Raghav Verma's Second Innings

Raghav Verma is the cofounder of the Tiger Global funded tea cafe chain, Chaayos. It has 16 outlets across Delhi NCR and Mumbai. Chaayos has been operationally profitable at each of its outlets, within 3 months of opening up and the unit economics have been positive. However, his success with Chaayos is fueled by a failed entrepreneurial venture.

Back in 2012, he cofounded an online education startup called PrepSquare. The startup was however shut down in 2013. “There was a certain sense of naiveté with which we approached things back then. We believed that building a product would be enough, and students would come automatically. We believed the price point of INR 2000 would be a no brainer, given people paid as much as INR 2 lakh for classroom coaching. But we underestimated the time and money it would take to build a brand and get customers onboard. We realized that we were probably too early in this space,” said Raghav.

This, however, did not budge him from co-founding Chaayos with Nitin Saluja. The idea was Nitin’s. “It was a simple idea; in a chai drinking country, there should be a place to step outside your home and get a freshly made cup of chai to your liking. It was not the first time that someone had tried to start a chain with chai at the centre, but I think what we did right was to stay true to the way chai is consumed in the country. The initial response was fantastic and we have just built on it from there,” said Raghav.

His learnings from PrepSquare helped him build Chaayos – distribution of responsibilities within the team, definition of long term vision and being very clear about positive unit economics. One other major learning was to talk to many people, not only within the food space, but across categories and startups. We tried to operate in stealth mode in PrepSquare, but realized later that learning from people’s mistakes made more sense than reinventing the wheel each time. So we reached out to many people in the industry and were mentored by many of the senior people,” he added.

(taken from inc42.com)