hyderabad, wrote: I would pay for this. Send me a quote for six kitchens.
Meera read that line eleven times. She had never quoted a price. She had given the app away to nineteen people for a hundred rupees a month and called it a pilot.
She opened a blank spreadsheet and typed, in the first cell, a number that frightened her.