Journey At Mumbai

I used to think that business is an enterprise where you build a product and go to the market to sell it. However it seems that I was very wrong.

I went to Mumbai in June, 2025 to build a startup called SuperFlights. I was young and excited. I thought we were building the next big thing. Then one day a guy asked me a question regarding what I was building.

I stopped. I started thinking. Then I said a Flight Booking Engine. The man was confused. He said, "Yeah, but there are dozen of companies who do that. Why would anyone buy tickets from you specifically?"

At that point I did not have an answer. Me and my co founder went for a smoke and started thinking. What was it that made us unique? Another question arose. "Do we need to be unique?"

I don't think so. Uniqueness is not the factor that matters in business. Sure its a great thing to have especially if you have monopolization of that sector, but no one is stopping others to get into it and kill your "uniqueness". Lyft started before Uber and yet everyone knows Uber and its a billion dollar empire.

Timing also does not matter. It matters not if you were early or not. Its meaningless to be early or late. Then what differentiates businesses?

I thought as I lit up another cigarette. What is the factor that makes businesses work. I thought and thought and thought.

I think I found an answer I said. It is very simple and we tend to overcomplicate it.

A business is something which fulfils the need of someone and ideally a problem is large enough that you can make a business out of it. However everyone knows this and there are business which fail even after this. It really matters not how good the thing you are selling is. Ideally it does matters but more importantly what matters is that you can bring your solution to the people who are in need.

I think it is Distribution which is the most important part of a business. If your product is the best and no one knows about it, its just a gold in a desert. Useless!

I thought of multiple ways to distribute our software. We could do ads, billboards and so much more. I felt for a while that it would be interesting to make ads myself and we started envisioning our ads and other stuff. In the span of two months I learn 2D animation. Below you can see some of the work I did.

We pivoted later down the line after two months in Mumbai. The AI boom was in full swing and interesting tools like Lovable and Bolt were raising millions in funding. These softwares piqued our interest and we got into the mess head first. After Superflights we built surfers.bot and put superflights on hold. We worked on many other similar ideas throughout.

Marketing is hard! The best form of it is organic but it works seldom organically. Generally in social platforms products work only when they have a huge marketing budgets. This is because in its very raw form, you pump money, you paint the town red, you get eyeballs of people who want the product, then its ooh-lala. We tried this at first with our ₹10,000 and here are the results.

A lot more of this is not something a poor indie startup can afford, so startups generally (non-funded ones at least) use alternate strategies. These include ragebaiting (Cluely), publishing scientific/technical papers to gain credibility, founders building communities and audiences around themselves (DHH -> Omarchy), open-sourcing their products (Supabase), and building in public on Twitter.

Well I tried to do a lot of these things but they seem to be more so of trial and error, serendipedious and also an important factor of quality was missing.

You sell a story, an aesthetic, a vibe that makes the user fall in love with the product cuz products are many but users will choose the ones which they love, get most value of and most importantly they "feel" is best.

We left Mumbai after six months of working for our indie startup and went back to our college. I learnt a lot and still am.