Sometimes the greatest journeys of life start with a simple 'yes!'
As the name implies, the inspiration for OnTheProwl came from a safari. Specifically, a trip to Jim Corbett National Park that Hussain, Gaurav, and I took in December 2019. We had all recently graduated from college and our careers had just taken off.
But before I get into the story let's introduce all the characters first. Starting with Gaurav.
Gaurav is a computer science engineer from the College of Engineering, Pune (COEP), one of India's oldest engineering institutes. In college, Gaurav spent his time being involved in as many activities as the hours of the day would permit him, from Debating to Choir Singing to heading college fests. He was everywhere. After graduating from college, Gaurav got a job at EQ Technologic, where he built microservices and backend infrastructure solutions, some of which even made their way to use with Siemens, BMW, and the US Navy.
In December of 2017, my friend hosted a Christmas party with his college mates and my group of friends. One of them was Gaurav. As any young engineer can testify, controlling alcohol didn't come naturally to him. And so there we were drinking to Christmas tunes. And among them was Gaurav who was running around socializing with everyone. He was never without a cup in his hand until the liquor hit the ceiling and Gaurav hit the floor. As I watched him pass out, I knew that over time we would become close friends. In the following months, Gaurav picked up an internship close to my house, and we would regularly meet in the evenings at cafes. I came to appreciate and respect his thought process and the depth of our conversations around interesting ideas.
Now over to Hussain.
Hussain and I were batchmates from Symbiosis School of Economics, Pune, but we had lived entirely different lives.
Both of us are from Pune. You can think of Pune as a small town with extremely tight social circles. This means I had heard of Hussain, but, given that he lived on the other side of town, I had never had many opportunities to interact with him.
Before joining Symbiosis, Hussain had given engineering a shot, but that hadn't worked out too well for him. Recognizing that his true passion was for business and finance, well into his first month of engineering, Hussain decided to take a gap year, with the aim of bagging a seat in an Economics course.
The following year, when Hussain joined Symbiosis, he had taken it upon himself to maximize his learnings by studying from books and from life itself. In his first and second year, Hussain had worked tirelessly at AIESEC, the world's largest student-run organization, where he led their business development team. In his final year, he got an opportunity to lead the business development team at Hyperloop India, and he wasted no time in grabbing this opportunity. The team at Hyperloop India worked days and nights to make their mission - international recognition for India's first student-run Hyperloop project - a reality. This culminated with them presenting their pod to Elon Musk and the team at SpaceX. Eventually, Hussain even got the chance to present the project to PM Modi!
And what's my story? Well, I have always been passionate about business and knew that one day I wanted to start something of my own. While growing up I looked up to legends like Warren Buffet and other great investors and similar to them invested in my first stocks in the 8th grade.
In college, I would regularly run out of pocket money, and I noticed that this held true for most of the students around me. Consequently, I started WeScript with one of my closest friends, aiming to generate viable side incomes for me and my colleagues.
At WeScript, we provided media services to YouTubers to help expand their reach. Our main offering was subtitling videos. Our clients were international YouTubers who wanted to increase their engagement with their Indian audience and Indian YouTubers who wanted to expand their reach to global audiences. We scaled the business to become an exclusive media partner with the biggest independent Indian YouTuber and supported many college students with enough money, enough to match what they were getting from home.
After graduating, I joined TresVista Financial Services in Mumbai where I worked with one of the largest PE in the world on all their due diligence. On a random winter night, 6 months after I had started working, I got a call from Hussain. He had also gotten a job from my company and wanted to know if I knew any place where he could stay. It just so happened to be that my roommate was moving out and I needed to fill the gap.
Hussain and I spent the next two years together, literally. We woke up together, headed to work together, chilled a bit in the office together, and sometimes went out together too. The foundation of our respect for each other, however, was laid when we decided to take the CFA examination and saw how the other would work for 15-hours and then come home to study for another 4 hours. Seeing each other push past our limits made us even more competitive. All in all, the environment was deeply inspiring.
As the exam came closer and our life in Mumbai became more stressful, we decided that we deserved a break after all of our struggles. Thus, we made a plan to spend our New Year in the north. I had never seen fresh snowfall in our country, and Hussain wanted to go to a National Park, as it had been years since his last visit. Noting both of these priorities, we zeroed in on visiting the legendary Corbett National Park and then climbing up the Himalayan mountains to welcome the New Year.
As any person who has been to a wildlife park can testify, to do it cheaply you need about 6 people in your group (to fill up the safari jeep), or else the costs would quickly go out of hand. Thus, our hunt for four companions to join us on this quest began. We made a list of the most spontaneous people in both of our circles and got them on board. Two of those people were Gaurav Rajeev and Sairaj Khope, Hussain's friend from his Hyperloop days. Back then, we had no idea that the four of us would become the founding team at OnTheProwl. But more on that in a while.
The trip went better than we could have expected. It was an entirely heterogeneous mix of people who had never spent more than a day with each other, especially under challenging weather. During the day we would explore, search for animals, and trek unknown paths, and at night we would all camp around a bonfire and talk about life.
After the trip, as we came back to our mundane lives back home, Hussain and I knew that we had shared some incredible moments with some of the most enterprising and bright people we know.
Well into January 2020, we decided to put the pedal to the metal on one of our ideas - we invited a few friends over to discuss the idea of providing working capital credit to Kirana shops. Our method of gauging the creditworthiness of the Kirana shop was going to be via helping them sell and track inventory. From what we understood of the market, Kirana shops spent 20-30 mins at the end of every working day updating their inventory books and this process could easily be automated by using smartphones that everyone had. We were going to make the PoS system that big retail outlets like DMart available to the smallest Kirana shop using their phones.
As discussions progressed, we realized that our team lacked a solid coder. The rest of the people we had were great at strategy, design, backend infrastructure, and finance but we didn't have a full stack coder. To fill this gap, I called up Gaurav.
Gaurav was instantly excited by the idea and before I could say much about our current state he volunteered to work on the project.
We started working more on the project. BizDev teams started interviewing more Kirana Shops. Tech team started designing the possible tech stack etc.
Unfortunately, tragedy hit the following month - the world came to a stop when every news channel started reporting on covid outbreak in Italy. A new age was upon us. Cities went under lockdown and sales at Kirana shops plummeted under curfew. To make matters worse, Reliance announced its mega mission of launching Reliance Mart which offered to digitize Kirana shops, and it provided much of the same infrastructure that we wished to build. Within a few hours of the announcement, everyone on the team got on a call to discuss the future of the project, codenamed ShopWazir. It was clear to us that to compete with a player of Reliance's scale was foolish. By the end of the call, we stopped the project and we felt that what was more important were the people that we had assembled than the idea itself. There are a thousand ideas out there.
Months passed with everyone back on their day jobs. All was quiet on the side-gigs front. Then, one evening in the early monsoon, Hussain came to my side of town in Pune and we went out for a drive. He randomly brought up an interesting problem in Indian Wildlife - there was no consolidated information center about National Parks anywhere in the country and booking safari permits was an extremely tedious process.
Hussain called up a family friend who was a professional tour guide who had also served on Madhya Pradesh's Board of Tourism. On speaking to him it was clear that there was a clear gap in Indian Wildlife Tourism and no one had bothered to fill it. We were going to do it. The plan was simple- we would create the first knowledge repository of Indian National Parks. If this was a problem then we were sure to get traffic on our websites which we would present to the government to hopefully get the license to sell safari permits. Again we called up everyone in our network to start working on this project. Most of the people were core techies and wildlife wasn't something that excited them at all.
Every day after working at our jobs we would collate information on national parks and add them to our WordPress website. But the WordPress website was too limiting and it didn't look sexy enough, so we needed someone to create a custom website. I called Gaurav again to help us out and he was back on the team.
It was now January of 2021, Hussain met me one night when he needed to talk to someone. We met at 11 pm on the streets and spoke about our vision for OnTheProwl. It was inspiring to hear about all the big ideas. Around 1 a.m, we popped the big question - we asked each other if we were ready to quit our jobs to work on making these ideas into reality. The answer was a yes from both of us. It was time to quit our jobs and work full-time.
We didn't know exactly what we were going to do, but we knew that we were young and this was the only time to try something new in life and still be okay. Seeing my conviction, my Dad let me use one of our houses as an office space till we got things moving. This became our first office, or as we called it back then, HQ.
We continued our primary research, speaking to folks who worked in the travel industry. Over time, it became clear to us that they were not very tech-savvy and also didn't have time to maintain an online presence, since their jobs required them to go to the remotest parts of the country. What if we built a platform that made it extremely easy for them to create a trip and sell it to their customers while also leveraging their social media profiles. This became our pilot project.
We built our MVP and tested it out with over 50 travel operators. The process was humbling but it got us questioning the fundamentals of the business. While the feedback was brutal, it was honest and it was something we could work on to make this idea work.
By the end of the year, all of us had nearly burnt through all our savings. I had 200 rupees left in my bank account. Gaurav was in debt and even Hussain had broken his account. We had bootstrapped it all till now and we needed funding. We applied to several VCs, but we were too early for all of them. Through some stroke of luck, we got in touch with Prateek at GradCapital. There was an instant connection with him and we knew that he was our best bet at raising money quickly. We needed it to be quick because we honestly didn't have money to survive without asking for help from family and we didn't want to go there.
After speaking to all the investors at GradCap, Prateek messaged us saying that it was a unanimous yes from their side and we were going to get funding. The team took this news like a godsend. We had been surviving on our savings for the better part of the year and we had gone through so many rejections from other VCs. At the far end of our hope, we finally got a glimpse of the light!
In the weeks to come, we planned how we would leverage the funds once they came in. One thing was clear to us - to experience the ecosystem at its fullest, we would have to move to Bangalore. Christmas Eve 2021 was memorable, to say the least - the funds finally came in. Needless to say, all of us agree that it was the best Christmas ever.
The next month, we relocated our office to Bangalore so that all three of us could work under the same roof. We hired our first employee as part of the founding team- our lead designer, Kartik.
And now we're out here, hustling for what we believe in, trying to create value in a space we deeply care about.
2 years ago, a group of young, free spirits went for a vacation to Corbett National Park and experienced the beauty of our forests and landscapes firsthand. A year ago, Hussain and I walked through the night and translated our dreams into a solid vision of what OnTheProwl could be.
It's been a grand ride ever since.
