mewt: beginner’s view!
Having started our bachelor’s degree together 8 years ago and spending 3 years ideating(almost every day and most of our ideas are startups now!), 1/2 year working(never really started) on a startup idea(we were amateurs) and another 1 year of phone call discussions, we(Rishabh Jain and I) finally decided to take work seriously.
With the business mindset and the background we had, we always knew we wouldn’t be working for a corporate and hence, didn’t take our jobs/internships seriously.
One day in my absence, the idea of mewt was born. I was informed about it the day after and was seemingly impressed. Having just started my masters, I wasn’t in a good position to add value to this unique idea and consequently decided against pitching myself into it. However, my restlessness knowing that my closest friends were working on something spectacular without me made me rethink my choice. After another month, I happened to mention my interest to Rishabh and was informed about the idea not taking off/everyone being very busy. The moment I mentioned my interest, Rishabh was ecstatic! He knew we could make this happen and I knew we would, we had spent more than 5 years ideating after all!
We finally decide to start working on mewt but didn’t know how to start, let alone executing the idea. Another 2 months later, we enrolled ourselves in a Hackathon on Account Aggregator(organized by Sahamati). It was in this period when we started doing our research about fintech and validating our idea. In a span of 2 weeks, we built our whole application using the developer APIs of Onemoney. Although we didn’t win the hackathon, our idea was appreciated by everyone and most importantly, received interest from multiple VCs. This got us thinking and we decided to revamp mewt and rebuild everything with better research. We spent the next 7 months researching the available technologies and validating our target market. We spent hours debating about our niche and discussing features.
Finally, in January 2021, we decided to start building our product. We managed to raise some money from friends and family, this pressure of having to deliver made us work tirelessly every day. It took us 6 weeks to finish our app, the first response made us realize that our partners weren’t as reliable as we expected them to be and this made us go ahead and start discussions with companies to execute our original idea(which had every investor/SME spell bounded). We currently are growing fast, getting interests from SMEs everywhere, but have kept them on hold. We are testing with friends and family before rolling the application out to the public. Also, we have just started the development of our banking products and believe this can revolutionize banking in India.
Starting from being ridiculed in our initial investor calls 10 months ago to being recalled by every investor(and we are denying investments) seeing our quick progress, I believe we are on the right track. Moreover, I have learned a lot in the past 10 months more than in the 5 years before that.
We believe mewt will be a groundbreaking technology and so do our advisors. With this confidence, we build our products every day….
This has been my experience with mewt so far, I’ll be writing another blog about the development phase(hence I avoided most of those parts here). mewt, has only been possible because of the amazing team(currently, Rishabh, Tarun, Chhavi, Jyoti Prakash, and I) we have and everyone has been equally important and valuable to us. Contributions of Gyanesh Malhotra, Fernando Camara, and Saurabh Sikchi(and few more people) in the past will always be remembered and honored.
