This is why Indian coders can almost never be good founders
I was trying to make this product happen two years ago, tried convincing many coders from grapevine and blind to work on it with me , but no one agreed. Said the market is too small or there isn't much scope for such a product.
Today there are already 3-4 such products in the market doing well , and Dhruv is just copying them and localising+marketing for India.
The problem with indian coders is they don't know how to look at the bigger picture from a founder or customer POV. They just care about getting paid a salary, no risk appetite or even willingness to make an MVP to test the market demand.
Even the rare ones that do make an MVP, they mostly suck at marketing/sales and will rarely team up with founders or marketers to make a business out of it.
Disappointing tbh. This is why there's very little product innovation happening in India. Coders just want big salary packages but won't take on risk, failing to realise that the reward is much bigger as a founding engineer than a salaried one.
The problem with India is poverty. Most coders and their dependents won’t be able to survive very long if they don’t get a monthly paycheck from their employer.
The risk appetite is low, because there isn’t much social safety net in event of failure - no unemployment benefits, no social security payments after retirement etc.
For most people, the promise of big rewards won’t help people much if they’re a couple of paychecks away from defaulting on their bike or car or house EMI payments.
That is why there will be little product innovation in India, unless there is funding available for it from angels, VCs, etc. for paychecks from day 1.
So for founders, securing funding to pay coders, is their primary responsibility, to be able to operate in the Indian market, rather than expecting the coders to work without paychecks. That’s the socioeconomic reality of India.
I'm not even talking about coders with dependents or EMIs here. There are plenty of well settled coders in India who will still prefer a FAANG/startup job with paycheque rather than building something of their own.
The ones I spoke to already had jobs plus took on freelance projects. They just didn't have the vision, told me instead that the idea doesn't have a large enough market. They were happy to work on it if I paid them a hefty sum though, always outside my budget.
Yes, agreed. VCs and investors in India are also risk averse. But the only way to crack funding in such a scenario is to build a product first which attracts users and subsequently investors, instead of founders going out to pitch.
Unless coders realise this, they will remain stuck with single digit and decimal digit ownership in startups they devote most of their hours to.
Bhai waise aap kis chiz ke founder ho
Anyone can code the MVPs now, Dhruv's platform isn't difficult either. But doing the coding part is 5% of the work, even less now.
The main issue is distribution and given today's environment where anyone can make MVP distribution is the only key differentiator.
Dhruv has millions of viewers, they day he launched the product he could get 10000+ people to try it. Very few individuals can do it.
That's part 1 of difficulty, other part is unit economics but distribution is THE hurdle. Coding definitely isn't an issue here.
As for as founding engineer vs a salaried one. Objectively the odds of making big as founding engineer vs a normal job in US big tech are almost 0 anywhere not just India.
If you as a founder have only potential reward as a way to attract talent I am sorry to say you are not cut out for it. You are also better off doing a salaried job.
Source: Made a small SaaS and have sold it after failing to realize a big revenue pool.
YoE: 6 TC: 2cr
If coding isn't an issue, coders should be working on more projects of their own. Like I mentioned, the minority of coders that do work on personal projects still don't end up partnering with seasoned founders or marketers and that is their biggest mistake - thinking they can sell as well as build. Very few people can do both well enough. You seem to have hit the same wall with your SaaS project.
I actually tried "vibe coding" with AI tools and couldn't even build a basic, functional website. There's just too much I don't know and AI tools are still very nascent, non coders can't use it to make fully functional MVPs on their own just yet. Realised it's better if I just learn coding on my own from scratch, rather than depend on coders or AI tools.
There's a big difference between "attracting talent" as an employer and teaming up as a co-founder. You are still stuck in that mentality it seems. Seasoned founders don't really need coders to make business happen. In fact India is filled with big businesses that don't even have a website or much of a digital presence and still make crores in revenue and profit.
Coders need founders and founder mindset more than founders need coders. Coders are mostly replaceable, and will continue to become more replaceable as AI tools get better over time.
If anybody in India is given a 1% chance to make ₹10 crore v/s a 75% chance to make ₹60L per year, they’ll choose the second.
One of the reasons is that it’s predictable income that can be repeated with a higher probability, if they’re laid off. Building a product (specially when it’s somebody else’s vision, you don’t believe in it and you’re one of the key implementers) is much more mental strain than a job. If you give 1% equity to such a person and they want to make a crore by selling the said equity, your company needs to raise funds at a valuation of ₹100cr.
If you have experience raising funds, you should be able to pay a decent salary (or a stipend) for folks to build your product. What was the pay and equity structure you were willing to spend to get your product built?
1% equity lol. I've offered 50% for projects from scratch, upto 20-25% for existing profitable businesses, and still no one gets interested.
It is standard practice for indian coders to be given minimal equity because there's no conviction in them. They will look to other projects within a few years, never want to build something for 5-10 years.
If I could have raised funds, i would've been able to afford higher pay too. But fundraising without IIT IIM tags is a challenge in India, and I'm still fully bootstrapped. I've had to reject funding offers because investors here demand too much equity for little to no contribution and too many terms and conditions on top of it.
TBH distribution played a huge role in making his product popular
Sure, but coders can always partner up with founders and marketers too. There's no dearth of such people in India. But they don't, that's the main issue. They don't have business sense or product vision, they just know how to follow instructions for the most part.
Someone even made an open source version of this tool and shared on reddit within a few days of his launch, it was that simple a concept. Yet no one in India made it on their own and tried to market it.
I tried convincing many coders 2 years ago, but all I got was excuses. I could've marketed and even pitched the MVP for funding, with minimum 20-30% equity or more for the coder. Still not enough to convince them, they would rather have me pay an upfront hefty amount instead of taking ownership of the product as a co-founder.
The founder mentality is severely lacking in Indian coders, they're all used to comfy jobs/freelance gigs working for others.
