The Indian market has seen several startups bring innovative products into the D2C and FMCG segment.
According to industry estimates, the D2C segment will grow 10-15x in 2022, followed by 9-10% growth in 2023 and 10-11% growth in 2024. the flow of investment, half a billion can be raised in the next 12 to 18 months by the FMCG sector in India.
is one such brand making its mark in the D2C space. Founded in 2018 by Bharat Sethi, Rage Coffee offers a variety of vegan and vitamin-infused instant coffee flavors. The Delhi-based brand D2C is currently present in over 2,500 outlets across India and plans to expand its offline presence 5-fold within a year by strengthening its distribution channels.
In this week 100X Entrepreneur Podcastserial entrepreneur and founder of Rage Coffee Bharat Seti talks about his entrepreneurial journey, the mistakes he made as a founder, how Rage Coffee stands out as a brand, and his future plans.
learn from mistakes
Bharat started his entrepreneurial journey in 2011-2012 when he established PosterGully, a D2C brand, which was later acquired.
After leaving PosterGully, he immediately started working on his next venture, which he says was one of the biggest mistakes he made.
Bharat recalls, “I didn’t take a break at all, because PosterGully was a great ride. I immediately started building this marketplace for architects, designers, and builders, with essentially every stakeholder in the home improvement space or home improvement space on one platform. But I realized later that not taking a day off for years was not a good thing to do.
“I think I made a lot of mistakes. When I started, we didn’t do enough research before we started a business, we didn’t know enough about the customer, we didn’t know our right to earn, basically for this product and this category. So those two years were mostly spent making mistakes and learning. So a lot of pivots.
Bharat says they experienced a lot in those 18 months, but his passion was not there and his heart was not in that category.
“A lot of the revenue was driven by B2B, so I realized it wasn’t something that would take me where I wanted to be. I’m a consumer. I understand consumer psychology and brand building. In 2017-18, I had gained a lot of visibility but I had made a lot of mistakes and there were a lot of learnings. I realized that setting a revenue target, for example, Rs 500 crore in five years, is important, but what will get me to that number is also an important aspect. And that’s how I worked, and the process was working backwards,” he adds. -he.
Building a D2C FMCG Brand
In 2017, Bharat got married, and it changed a lot of things, he says.
Bharat says, “When you have a family to support and you are pressured by a family, your appetite for risk goes down. But I also know it’s the only thing I know. I only know how to build, but creation will need time, will need failures and will need money and will need this effort. So I said to myself and my family that if they gave me three years, I would build something of a substantial scale that I would be happy about and everyone around me would be happy about. »
In 2018, Bharat began his research to launch a data-driven business. “Unlike my previous business which was driven only by passion, this time around I decided to take a data-driven approach,” he says.
Bharat started collecting and collating data by approaching several distributors, superstorers and traders among others in the market.
At the end of 2018, he concluded that he needed to create a brand that had taste, quality and delivered the caffeine kick that today’s consumers so desperately need to make their days or their cooler mornings. This is how Rage Coffee was started.
The company is now on track to achieve sales of Rs 100 crore this year and claims to have grown by 500% since its inception.
To learn more, listen to the podcast here.
Remarks:
02:02 – Introduction
02:47 – Family background and what led him to entrepreneurship?
06:35 – Conceptualizing PosterGully in 2012
11:09 – Exit PosterGully
11:50 a.m. – Powered by Zoho – Prashant Ganti explains where founders are struggling with payroll and how can they fix it?
12:59 – Mistakes and learnings from iDecorama
6:45 p.m. – Ideas for Rage Coffee
25:55 – Milestones and growth over the years