Here we are, supposedly at the top of our game, but something felt a little awry.
An ex-boss and a mentor of mine from my New York days messaged me on Instagram saying, “You did it!”.
And that’s when it hit.
We have not “done it”, we are nowhere close. But the gap between the perception of where we are versus where we actually are had widened overnight. And the number of perceivers had also suddenly increased exponentially.
All of us were drowning in a flurry of “congratulations”, and while we arguably deserve a pat on our back for our efforts so far, we still have so so much further to go.
We still need to test our technology at scale. We still need to improve the finer properties of our material. We still need to build and grow our team. We still need to prove whether we can economically sustain the change we strive to create in the waste management space. Hell, we still need to find a proper Chartered Accountant.
So, the real test has just begun. The flight has taken off, but we need to ensure it doesn’t come crashing down.
It was this gap between perception and reality that swept me into quiet lowliness. Maybe it was a normal biological low after the highest high, but it definitely was a moment of reflection.
And eventually, a source of motivation that this gap will be filled.
*****
I have been writing these quarterly letters since the break of the Ashayaic dawn, more than three years ago. These are not newsletters or "investor updates” that focus on tooting our horn. They are just chapters in our journey so far, yearning to bring you along on the painful joyride that this is – a little raw, a little real, a little long, and yes, fine, with a little bit of tooting.
Okay, let’s dive into what happened this past quarter.
It all started with Lollapalooza India in January.
BookASmile, who are early believers in what we do, gave us an opportunity to sell our recycled sunglasses at India’s biggest (English) music festival. They also bought a few hundred sunglasses for their artist gift hampers, so yes, we are not wrong when we say that even Sting got one of our shades. Not sure if he even knows about this, but let’s not dwell on that too much.
It was a hot, sunny, long weekend in Mumbai, which was bittersweet. Lots of people wanted our shades, but it was also really uhh, hot and sunny.
We sold more shades at this event than we ever had, but we still didn’t sell enough. This gap in expectations was unfounded, based on giddy excitement probably triggered by One Republic.
The team had conflicted amounts of fun – good music but long hot days, lots of carrying things and walking in the sun, but also lots of team bonding in a way that’s always better post-mortem.
Overall, we learnt that our sunglasses are cool and all, but we are a material science company at our core, and this event is probably going to be a once-only event.
But the week after, we had already signed up for another festival – SpokenFest, admittedly for selfish reasons. The festival did attract our target audience, was less intense than Lolla, and financially we broke even so no harm no foul? And that’s all I have to say about that.
And then the week after that, we got a call that we’ll be airing on Shark Tank India next week. Then we got another text saying that our History TV18 episode of “OMG! Yeh Mera India” will also be airing on the same day as our Shark Tank episode.
Two national TV shows on one day, right after doing two festivals. Aren’t we lucky? But oh man, what a mad few months.
Leading up to the Shark Tank episode, I was a bit nervous, unsure about how generous our edit was going to be.
The actual pitch on the day of the shoot in December was about an hour long, and there was plenty of masala that I was nervous about. But we got an excellent 15-minute edit that focused on the heart of what we do – our impact (and very little on of all the masala, for which I will be eternally grateful to the producers).
Also, to the credit of the Sharks – both Ronnie’s and Peyush’s teams reached out to us swiftly after the shoot, conducted due diligence and are joining our current funding round as planned. I got a chance to meet Peyush last week where we talked shop and I even spent some time with Ronnie’s team at the upGrad offices.
I know there’s a lot of noise around how some of these Shark Tank deals don’t actually go through and how some entrepreneurs get “ghosted”, but for us, none of that has been true - it has all been a fair process so far. Still not fully there, but fingers crossed, I haven’t jinxed it.
That fateful night of the double-TV-appearance, the whole team got together at home, with Mum and Dad and family. And everything seemed to stand still, with everyone beaming with pride, as we savoured the fruits of our labour over the last three years.
As that passed, some of us started looking at our website traffic and sales, expecting a Sharky avalanche of sorts. But what we got was only a little snow.
We had sold 5x more when we went viral organically a year ago, so this was a bit of a doozy. We have our theories, but do share yours too if you’ve made it so far.
We did receive a ton of emails and messages, and a surprisingly large number of requests for our tech – “Hey, I want to set up your plant in my city.” But there was also a lot of noise, and I was constantly trying to focus on the signal.
Just when we thought we would get some respite, we came around to the fact that we had a show at Lakme Fashion Week in about a month. And while most brands would salivate at this opportunity, we couldn’t help but look at it exhaustingly. Yes yes, we are super spoilt.
We are not a typical fashion house, we are far from it. So, we wanted to do something more than just a fashion show, something that demonstrated the depth of our work, beyond the glam.
And that’s what we did. We put together an installation of sorts, painted with the chicness of the fashion world with eco-punk models adorning the newest inspiration of our shades while frolicking in the irony of a bathtub full of shredded packets of chips.
We didn’t stop there though.
We went a layer deeper, showcasing the chemistry of our technology and the heart of our impact – our optimizers or former waste-pickers who we have now formalized into our organization.
And the best part? The entire team came to see it. They got a taste of Fashion Week, not as outsiders, but as designers of sorts, as the heart of the show. For the press conference afterwards, we pulled in Sandhya, a former waste-picker, who spoke about her work in Marathi. My uncle commented after – that’s probably the first time that’s happened at Fashion Week.
It was something that you would probably never see at India’s biggest fashion week (or any Fashion Week for that matter), and we got it all pretty much for free (through a grant). This video does a nice job of putting it all together.
None of this would have been possible without Darshana and Amanda, the excellent folks at Circular Design Challenge who did the heavy lifting in putting a lot of this together.
If you’re wondering if all that was a lot, well a lot more happened.
Amidst all this chaos, we had to deliver three corporate gifting orders of close to 300 sunglasses in record time across India, the UK and the United States. Suraj and Pravin Kaka spent many unsolicited nights in the lab making this happen while Jitu and Rajesh were hustling at SCALE at ChemTech – India’s biggest Chemical Engineering conference.
We developed three new colours for our shades which we debuted at Lakme Fashion Week alongside DIY-esque sunglasses which you can adorn with any bling that you would like. We revamped our website, launched jewellery and eyeglasses, made progress on our pilot plant, won a grant from DBS Foundation, got into Marico Innovation Foundation’s Scale Up program and even got featured on French TV2.
We are now 22 folks strong, about to close our seed round and are raring to go.
I feel like I say this in every letter – the last three months were insane. My sister tells me that’s just how it’s going to always be now.
I don’t know what to make of that.
But I know that while the last three months had many once-in-a-lifetime experiences, I felt a bit distracted. A bit distracted from the core technology and the business we need to build, the core problems we need to solve.
While Shark Tank, Lakme Fashion Week, etc have been great experiences, in the long run, they’re not make-or-break for us.
I wouldn’t change anything that happened in the last three months, but I’m ready to focus on our core.
On filling that gap.
Yours,
Anish
