What comes to mind when you hear ‘Desi Founder’? We’ve intentionally blended these two distinctive terms to build a memorable and conscious brand. It’s straightforward: we’re highlighting startup founders of Desi origin. We are here to share our story of our origin, our current build, and future ambitions.
Table of Contents
The Inspiration
The word Startup might have been coined by Forbes in 1976 for budding companies, but India has been building startups even before the time of Independence, and has given platform to lot of amazing Entrepreneurs since many decades. It is another matter that we never labeled such products or companies are Startups until recently. But that doesn’t take away the hard work, resilience and marketing put into making these companies a great success. If we think of it, Entrepreneurs like Dhirubhai Ambani (Reliance), Karsanbhai Patel (Nirma), Narayan Murthy (Infosys) and many more have built successful businesses starting from scratch, and have given employment to thousands of multi-generational people, and continue to do so even today.
India never shies away from putting such businessmen on a pedestal, and praise the likes of Tata’s Birla’s and Ambani’s. But the current trend of Startups has seen an aggressive boom in India since around 2010’s, when many founders have built successful businesses, many of them mostly tech related. As India got more exposure to Smartphones and Internet, the penetration of Startups has been phenomenal and continues to do so.
One of the decently bootstrapped Startup which comes to our mind is Zerodha. They have been building a very good product without much marketing spent or even taking any Venture Capital money. A lot more can be written by many Startups born and run successfully in India in the recent times, but we will keep that topic for some other day.
The Market Need
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and I had been searching for resources to learn and understand how Startups usually work in India. The entrepreneur in me has kept the spark alive since college time, where I wanted to build something meaningful in life, which can be helpful to the general public. Sounds very cliche, but who hasn’t dreamed of building something great? While I kept browsing the internet with resources like Instagram, YouTube, Blogs, News sites, LinkedIn, Y Combinator, Crunchbase, etc. the resources
I found were mostly relevant to the western world. India has also dabbed into the Startup scene, but they almost feel like feel good pay to promote noise. Where are the stories of Struggling founders who are just starting out? Where are the ones who haven’t even seen the V of Venture Capital? Where are the actual useful resources for a college student to learn about starting a Startup in India? Most of the advice found online are either not India specific focused or are just vague general information without going into detailed descriptions.
The pain point was valid and the gap was there to be filled. That is when I decided to Start Desi Founder’s blog, where I would interview niche Startup Founders, whom most haven’t even heard about and needed a platform to voice their journey. I conducted around 20+ interviews, and thoroughly enjoyed the enthusiasm these founders shared about their products and their journey. We have also highlighted insights about how and what to do when stepping into this entrepreneurial journey.
When I spoke to many of these founders, the most common problem they faced apart from getting the funding was in getting good potential co-founders and also about having an India specific platform to promote their Startups to an niche crowd. I actually informed them that there is already YC Co-founder matching platform and ProductHunt available in market, which are a pretty huge deal in the Startup world, and why not utilize these tools to their advantage. They told me that they did try out these platforms extensively, but the crowd there is majorly western and doesn’t help connect the Indian Startups with an Indian specific crowd.
Now throw in a bit of racism and stereotypes, and it leads to a disaster for such budding Startups even before they start their journey. The needs and understanding of Indian pain points can be very much different to a western market, and the spending ability is also very much different. The western consumer will not understand our challenges, culture or laws.
I kept doing extensive market research if there is even a need for such a tool, when there are also specific communities available on reddit such as r/StartupIndia and r/IndianStartups. But unfortunately Reddit is a very niche platform in India, where more than 80% of the population has never even heard of it. And the very few millions who use, are scattered around in different communities.
And let me not start with the quality of the Startup pages for India on Instagram, Facebook and such which are utter garbage, and are mostly about reels, memes and earning a quick buck. Same goes with News portals specifically run for Indian Startups, which I feel can be improved a lot as we move forward.
I did discover an upcoming platform for Startups called Medial, about which I will go in a bit detail later on. But I would genuinely appreciate their will to try out something different and proving Product Market Fit for an Indian audience. I hope Medial thrives and grows along with us, making the journey of Startup founders easier and more productive.
Desi Founder Redefined
Going through all of these data, feedback, pmf, and the market need for the necessity of tools to be built for Indian Startups by an Indian Startup, we decided to pivot into creating a social networking community platform, which is more than just a forum, but also has specific tools to find co-founders,tool to spotlight your products, have resources details needed for an early stage startup founder, and much more all under one roof. The journey is currently in progress, as we keep building tools and features every day. We will journal the progress below and break down into what we have already built, what we plan on building and how we will do it.
Competition
Having a competition in market is good. It tells us that there is a valid market need which is waiting to be fulfilled. India also is a hot market for Startups sprouting up every single day, so much so that even GOI finally launched an initiative called Startup India in 2016.
India’s startup ecosystem is experiencing strong year-over-year growth, with projections for 12-15% annual increases. This growth is fueled by factors like rapid digital adoption, government support, and increasing venture capital funding. The IT sector, in particular, is experiencing significant expansion, with revenue growth reaching 15.5% year-on-year in FY22.
Growth Statistics:
- Overall Growth: India’s startup ecosystem is expected to maintain a consistent annual growth rate of 12-15%.
- IT Sector Growth: The IT sector in India witnessed a 15.5% year-on-year revenue growth in FY22, reaching US$ 227 billion.
- Job Creation: Startups have created over 1.55 million direct jobs.
- Funding: In 2024, PE investments soared to $15 billion, a 46.2% YoY increase.
- Unicorn Growth: India has seen a significant increase in the number of unicorns, with 111 by January 2024, valued at over US$ 350 billion.
When there is a demand in market, there will definitely be competition. And competition is good, it gives users the freedom to choose from the various options available in market. We will list down our competitors of Desi Founder below, and weigh in some pro’s and cons of them, and what mistakes we can avoid to capture the market need.
Well, who hasn’t heard about LinkedIn. It is where your company’s HR go to brag about nonsensical stuff when they are usually tired from organizing Rangoli competitions. The situation is so bad that there is a dedicated community called r/LinkedInLunatics.
LinkedIn began in co-founder Reid Hoffman’s living room in 2002 and was officially launched on May 5, 2003. They were eventually sold to Microsoft in December 2016 for a whooping $26.2 Billion all-cash transaction. LinkedIn is the Facebook of Professionals, both metaphorically and literally. They are too big to fail at this point, but they are too big to change too. The platform was built in 2000s for the crowd of that time and has yet to evolve into today’s times, and has very bleak chance of taking that path.
X [Twitter]
Twitter has a very large and active crowd of Entrepreneurs, both International and local. But it is in the end a micro-blogging site with a general feel, and after the takeover by Elon Musk, the platform’s quality and moderation has gone down the drain, so much that it has lost around 11 million users in EU alone in 2025. It is yet to be seen how long the platform will survive competing with the likes of Bluesky and Threads. But for now, it is still a good platform for Entrepreneurs to stay connected and be updated about the Startup world, even though it lacks lots of essential tools required for founders.
Reddit might be one of the most active sites in the world, but it is still a very niche platform in India and continues to do so in the near future. Reddit also hates direct promotions and pitching, which are the bread and butter of Startup founders who are still tinkering and learning how to market their products. There a definitely very active communities for Indian Startups on reddit, namely r/StartupIndia and r/IndianStartups the biggest ones.
They are quite resourceful to a limit, but again dies down quickly due to it’s niche exposure among Indians, anti-promotional atmosphere and the lack of necessary tools required for founders. It is however good to get a general feedback about your ideas, queries and suggestions from an active crowd of redditors. We do however take a lot of good stuff from reddit which we plan to implement in Desi Founder.
Peerlist
As Peerlist is being built by a designer, the UI is very clean and easy on the eyes. It is a good thing that even this product is built by Indians, and we do hope for them to thrive in the near future and become a global unicorn. They however dislike anonymity, and allow only real profiles with real names, making it a direct alternative to LinkedIn mainly.
They do have a real potential to be a replacement of LinkedIn in the coming years. The non-anonymity has it’s own drawbacks as founders and their employees who use the platform will try to be mostly politically correct and avoid any kind of exposures without the risks of denting their careers. They are also focused more on a global user-base, rather than focusing on just the Indian market, which again avoids the main pain points we are trying to solve at Desi Founder.
Medial
Medial, a startup from Bengaluru can be considered a close competition to us. They did have a two year head-start to us, and have proved that there is a big necessity of an Indian specific Startup platform. This platform’s structure is more similar to Twitter, unlike ours which is more of an old-school forum style similar to Hacker News and Reddit.
We see a lot of gaps and potential this platform is missing out on, which we want to fill in the coming times at Desi Founder. We will not go into specifics, nor want to bring them down, because a healthy competition is good for everyone, especially the users. They should always have the choice to experience a good alternative if they feel the current one isn’t satisfying their needs or goals. We wish this platform grows and thrives along with us, which is why we are giving them a shout-out here.
Current Progress
We started building our community platform since February 2025, and have since launched the MVP for BETA testers. We go into very nitty gritty details from the UX experience to solving the pain points we started out to solve. UI is still not our main goal, and we believe that we can add the makeup on this later on. Current focus is building a robust backend platform which can be scaled very fast when necessary, and go into minute details of every UX problem we have faced in the past using other platforms. There is fortunately no vibecoding going on here at Desi Founder, and everything is being built by scratch with manual code.
For now we just have the basic structure of user login, profile settings, adding social links, profile avatars, and creating posts (Text, Link & Image) and comments at Desi Founder. The build is a bit slow, but we are bootstrapped hence, no urgency to build something mediocre fast and exit the game. Our plan is long term, and build this platform brick by brick to give the best experience to the users.
You may sign up for BETA here, and play around with the current build. Give us feedback on discord, where we are pretty active, and can also add your suggestions, bug reports and complaints.
Future Plans
Well, this is where the real gems are hidden. Not yet built, but currently on a roadmap which will make this platform one of the best experience a Desi Founder will get. We will list down the tools and features we are building as we speak, and also plan to build in our Phase two. Almost every single feature we are building at Desi Founder will have a free tier availability, without being put behind a paywall. We also plan to keep the community discussion feature open for public to browse, without the necessity of ever signing up.
- Spotlight your Startup
- Grants List
- Active VC List
- Startup Events around India
- Co-founder matching tool
- Job Board for Startups
- Referral Program (with rewards)
- Polls
- Important Documents Templates
- Collaboration for Projects
- Idea Generation
- and much more….
Our main aim and goal at Desi Founder is to help Indian Startups grow with minimum roadblocks, and be a part of the resource which can be ethical and informative for budding Entrepreneurs. Will we succeed? Only time can tell, which is why we are journaling it here to visit back in future and understand how it all began. Cheers!