December 2016, 4 kids after a hectic month of job hunting aka placements, chilling with contraband realized they have 6 months of sponsored experimentation in front of them. So, after a month of slogging our way to get a job as early as possible #statusGamesOnCampus, we decided to think of startup ideas so that we can ditch the jobs.
Over the course of next few months with tons of “tu beer hai” moments, around April, all batch mates were leaving the campus, we decided to tackle the problem of drone delivery.
While the entire world was running around in circles building supplementary businesses in the hope of doing this, 4 barely out of college students decided to not beat around the bush. High on “lean startup”, “zero to one”, “hard things about hard things” and plenty other startup gyaan books, we started figuring out the two most revered aspects of a startup.
1. Unit Economics
2. Tech Feasibility
Over the next 3 extra months in the heat of Kharagpur (one last time :( ), we managed to figure out a probable working unit economics but mostly built a cool POC delivering “Lays Magic Masala” to hostel roofs from the student community center. The Lays was actually bought from the hostel only. But who cares? It worked :D. Couple of times. ;)
Naive of us then to think this is good enough to go out there and claim we can do drone deliveries. Obviously, we understood regulations were not open so we were planning to start in private campuses - college, business parks etc. to start with and eventually move to open spaces once regulations allow.
Considering it was a hardware product, we realized we would need a raise some amount till GTM and we also committed ourselves to this enough to look for flats outside campus since Kgp gave us the best possible infrastructure to build and test. Soon, We found a flat in kgp, had a GTM plan on Trello and with 1 week to our official joining, decided to go home and join jobs only till we sort 2 things.
1. Fund Raising Closure - This wasnt that hard but just slow considering kgp entrepreneurship park was supportive enough.
2. Regulations in private property
Over the course of next 3 months working on this part time, we went to multiple pitch competitions and talked to many angels and VCs concluding to pretty strong feedback. 1. Repercussion of the blanket ban on this 2. Unit economics of Supply Chain are far more complex than what we assumed.
As we kept digging more and pushing more stakeholders, the clarity kept reducing on the path to product market fit or even go to market. And with that from doing drone delivery in India, we started the search for the next idea attending every hackathon out there #separatePostAlert. We were in Bangalore after all.
Cut to August 2021. I work in supply chain tech with at least of my then co-founder - still a teammate and co-team-founder (Had to create the term) and after jumping tons of hurdles and approvals and pushing and paying our the way to finally be able to do a controlled setting trial of drone delivery for medicines in a 15 sq. km. grassland 2hrs from Bangalore. 5+ years after the first attempt at it, we managed to do a controlled trial but the path looks a lot more optimistic today and yet there is long way to go before this gets main stream. But we finally do have a path!
Couple of days after the trial, I decided to compare the unit economics calculations done by 2016 Soumyadeep and 2021 Soumyadeep for the same problem and realized something one of the then-co-founders said in one of the million arguments we were having then -
“If you really want to solve Last Mile using Drone Delivery, You should work in Supply Chain first.”
He could not be more right. 2016 economics was far from reality, but well, 2021 economics is also far from what will make it sustainable.
But that is the problem to be solved!