#1 — Anmol Maini (Part 2) | #YuvaStories
This is continuation of #YuvaStories with Anmol. You can read the Part 1 here.
Manan: Can you take us through the entire Doodh.Delivery journey?
Anmol: Demonetization took place in India around Nov ’16. During the time, I was talking to my mom and she told me how local vendors have stopped taking cash for your daily essentials purchase. I was aware of the multipurpose utility of milk in Indian households and hence decide to do Doodh Delivery.
The idea was simple, you pay online once in a month for your entire month’s milk, I built the website while in college in the US and rolled out the service for people in my colony in Delhi when I came home during the summer vacation.
The distribution was very simple, every morning a distributor would come to the colony, I would purchase milk from him, sort it into respective orders and then deliver it individually.
I wasn’t charging delivery, you would just pay for the milk. Since the transition from one vendor to another is difficult, customers would stick around even if there were delays in their orders.
M: What were the key learnings from this milk delivery experience?
A: I realized I didn’t need a website, WhatsApp would have sufficed. Also, my neighbourhood wasn’t the best place to do it because it had people in the 50+ age group, 20–30-year-olds would have been a better market.
Choosing the correct market is way more important than I thought, talking to customers as much as possible is also extremely essential.
Whenever I would onboard new customers, I would get relevant feedback. For instance, I had a chatbot on my site and customers would keep pinging me there to alter their orders despite going to specific options that were available in the website. I realized this and made relevant changes.
My customer acquisition strategy involved an in-person onboarding. If I had to onboard someone on the 3rd floor, I would ring the other doorbells and pitch the service to them.
M: Did you think of having a co-founder? What were your plans to scale this?
A: No, I didn’t feel the need for ‘co-founder’ at my stage since my mom pitched in and helped me out with the orders and opening of an entity for the company. The trust factor is very important when looking for a co-founder and I wanted to go back to college after my vacation.
This entire model was operationally intensive and I had a few thoughts on how to scale. I wanted to move into daily necessities capped to 10 items like bread,eggs etc. Another aspect was a direct-to-home model ad platform, instead of ad pamphlets in the newspaper you can give your pamphlets in my daily delivery basket.
M: Why did you end up shutting this down? How was the offboarding like?
A: I wanted to go back to college and this was something that was very operationally heavy, hence I decided to close it down. Offboarding was smooth, I asked all my customers whichever local vendor they preferred and transitioned them to the respective vendors.
M: Damn interesting story, there! Can you tell us about the books that helped shape your early days of college?
A: I read a lot of autobiographies. To name a few, I found Walter Issacson’s biography of Steve Jobs as well as Sir Alex Ferguson’s biography to be interesting. I read about sports and music as well. Though I’d like to say that books in particular didn’t influence my decision.
M: What’s your current content consumption stack?
A: I am re-reading Zero to One by Peter Thiel. I read a lot of newsletters (15–20): Fintech today, Divinations are best ones. Podcasts I like: 20 minute VC, Venture stories, a16z. I am a big fan of Paper.vc too.
Also, I’m coming up with my own newsletter which is basically deep dive on sectors I find intriguing: neobanks/ISAs in India. Recently started my own subscription based WhatsApp group where I send curated articles on Indian Startup Ecosystem.
M: Is there any advice that you’d like to give to current startup founders in school/college?
A: I have never successfully done it myself so everything needs to be taken with a pinch of salt but I’d say, continue only when you think you have the resources and the ability to support yourself after college. If you are running a good business everything will turn out well, but you need to have the conviction. No one will convince you, you will need to the biggest cheerleader of your ship.
M: What according to you defines that conviction?
A: I think it’s entirely variable from company to company but any metric that supports it to be big enough to kind of continue doing anything else. If you’re making enough rent and still enjoy working on this in the worst of times, you probably should continue with it.
M: What should anyone do to get into the startup space?
A: Read a lot, try to look into stories of companies, stories of sectors that you like, because that’s the only way to learn about it without any direct connection. Another thing is to follow interesting folks on Twitter to learn a bunch of cool and interesting stuff.
Manan: Thanks Anmol for your time & sharing your journey. It was pleasure hosting you.
“One way to start a startup is to just do a startup”
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