Piyush Jha
Founders and First Breaths
The early morning drizzle of Bangalore clung to the cracked pavement of HSR Layout as Aarav Dev brushed aside the steam from his chai and stared at the blinking cursor on his MacBook screen. His co-founder, Neel Roy, sat across the room, legs tucked under him, mumbling code like mantras under his breath. The rented two-bedroom apartment doubled as their office, home, and war room. The seed of their startup—an AI-driven local commerce aggregator—was barely a sprout, but already the roots were clawing through sleepless nights, pivot pitches, and unpaid electricity bills. “We need to launch,” Aarav muttered. “Not tomorrow. Now.” Neel didn’t look up. “We still don’t have the payment gateway integration. Razorpay’s docs are buggy as hell.” Aarav stood up, running a hand through his uncombed hair. “No one gives a damn about integrations if there’s nothing to use. We need noise. We need signups.” It was their third startup idea in two years. The first one, a hyperlocal pet-care delivery app, died quietly after seven months. The second—an edtech mentorship platform—bled out during COVID when every investor suddenly fell in love with unicorns that burned brighter. This time, the idea was survival, not success.
Back in IIM Kozhikode, they were known as the “Gravity Twins”—always dragging each other back to reality after wild pitches and beer-fueled dreams. Neel, the coder with a quiet stare, carried the weight of algorithms; Aarav, the pitch-man with charm and caffeine in equal measure, danced in the spaces between angel rounds and elevator talks. But Bangalore was different. It didn’t care about GPAs, certificates, or LinkedIn endorsements. Here, ideas lived and died in coffee shops and coworking spaces. Success smelled like sweat, failure like stagnancy.
Aarav refreshed his inbox. No reply from Shalini yet. She was their only hope—an early-stage investor who had shown lukewarm interest in their pre-alpha deck. “If she doesn’t respond by Monday, we’ll run out of cash by next weekend,” he said aloud. Neel finally looked up. “So what do you want to do? Hard pivot again?” Aarav frowned. “No. We roll the dice. Beta launch with ten merchants from Koramangala. I’ll get them onboard. You finish the backend.” “In three days?” “In three sleepless days.” Neel nodded once, not out of confidence, but because he’d forgotten what sleep felt like anyway.
By afternoon, Aarav was riding a rented bike through the traffic chaos of Silk Board, a grimace etched on his face as he weaved through buses and food delivery boys. Each café and kirana shop he passed was a potential user, a potential testimonial, a potential case study that could one day convince a bored VC in Indiranagar to drop a cheque. He stopped outside a rundown general store—”Suri Mart”—and walked in, ducking under a wire strung with packets of Maggi. “I’m building something that can get you ten more customers a day without you paying a paisa upfront,” he began. Suri Uncle, a grizzled man with paan-stained lips, squinted at him. “Another app?” “No, sir. A relationship. Between you and your next-door customers. WhatsApp-based, no commissions, just visibility.” The man chuckled. “Sounds like love marriage. Full of risk, no guarantee.” Aarav smiled. “But sometimes, love marriages work out great.” He left twenty minutes later with a handshake and a promise—Suri Mart was onboarded.
By evening, five merchants had signed up. Aarav’s shirt was soaked, his throat dry, and his phone’s battery at 3%, but a rush of triumph surged in his chest. This was what they lived for. Not pitch decks, not CAC metrics, but the raw thrill of a maybe turning into a yes.
Meanwhile, Neel was breaking under the pressure of syntax errors and recursive bugs. He hadn’t spoken to his parents in days, hadn’t eaten real food since Wednesday, and hadn’t been paid since January. He stared at the database schema, fingers shaking. “One wrong commit and we’re back to square zero,” he whispered. But somewhere, in that chaos, something clicked. The payment gateway hummed to life. The login screen stopped crashing. The dashboard loaded. He messaged Aarav: “Launchable. Barely. But launchable.”
That night, they sat on the terrace of their building, facing the haze-covered skyline, laptops closed, plates of idli on their laps. “You think this is the one?” Neel asked. Aarav chewed thoughtfully. “I think this is the only one.” “Why?” “Because we’ve run out of backup plans.” They laughed—short, tired laughs that knew too much about failure. Aarav pulled out his phone, opened Twitter, and typed: “After two dead startups and one working prototype, we’re launching #LocalSpark today. If you live in Bangalore and want to support two mad builders, try us out. RTs are love.”
He hesitated for a second. Then tapped “Tweet.” The message flew into the digital ether.
Somewhere, someone would read it. Somewhere, the fire would catch. Or maybe not. But they were already burning.
The First Spark
The next morning began like every other—humid, hopeful, and half-charged. Aarav woke up to the screech of crows and the faint buzzing of Neel’s electric trimmer in the bathroom. The tweet he posted last night had gotten a modest 47 likes and 13 retweets. Not viral. But not dead either. Among the retweets was one from Shalini Mehta.
His heart skipped a beat.
She hadn’t replied to his emails in weeks. But here she was, quote-tweeting: “Persistence is underrated. Keep an eye on these guys. #LocalSpark”
It wasn’t a commitment. It wasn’t even a DM. But in the startup world, it was a spark—and sometimes, that was all you needed to start a fire.
Aarav walked into the hall, where Neel was already buried in lines of code, his third cup of filter coffee in hand. The floor was littered with power banks, ethernet cables, and yesterday’s dinner boxes. Aarav waved the phone in front of him. “She saw us.” Neel didn’t respond. He was staring intently at the console screen. Aarav waited. “Shalini Mehta quote-tweeted us.” Still no response. Aarav leaned closer and squinted at the screen.
“Why are there 150 new registrations overnight?” he asked slowly.
Neel turned toward him, finally registering the excitement on Aarav’s face. “I don’t know,” he said. “When I went to sleep, we had eleven. Now it’s 161.”
Aarav checked the analytics dashboard. The tweet had been picked up by a couple of Bangalore tech newsletters. A blog post titled “Ten Startups to Watch in 2025” had somehow included LocalSpark at #9. There were email inquiries from small businesses in Jayanagar, Indiranagar, and even Whitefield.
“Shit,” Aarav whispered. “We’re not ready.”
“No,” Neel agreed. “We’re very much not ready.”
The servers they were using were shared and cheap. Their database wasn’t built for scale. The user interface still had placeholders with ‘Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet’ in the merchant bios. They didn’t even have a privacy policy page.
And yet, it had begun.
By 10 a.m., the inbox was a chaos of pings. Aarav spent hours replying to merchant queries, offering onboarding support, scheduling calls. Neel, meanwhile, set up a makeshift Kanban board with Post-its on the fridge. Yellow meant bug. Red meant crash. Green meant fixed. There were too few green ones.
“We need help,” Neel said bluntly.
“From where?”
“Hire someone. Even if it’s just on contract.”
“With what money?”
Neel didn’t answer. The silence lingered. Then Aarav got up, walked to his desk, and pulled out the emergency folder from the drawer. Inside was a crumpled cheque leaf, a scan of their joint agreement, and his mother’s gold chain.
“You’re not serious,” Neel said.
“I am,” Aarav replied. “Pawn shop near BTM. They don’t ask too many questions.”
Neel looked at the chain, then at his friend. “She’ll kill you.”
“She already thinks I’m unemployed and surviving on Maggi. I think the gold chain is the least of her worries.”
Neel chuckled, but it came out more like a sigh. “I’ll call Dhananjay. He owes me a favor. Maybe he can spare some weekend hours.”
By late afternoon, they had two interns from a local engineering college helping them with testing. Dhananjay, a DevOps freelancer, agreed to patch their AWS backend for free in exchange for some future equity. Aarav wrote up a formal contractor agreement using a template he found online. None of it was ideal. None of it would hold up in court. But it would hold them for now.
They renamed their Trello board “Launch or Die.”
That night, Aarav made another field trip, this time to Domlur, where a popular South Indian eatery, Mani’s Café, had expressed interest. He pitched the platform with every bit of energy he had left.
The manager, a stout man in his 50s, listened with arms crossed. “So you’re telling me I’ll get customers through WhatsApp?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aarav replied. “With zero upfront cost. We make money only when you do.”
“What’s your tech stack?”
Aarav blinked. “Excuse me?”
“I’m an ex-Infosys guy,” the man said with a smirk. “Built SAP integrations for twelve years.”
Aarav relaxed. “Node backend, MongoDB. Simple APIs. We’re migrating from Firebase to AWS.”
The man smiled. “Good. You’ve got twenty-four hours to prove you can get me fifteen orders.”
Aarav grinned. “Done.”
Back at the flat, Neel was trying to fix a crashing issue on Android. The app kept freezing during merchant selection.
Aarav entered and flopped onto the floor, exhausted. “He gave us twenty-four hours.”
“Then we’ve got twenty-three left.”
They stayed up again. Power nap schedules were drawn up. Aarav went live on Instagram, giving a behind-the-scenes glimpse into their tiny war room. Neel posted on Reddit. One of the interns reached out to a micro-influencer food blogger who agreed to post about them for free idlis.
The orders began to trickle in the next morning. Three. Then five. Then ten. By the time Mani’s Café opened for lunch, they had already crossed the target.
Aarav called the manager. “Fifteen orders, as promised.”
The man laughed. “I didn’t think you’d make it. Fine. I’ll tell my cousin in Malleshwaram to sign up too.”
They had done it. A small win, but real. Earned. Not borrowed. Not bluffed.
That night, Aarav looked at Neel as they sat in silence on the terrace again, this time with actual biryani instead of leftover upma.
“You think we’ll make it?” he asked.
Neel didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “We just did.”
Signals and Silence
For two whole days, the LocalSpark dashboard pulsed with fresh user data—metrics they once had to fake for pitch decks were now real. Daily Active Users crossed 400. Bounce rates dropped to under 30%. Six new merchant inquiries came in from areas they hadn’t even reached—Yelahanka, Sarjapur, even a small bookstore in JP Nagar that wanted to list rare Kannada titles.
And then, like a match burnt out too soon, everything slowed.
No new users signed up that Wednesday morning. The analytics graph froze like a heartbeat monitor flatlining. The Instagram reach stalled. Neel double-checked the server—no downtime. Aarav checked the emails—no spam filter issues. For a moment, the silence in the room was louder than traffic outside.
“What the hell is happening?” Aarav muttered, refreshing the backend page for the fifteenth time.
Neel glanced up. “Maybe we got featured on a slow news cycle. People got curious, clicked. Now they’re gone.”
“But the product works. The merchants are happy. We delivered orders!”
“That’s not how virality works,” Neel said. “It’s never about quality. It’s about momentum. Algorithms are emotionless gods.”
Aarav rubbed his face. “We need a new push. Something loud.”
But he knew the truth. The last two weeks had been fueled by adrenaline, favors, and luck. They were out of all three. The money from pawning the chain was nearly gone—most of it had gone into AWS credits and the freelance payments. The interns had classes starting again. Dhananjay was becoming harder to reach. And Shalini Mehta still hadn’t replied to his follow-up messages.
That night, Neel cooked instant khichdi while Aarav stared at a blank Google Doc titled “Series A Strategy.”
“I don’t even know what to write anymore,” he said.
“Then don’t,” Neel replied. “Let’s just survive another week.”
But survival wasn’t enough. Aarav could feel it. Startups didn’t die with bangs. They starved quietly. One unread email at a time. One unpaid electricity bill at a time.
The following day, Aarav left the house early. He didn’t tell Neel where he was going.
He had an address in Indiranagar scribbled in his notebook. A café that hosted weekly pitch meetups. The kind of place where hopefuls with sharp haircuts and recycled slogans tried to impress disinterested angels who sipped cold brews and checked their Apple Watches.
The event had already started. A young woman was pitching a menstrual health tracker powered by ML. The audience clapped politely. Aarav scanned the room. And there she was—Shalini Mehta, sitting by the window, notebook open, writing something with a purple pen.
He waited until the break.
“Shalini?” he said, approaching cautiously. “Aarav Dev. LocalSpark.”
She looked up. Her eyes were unreadable. “Oh. Hi. I saw your post. That tweet got good traction.”
“I was hoping to connect,” he said. “We’ve onboarded over twenty-five merchants, crossed 600 MAUs, all in two weeks. We’re scrappy, but it’s working. I sent you—”
“I saw your deck,” she interrupted.
Aarav blinked.
She closed her notebook slowly. “You’re smart, Aarav. And clearly relentless. But I need to be honest. There’s no moat.”
“No moat?”
“No defensibility. Anyone can build a local merchant app. Swiggy could roll this out in a weekend if they cared. You don’t have exclusivity, IP, or data advantage.”
“But we have users. Happy users. Organic growth.”
“That’s great for now. But if the model is too easily replicable, I can’t invest.”
Aarav felt something sink in his stomach. “We’re not trying to be the next Swiggy. We’re solving for the long tail—hyperlocal visibility for the under-digitized.”
She smiled gently. “And maybe someone else will solve it better, later. Or you’ll pivot and find your true product-market fit. But not with my money.”
There it was. The clean, corporate No. It didn’t shout. It didn’t insult. It just ended things, decisively.
Aarav walked out of the café without finishing his coffee.
That night, back in the apartment, he didn’t tell Neel. Instead, he opened the fridge, pulled out a bottle of cold water, and stared at their wall of Post-its.
Neel walked in, holding a phone. “Aarav. You’re going to want to hear this.”
Aarav raised an eyebrow.
“Remember Sudhir, the merchant in RT Nagar? He posted about us on his Facebook group for small business owners. Said his footfall increased 2x since joining. That post got shared across some B2B WhatsApp circles. We’ve got a demo request from the Bangalore Retail Federation.”
Aarav’s breath caught. “The BRF?”
Neel nodded. “They’re asking if we can do a private demo next Monday. Ten retailers. All high-volume stores.”
Aarav sat down slowly. “That could change everything.”
“If it goes well.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
Neel smiled wryly. “Then we try again. Like we always do.”
They sat in silence. Outside, the city roared on—traffic, monsoon, time. Inside, the quiet returned, but this time it held something more than dread.
It held possibility.
Aarav looked up at Neel. “Let’s build something they can’t ignore.”
Neel raised his water bottle. “To building.”
They clinked bottles like fragile toasts.
The Demo Gamble
Monday arrived cloaked in a heavy grey drizzle. The kind of Bangalore morning that made you want to pull a blanket over your head and pretend the world didn’t exist. But for Aarav and Neel, it was the day they’d gambled everything on—a private demo with ten high-volume retail store owners arranged by the Bangalore Retail Federation. If even three of them signed up, it could validate everything they’d built. If none did, well… neither of them was ready to think about that.
Neel triple-checked the build before they left. Aarav had printed handouts, made a demo video, and even dry-cleaned his only blazer. They couldn’t afford Uber, so they booked an auto. On the way, Aarav sat nervously with his laptop bag on his lap, eyes fixed on the raindrops sliding down the cracked plastic window.
“You good?” Neel asked.
“No,” Aarav muttered. “You?”
“I stopped feeling emotions sometime last week.”
They reached the BRF office in Basavanagudi—a low-rise building that looked like it hadn’t been painted since the 90s. Inside, however, it was bustling. Well-dressed middle-aged store owners were sipping tea and murmuring to each other in Kannada, Tamil, and clipped English. Aarav handed out pamphlets. Neel set up the HDMI cable.
At exactly 11:05 AM, the secretary called them in.
The conference room was modest—twelve chairs, a projector, and an old wall clock ticking just a bit too loudly. Aarav stood at the front, palms sweaty, while Neel sat to the side near the laptop, ready to jump in if anything broke.
“Good morning, everyone. I’m Aarav, and this is Neel. We’re the co-founders of LocalSpark.”
No one replied. A man coughed.
Aarav clicked to the first slide.
“We’re building a discovery engine for Bangalore’s local stores. Think of it as a WhatsApp-first storefront where your neighborhood customers can find your best-selling items, chat, and even place orders without installing an app.”
Still silence.
Aarav pushed on. “We’ve already onboarded over 30 stores across five neighborhoods. Here’s what Sudhir from RT Nagar had to say—”
He hit play on the testimonial video. The small screen flickered. The audio was tinny. Still, Sudhir’s enthusiastic face filled the room.
“They helped my son make a WhatsApp menu. My regulars started sharing it in their building groups. I got twelve new orders in two days!”
A few murmurs broke out among the retailers. Someone leaned forward.
Aarav sensed an opening.
“This isn’t an app that you have to learn. It’s not a monthly subscription. It’s not a marketplace that takes 20% of your profits. It’s you, in control. Your customers, your data. We’re just the enabler.”
Now heads were nodding.
Neel switched the screen to a live dashboard, showing a real-time ping from a kirana store in Koramangala.
“You see that?” Aarav said. “That’s a customer who just asked for two packets of Amul butter through the system.”
A man with a thick moustache raised a hand. “How long does setup take?”
“Fifteen minutes,” Aarav replied. “We help you do it right away. No coding. Just a few photos, a price list, and a smartphone.”
Another man, in a crisp white shirt, asked, “What if someone wants to pay online?”
“We’ve integrated Razorpay,” Neel said quickly. “But most customers prefer cash or UPI. We track it all.”
More nods. Even the room’s vibe was shifting. Curious glances were turning into interested questions.
“Is it multilingual?” another voice asked.
“Right now, it supports English, Hindi, and Kannada,” Neel said. “We can add more based on demand.”
By the time the clock struck noon, Aarav had stopped sweating. The final slide flashed: ‘Bring your store online without losing your soul.’
The secretary walked in and said, “Okay, gentlemen, we’ll be in touch.”
The duo packed up in silence. Outside, they waited under a leaky bus stop as the clouds finally gave way to sunlight.
“So?” Neel asked.
“No idea,” Aarav replied. “They didn’t say much.”
“Better than saying no.”
They rode back in silence, only occasionally checking their phones. No missed calls. No emails. No signs. Bangalore shimmered around them—auto horns, masala dosa smells, the blur of optimism and exhaustion.
At 4:37 PM, the email came.
Subject: Feedback and Next Steps – BRF Meeting
Aarav opened it while pacing their living room. Neel stood behind him, arms crossed.
“Three stores want onboarding this week,” Aarav said slowly, reading aloud. “Two want private demos. And one—” He stopped.
“One what?”
“One of them is interested in a pilot project across all six of their city outlets.”
Neel blinked. “You mean like a chain?”
Aarav nodded. “Like a chain.”
They didn’t jump. They didn’t cheer. They just stood there, breathless, like climbers who had seen the peak in the distance but still had cliffs to scale.
But for the first time, they believed the climb was possible.
Code and Consequences
By Tuesday, the apartment no longer felt like a home. It had transformed—Post-it walls, loose wires on the floor, empty Red Bull cans on every surface, and a strange smell of burnt toast that no one remembered making. Neel sat cross-legged on the floor in front of three screens, hair in chaos, mumbling into his headset. Aarav paced back and forth, phone in hand, toggling between Zoom calls with the BRF merchants and cold outreach to new retail groups.
They had a real shot now. That chain of six outlets—Chaya Stores—was the kind of client that made other clients take you seriously. Chaya was family-run, legacy-rich, and known for its loyal customer base across South Bangalore. If they liked the product, others would follow. But with that possibility came the weight of everything that could go wrong.
“Their team wants multi-user access for store managers,” Aarav said.
“I’m on it,” Neel replied without looking up.
“And inventory sync across branches.”
“I know.”
“And a dashboard with analytics.”
“I KNOW!”
Aarav paused. Neel never snapped. But this was different. They were no longer hacking together a college project. Expectations had arrived, and with them, pressure.
“You’ve been at this 22 hours straight,” Aarav said gently. “Take a nap.”
Neel shook his head. “If I sleep, I’ll lose the logic thread. The middleware’s acting up. I need to rewrite it before I forget what the bug even is.”
Aarav didn’t push. Instead, he microwaved two cups of leftover rice, handed one to Neel, and sat beside him. Silence stretched between them.
“You think we’re building something real?” Aarav asked.
Neel chewed and nodded. “Feels more real than anything else I’ve done.”
That night, Chaya Stores’ operations manager called for a live walkthrough. Aarav led the call while Neel pushed fixes on the fly. The client was impressed—mostly. At the end of the call, he said, “The product is raw. But the energy is good. Let’s try a two-week pilot. If we like it, we’ll pay to expand.”
Aarav almost said thank you three times but settled for a confident, “We won’t let you down.”
After the call, he collapsed on the floor with a sigh. “It’s happening.”
Neel stood quietly near the window. “Yeah. It is.”
But with success came new challenges. Their basic Razorpay integration couldn’t handle high-volume transactions. Merchant data syncing failed if more than two stores updated stock simultaneously. And then the worst happened.
Friday morning, the system crashed.
A push from Neel’s end during an update caused a loop that brought down the entire API layer. Merchants couldn’t log in. Orders disappeared. The admin panel showed garbage data. Chaya’s manager called twice. Then once more. Then sent a message that simply read, “This is not acceptable. We’re pausing the pilot until the issues are resolved.”
Neel’s face turned blank when he read it. He didn’t speak. Just turned back to the screen and began typing.
Aarav called the manager immediately, apologized profusely, promised a full fix by Monday.
They worked for 36 hours straight. Neel rewrote the backend architecture from scratch, using every trick he’d learned in five years of competitive coding. Aarav created backup WhatsApp flows for merchants to handle order confirmations manually in the meantime. They pushed out three emergency updates in 12 hours. The interns tested the platform across ten dummy stores. Finally, on Sunday morning, Neel leaned back and said, “It’s stable.”
Aarav tested it one last time. Every click responded. Every function worked. He exhaled slowly. “Now we just wait.”
The Chaya team reactivated the pilot on Monday without fanfare. No emails, no thanks. But the orders started appearing again. The dashboard came back to life.
“We survived,” Aarav said quietly.
“For now,” Neel replied.
They both knew survival wasn’t a one-time thing. Startups didn’t crash and burn in a single day—they died from a thousand small leaks. One more bug. One lost client. One forgotten login. And so, even while they celebrated, they began thinking about the next leak.
That night, Aarav stared at their dwindling bank account. They had twenty-four days of runway left. Enough for rent, food, and two more AWS bills. After that, unless they raised funding or started charging merchants, they were done.
“I’m calling Shalini again,” he said.
Neel shrugged. “Won’t hurt.”
This time, she picked up.
“Aarav,” she said flatly.
“Quick update,” he began. “We onboarded Chaya Stores. The crash happened, yes, but we fixed it in 36 hours. They reactivated. We’re stable.”
There was a pause.
“I respect the hustle,” she said. “But the core concern remains. Without a monetization model, this is still a feature, not a business.”
“We’re rolling out a commission-free freemium plan next week. Basic listings stay free. Analytics, inventory sync, and payment modules go premium.”
Shalini was quiet again.
“Send me the revised deck,” she said. “I’ll take a look.”
Aarav’s hand trembled as he ended the call.
He turned to Neel, grinning.
“She didn’t say no.”
Neel looked up. “Then we’ve still got a shot.”
The Freemium Line
The morning sun filtered through the grills of their window, slicing the room into harsh geometric shadows. The light touched Aarav’s laptop screen just as he finished typing the subject line: “Revised Pitch Deck – LocalSpark (May 2025)”. His finger hovered over the send button. He’d read and rewritten the deck five times since the call with Shalini. He’d added graphs, removed jargon, even used a serif font to make it look more “investor serious.” But deep down, he knew what mattered wasn’t the font or the slides—it was the promise.
He hit send.
Neel, meanwhile, was immersed in refactoring the pricing logic. The freemium plan had to be airtight. It couldn’t feel like a bait-and-switch. It had to offer real value for free, and real reasons to upgrade.
“Basic plan stays zero forever,” Aarav had said during their late-night discussion.
“Forever’s a long time,” Neel replied.
“But if we don’t earn trust, we won’t earn revenue.”
They settled on three tiers: Basic (free, limited to 1 store and 50 transactions/month), Pro (₹399/month), and Plus (₹999/month, multi-store with analytics). They debated the numbers for hours, finally deciding that early subscribers would get a lifetime discount. Aarav’s job was now to convince merchants it was worth paying. Neel’s job was to make sure they didn’t regret it.
They updated their website, created onboarding flow screens, and pushed the upgrade modal inside the merchant dashboard.
The reaction came fast.
By Thursday evening, 17 merchants had already upgraded to the Pro tier.
“Seventeen,” Aarav whispered. “That’s nearly ₹7,000 in recurring monthly revenue.”
“It’s not rent money,” Neel said, “but it’s proof. Proof that someone thinks we’re worth paying for.”
Then came the call they didn’t expect.
“Hi, I’m Rakesh Nambiar. I run a POS software company in Chennai. Heard about LocalSpark from a BRF board member. We’re interested in a partnership.”
Aarav nearly dropped the phone.
Rakesh continued, “We’ve got a network of 1,200 small retailers. If your product plays well with our POS, we could explore integration. Maybe even a bundled offering.”
“Let’s talk,” Aarav said instantly.
Two hours later, they were on a video call. Rakesh was slick—trimmed beard, whiteboard in the background, and a laminated user journey pinned to the wall. His tone was calm but calculated. “We’re not looking to acquire,” he clarified. “But a strategic collaboration. API-level integration. Shared revenue on premium users.”
Neel asked the important questions—data security, sandbox access, sync latency. Aarav asked the bigger ones—timeline, terms, equity implications.
By the end of the call, Rakesh smiled and said, “You boys remind me of myself ten years ago. Hungry. Scrappy. Maybe even stupidly optimistic.”
“Still stupid,” Neel muttered after the call ended.
But neither could deny it: momentum was back.
Over the next week, their user base grew 30%. Word-of-mouth referrals became their top acquisition channel. A tech blogger wrote a piece titled “The Bangalore Boys Giving Swiggy a Headache.” Investors started replying to Aarav’s emails—not all with interest, but with respect.
And finally, Shalini responded.
“This is a strong turnaround. Your monetization is still early, but the traction is undeniable. I’d like to offer ₹30 lakh for 8% equity. Convertible SAFE. Terms attached.”
Aarav stared at the email for a full minute before forwarding it to Neel.
“She bit,” Aarav said.
Neel raised an eyebrow. “Too low?”
“It’s a lifeline,” Aarav said. “If we negotiate too hard, we’ll lose the rope.”
They called her that evening. Negotiations were polite but firm. Shalini wouldn’t budge on equity but offered to connect them with two other angels if they accepted the SAFE as-is. It wasn’t ideal. But it was fair. And it was real.
They took it.
The money landed in their account within a week.
The first thing they did was pay off Dhananjay.
Then they moved out of the crumbling apartment and rented a two-room office in Koramangala.
It had peeling walls, a shaky Wi-Fi connection, and an army of ants living behind the microwave.
But it had a front door with a sign.
LocalSpark Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
On their first day in the new office, Aarav wrote on the whiteboard: “Real companies start with real chaos.”
Neel added underneath: “And real rent.”
They both stood back and smiled.
LocalSpark was still fragile. Still one bug, one refund, one angry tweet away from disaster.
But it was no longer just an idea.
It was a company.
Office Warming and Firefighting
The first day in the new Koramangala office felt surreal. Not because it was fancy—it wasn’t. The walls were stained from old posters, the floor tiles uneven, and the AC dripped with a wheeze every hour. But it was theirs. After two years of borrowed desks, rented corners, and late-night café huddles, LocalSpark had a nameplate and a lock of its own.
They brought in two second-hand desks, three bean bags, and a whiteboard. Neel stuck a Post-it on the router: “Don’t Touch Unless It’s Dead.” Aarav scribbled their new motto under the whiteboard marker stains: “We spark local. Daily.”
On Day 2, they hired their first full-time employee—Anjali R, a recent design graduate who had cold-emailed them saying, “Your UI hurts my soul. Hire me.” They laughed, then gave her a desk. On Day 3, they interviewed their first intern cohort—four college kids eager to learn everything from wireframes to WhatsApp API structures. On Day 4, Neel created a Slack channel named #war-room, and by the end of Day 5, they had their first full sprint calendar taped above the coffee machine.
It was chaos. Beautiful, buzzing chaos.
But success is a strange creature. The moment you make peace with it, it starts testing you.
On a humid Friday afternoon, Aarav received an email from a Chaya Store franchise in Banaswadi. Subject line: “URGENT—CUSTOMER DATA BREACH?”
He froze.
The email explained that a customer had received another person’s invoice with phone number and address attached. Just one order. But one too many.
“Neel,” Aarav said, voice clipped, “we have a leak.”
Neel didn’t even blink. He’d sensed it. Their user table was fine, but the cache layer on their order tracking feature was buggy—occasionally pulling the wrong JSON data in bulk-update scenarios. The exact scenario he’d flagged last week but hadn’t had time to fix.
Aarav called the merchant personally, apologized, offered free dashboard credit. “It won’t happen again,” he said.
Then they shut the feature down.
For three hours, they operated without live order tracking. Merchants called. Customers complained. Neel patched while Aarav drafted a temporary FAQ to deflect the panic.
By midnight, it was fixed.
And by morning, it was forgotten.
But for them, it wasn’t.
“I can’t sleep,” Aarav said that night, slumped on the office couch.
“You never sleep,” Neel replied from his floor mattress.
“We’re sitting on a house of cards.”
“All early-stage startups are,” Neel said. “The difference is—some learn fast enough to reinforce the walls before the wind hits again.”
Aarav nodded, half-smiling. “How’d you get so wise?”
“I read the onboarding notes on Slack. Anjali writes like a monk.”
The next week, they began drafting their first Privacy Policy and Terms of Service—proper ones, reviewed by a freelance lawyer. Anjali redesigned the dashboard UI. Neel rewrote the caching logic. Aarav reached out to more retail federations and even got a response from a group in Pune. The LocalSpark engine, once a humble script running on Firebase, was now a train rumbling forward—still wobbly, but moving.
They hit 1,000 monthly active users by the third week of the month.
The day the numbers hit four digits, they ordered biryani and danced on the office balcony, shouting out to the noisy traffic below like two maniacs who’d somehow convinced the universe to play along.
And yet, even amid the celebration, Aarav sat Neel down and said, “We need to start thinking about scale.”
“Not now,” Neel said. “We just got stable.”
“That’s exactly why. We have one shot to go from tiny and cool to big and serious. If we wait till we break again, we won’t have the bandwidth to rebuild.”
Neel leaned back. “You want to raise again?”
“Maybe. But not yet. First, we go deeper in Bangalore. We show that our engine works across neighborhoods, across customer types. Then, and only then, we pitch to go national.”
Neel considered this. “Alright. What’s the plan?”
“Two words,” Aarav said. “Hyperlocal evangelism.”
“Is that even a thing?”
“It is now.”
They designed a simple program. Merchants who referred five other businesses would get a free Pro upgrade for three months. Customers who shared store links on their building WhatsApp groups would get digital coupons. They called it Spark Circles.
It worked.
By the end of that month, they were in 18 neighborhoods across Bangalore.
Every new order wasn’t just revenue. It was a message: We see you. We support you. We spark you.
Aarav stood one night at the balcony again, phone in hand, refreshing the dashboard as green pings flickered on the map of Bangalore. From Indiranagar to Basavanagudi to Kammanahalli. Each dot, a tiny rebellion against the idea that tech belonged only to the giants.
He turned to Neel, who was pouring instant coffee over cold milk.
“We’re becoming something,” Aarav said softly.
Neel nodded. “Let’s just hope we become it fast enough.”
Spark Circles and Smoke Signals
October arrived with misty Bangalore mornings and the distant thud of Diwali firecrackers being tested prematurely by impatient kids. LocalSpark’s tiny two-room office had become a hive of chatter and codes, chai cups and whiteboard drawings of customer journeys that looked more like art therapy than UX design.
Spark Circles had exceeded every expectation.
Word of mouth had exploded in pockets where Aarav had never stepped foot. A grocery store in Madiwala saw a 23% sales increase just by sharing their WhatsApp link in the neighboring apartment complex. A pharmacist in BTM Layout sent them a hand-written thank-you note saying he hadn’t imagined digital orders were even meant for people like him.
They were building more than a platform—they were creating community.
Every ping on their merchant dashboard felt like a lightbulb being turned on somewhere in the city.
But with growth came noise.
Anjali flagged a sudden spike in merchant complaints on a Tuesday morning. Neel pulled up the support dashboard and saw nearly 17 identical queries.
The order confirmation messages weren’t triggering.
That meant customers were placing orders, but not receiving the confirmation prompt. A small bug, but for a hyperlocal, WhatsApp-based product, it was a deal-breaker.
Neel dove into logs. “Somehow the new message scheduler isn’t playing well with the delay buffer we introduced last sprint.”
“So, fix it,” Aarav said.
“I will,” Neel snapped, not out of anger, but exhaustion. His right eye was twitching—he hadn’t slept well in days.
Anjali walked over. “We should consider rotating deployments through staging longer. We’re testing directly on prod too often.”
“We don’t have the manpower for two-week staging cycles,” Aarav said.
“Then maybe we hire better interns,” she replied flatly.
Silence.
She walked away before anyone could respond.
That afternoon, Aarav took her for a walk around the block. The drizzle had softened the tar and the scent of wet earth reminded him of every monsoon he’d spent trying to prove something.
“I know things are messy,” he said. “But we’re trying.”
She didn’t look at him. “Trying isn’t the same as listening.”
“What haven’t I listened to?”
“The fact that we’re growing like a firecracker rocket, and treating it like a campfire. We need processes. Teams. Roles. Not just hope and hustle.”
Aarav sighed. “You’re right.”
She stopped walking and turned. “Then let me own something. Officially. Product design. User experience. Testing cycles. I don’t want to just give feedback—I want to be responsible.”
Aarav smiled. “You’re promoted.”
“To what?”
“Product Head.”
Anjali blinked. Then nodded once. “Cool. I’ll need two interns and a Figma Pro license.”
Back at the office, Neel had resolved the scheduler bug. They pushed a hotfix and re-ran the notification queue. Orders resumed. The green pings returned to the dashboard like fireflies after a power outage.
But the tension lingered.
That night, Aarav sat alone, staring at their latest numbers. 3,500+ monthly active users. 290 merchants. 71 paying Pro subscribers. MRR—just over ₹40,000.
Not bad. But not enough.
Not to raise a big round. Not to scale outside Bangalore. Not yet.
He opened his notebook and made a list:
Product: Stable (for now)
People: Fragile but growing
Money: Tight
Vision: Strong
Fear: Constant
He closed it, leaned back, and wondered what the next leak would be.
The answer came the next morning.
A merchant from JP Nagar called. Furious. His storefront had vanished from the dashboard.
Neel pulled up logs. “His account was flagged by the WhatsApp Business API. Possibly due to too many outbound messages in a short time. Auto-suspension.”
“So… it’s our fault?”
“No,” Neel said. “It’s Meta’s fault. But yes, it’s our problem.”
They spent the entire day documenting mitigation protocols. Throttling messages. Educating merchants. Creating backup order forms. Aarav even drafted a one-pager titled “What to Do When WhatsApp Hates You”.
The deeper they went into their own ecosystem, the more they realized how dependent they were on platforms they didn’t control. WhatsApp, Razorpay, Google Maps APIs. Their spark could only burn as long as those wicks stayed lit.
That night, they called a team meeting. No slides. Just a circle on bean bags.
“We’ve been sprinting,” Aarav said. “Now it’s time to plan our next marathon.”
They discussed version 2.0—an independent merchant dashboard app, fallback SMS channels, better uptime monitoring, more localized UI elements.
Anjali suggested they start building for voice. “Half the merchants prefer calling over tapping. What if the app could talk back?”
Neel raised an eyebrow. “Voice assistant?”
“Basic Hindi and Kannada prompts. Guided flows. Even IVR if needed.”
The room buzzed.
For the first time in weeks, they weren’t fixing. They were dreaming again.
As the rain returned outside and thunder rolled over Bangalore’s blinking skyline, Aarav looked around and saw not a startup barely hanging on—but a team leaning forward, eyes open, hungry.
This wasn’t just a spark anymore.
It was a fire.
Between Screens and Streets
By mid-November, Bangalore had turned gold. Gulmohar leaves scattered the footpaths like lazy blessings. Diwali had passed, but the city still shimmered with leftover lights. Inside LocalSpark’s small office, Aarav watched two things flicker: the fairy lights Anjali had taped above the whiteboard, and the analytics dashboard—both equally unpredictable.
The past two weeks had been a mix of silent wins and loud doubts.
Their voice-guided prototype—nicknamed “Suno”—was picking up traction. Merchants loved the idea of navigating their storefront via basic Hindi commands. Anjali had stitched together a working flow using open-source voice libraries, and Neel had somehow made it all fit into their clunky backend.
But tech wasn’t the problem anymore.
Perception was.
“We’re getting called a ‘neighborhood tool,’ not a real company,” Aarav said, eyes scanning a VC blog that subtly mocked startups solving “hyperlocal hobbies.”
Neel looked up from his laptop. “So?”
“So, we’re being dismissed.”
“By people who’ve never been to Shivajinagar or stood in line at a ration store. Let them dismiss.”
Aarav sighed. “Still stings.”
But he knew Neel was right.
The day they stopped solving for real shopkeepers and started chasing validation, LocalSpark would lose its soul.
And yet, the business side demanded polish.
To scale beyond Bangalore, they needed stronger systems, better outreach, and yes—more money.
The Shalini Mehta SAFE fund had nearly run dry. Their revenue was crawling, not sprinting. They could afford rent and salaries, but not expansion. Not yet.
So Aarav made a decision he didn’t like, but couldn’t avoid.
He reached out to a firm he once swore he never would—Rising Tide Capital, an aggressive VC group that had a reputation for owning founders.
He filled out their cold intake form. Pitched the metrics. Downplayed the chaos. And waited.
Meanwhile, Neel rolled out Suno to a pilot group of 20 merchants.
Initial feedback was promising. “My wife doesn’t even need to touch the screen anymore,” one said. “She just says the product name, and it gets added.”
But with the praise came the inevitable edge case.
A barber shop in Banashankari used Suno to list its services. Somehow, due to accent confusion, the voice flow mistook “cut and style” for “cart and tile” and merged the shop’s listings with a hardware store. The result was a surreal storefront offering both men’s grooming and ceramic flooring.
The glitch went viral on a local meme page.
Aarav wanted to be angry. Instead, he laughed. Then he wrote a post explaining the error, tagged the barber shop, and turned the whole thing into a customer spotlight titled: “From Blades to Bricks – When Tech Gets Too Creative.”
The post blew up.
Followers doubled. Merchants commented with laughing emojis and support.
Aarav messaged Neel: “We just went viral because of a bug. Again.”
Neel replied: “As long as they remember the name.”
Two days later, Rising Tide Capital responded.
They wanted a meeting.
Aarav didn’t tell the team right away. He wasn’t sure how he felt. RTC was big. But they were also known for control—board seats, clause traps, performance pressure. Still, they had scale. They could help LocalSpark go pan-India in months.
He took the meeting alone.
The partner, Amrita Gulati, was sharp, fast-talking, and deeply well-informed.
“We like what you’re doing,” she said. “But we’re not just here to give money. We invest in systems. In structure.”
Aarav nodded.
“We’ll offer ₹2 crore for 15%, plus performance-linked tranches.”
“That’s steep,” Aarav said carefully.
“You’re a spark,” Amrita said, smiling. “We want to turn you into a firestorm. But we’ll hold the matchbox.”
The call ended with polite smiles and an NDA.
Back in the office, Aarav finally told Neel.
“You want my opinion?” Neel asked.
“Always.”
“We didn’t build this to get told what to do.”
“We also didn’t build this to die broke.”
Neel leaned back. “So what now?”
“We buy time,” Aarav said. “Three months. Push revenue. Revisit fundraising later.”
Neel nodded. “Then let’s stop reading VC blogs and start walking the streets again.”
So they did.
For the next two weeks, Aarav and Anjali met shopkeepers on foot—asking, listening, watching how they used the app. Neel redesigned the merchant flow to require fewer taps. Anjali created a Help Bot for customer queries. They released version 2.3, codenamed Mysuru.
And the dashboard began to blink again—slow, steady, true.
That Friday, Aarav stood on the office balcony, watching a line of street vendors pack up their stalls. Lights off. Day done.
Neel joined him, sipping lukewarm chai.
“Still worried about validation?” he asked.
“No,” Aarav said, eyes on the city. “I’m worried about velocity.”
Neel nodded. “Then let’s push.”
And from somewhere inside, they both felt it again.
Not fear. Not fatigue.
But fire.
All the Places We’re Not
December arrived like a whisper in Bangalore—dry air, shorter days, and a sense that time itself had curled up in a blanket, waiting for someone to move it along. At LocalSpark, there was no time for blankets. The team was running on coffee, stale samosas, and something more potent: belief.
They were nearing 5000 monthly active users. Spark Circles was scaling organically. The Suno voice flow had stabilized in Hindi and Kannada, and Anjali had begun testing basic Tamil for their first out-of-state pilot in Hosur. A tiny grocery chain called SaiMart had reached out from Coimbatore. Another interest pinged in from Goa.
Every time a new merchant signed up outside Bangalore, Aarav felt a strange blend of thrill and guilt.
They were growing. But not fast enough.
Revenue had crossed ₹75,000 MRR, which looked nice on a pitch deck but still meant late rent payments. The AWS bill was creeping up. The interns’ stipends were overdue. One of the monitors had begun flickering with the sort of annoying persistence that could turn a calm Neel into a muttering monk.
“We need a full-time DevOps person,” Neel said one morning, sipping cold filter coffee and tapping furiously.
“We need 2 lakh in the bank first,” Aarav replied.
They were still bootstrapped. Still fragile. Still ducking under the kind of pressure that didn’t look dramatic on social media but could eat you slowly in real life.
Aarav stared at the glass board in their office that now had more sticky notes than white space. Expansion. Monetization. Automation. Support. They were building everything, and barely holding anything.
That’s when the call came from Shalini.
“I’m introducing you to someone,” she said. “Soft-spoken, ex-Flipkart, now running a rural commerce startup. He’s been through what you’re about to go through.”
His name was Vivek Nayak.
He joined them for tea one Thursday afternoon, wearing worn jeans and carrying a laptop plastered with old hackathon stickers.
“Nice office,” he said, smiling. “Smells like effort.”
He didn’t ask to see a pitch deck. Didn’t want analytics. Instead, he asked, “What are the three things keeping you up at night?”
Aarav answered first. “Sustainability. Focus. And velocity.”
Neel added, “And not knowing if we’re building the right things.”
Vivek nodded. “Here’s a secret. No one knows. The trick is to stay in love with the problem, not the product.”
He spent three hours with them. He drew graphs on napkins. He explained why WhatsApp might always be a double-edged sword. He shared stories of missed Series A rounds, sudden pivots, accidental wins.
Before leaving, he said something that stuck with Aarav.
“Sometimes the places you’re not yet in—cities, markets, dreams—they make more noise in your head than the ones you’re already serving. Don’t let absence drown out presence.”
That night, Aarav walked to the Indiranagar chai stall they’d once pitched from. It was still there—same broken bench, same uncle who knew your order without asking.
He watched as a student paid with a QR code, a delivery guy waited on his bike, and an aunty loudly negotiated over snack prices.
This was the India they were building for.
Messy, mobile, magnificent.
Back at the office, Anjali had stayed late, designing a new onboarding screen with voice+visual support. “People remember stories more than screens,” she said. “So let’s tell them better ones.”
Neel pushed a silent update to the dashboard that showed merchants real-time heatmaps of order traffic. “Feels like power, right?” he grinned. “Like seeing your own heartbeat.”
The team clinked paper cups of chai.
On Sunday, they launched Spark Stories—a campaign that let merchants upload short audio snippets about their stores. A butcher in Hebbal recorded his grandfather’s tale. A tea vendor near Ulsoor sang a jingle he used as a child. A bookstore owner recited two lines of his favorite Sahir Ludhianvi poem.
By Tuesday, the campaign went viral.
Not because it was slick. But because it was honest.
LocalSpark wasn’t a platform anymore.
It was a voice.
Aarav wrote a late-night post on LinkedIn that simply read:
“We’re not everywhere yet. But where we are, we matter.”
The post crossed 10,000 views.
Among them, a seed fund manager from Mumbai left a comment:
“Let’s talk. You’re building something real.”
Aarav didn’t reply immediately. He closed the tab, looked around at the sleeping office, the blinking server monitor, the wall of dreams and deadlines.
He smiled.
They weren’t everywhere yet.
But they were becoming everything, somewhere.
Becoming
It was a Wednesday afternoon when the power went out.
The entire street in Koramangala 1st Block went dark—traffic lights blinked dead, ceiling fans froze mid-rotation, the buzz of office ACs gave way to the low hum of Bangalore’s midday silence. But inside LocalSpark’s tiny second-floor office, no one moved.
Neel didn’t look up from his laptop, which was still running on battery. Aarav was scribbling flow diagrams on the whiteboard in the dim light. Anjali lit a candle she’d stashed under the snack drawer months ago, and it cast their shadows wide across the walls.
“Weirdly poetic,” she said.
Neel nodded. “We’re used to building in the dark.”
They were in their final sprint of the year. The Mumbai seed fund had offered ₹1.5 crore for 10%—a cleaner, warmer term sheet than they had dared hope for. Due diligence was underway. Paperwork in progress. But there was no celebration yet. No champagne. Just checklists and checksum verifications.
They had also signed on 8 more stores in Coimbatore, 3 in Mysuru, and 1 in Guntur—marking their first step into non-Kannada-speaking regions. Spark Stories was a hit, so they translated it. Hired local volunteers to narrate. Crowdsourced audio clips from customers themselves.
LocalSpark wasn’t just growing. It was being loved.
But amid the good, came a hard truth.
They couldn’t keep running like this.
Aarav stood in front of the whiteboard and circled a number: ₹2,10,000.
“That’s our monthly cost now. Even with the seed money, we’ve got 10 months of breathing room—if we grow linearly. But the real world isn’t linear.”
Neel nodded. “Then we pivot again. Not the product. The plan.”
So they did.
They streamlined onboarding—cutting merchant setup time to 8 minutes flat. Introduced weekly learning sessions with small businesses to teach them digital best practices. Anjali led a redesign of the dashboard to reduce support tickets by 40%. Neel trained the interns to handle low-risk bug reports.
They created what they never had before: systems.
By the end of December, LocalSpark had 6,800 active users, 450 paid Pro merchants, and over 12 regional language storefronts.
But perhaps their biggest win wasn’t a number.
It was a note.
A hand-written postcard from an 82-year-old bookseller in Shivamogga.
It said:
“My daughter taught me how to check orders on your app. I didn’t know I could still learn things. Thank you for making this old man feel young.”
The team read it aloud in the war-room and passed it around in silence.
Later that evening, Aarav stood outside on the street while the power grid slowly came back to life. Tubelights flickered back on in nearby buildings. Bikes roared into movement again.
Neel walked out beside him.
“You think we’re ready?” Aarav asked.
“To grow?”
“To become the company we dreamed about.”
Neel looked at the signboard above their heads. The paint was fading. One letter was chipped.
“We’ve already become it,” he said. “We just haven’t told the world yet.”
Aarav smiled.
In a week, they’d sign the term sheet.
In a month, they’d onboard 100 more stores.
In a year, maybe they’d break even. Maybe not.
But they would still be here—building in the dark, sparking light, turning local into limitless.
Because that’s what real startups do.
They burn slowly.
And then, all at once.
END
