Failure is frowned upon in India, and it’s

Failure is frowned upon in India, and it’s worse when you are a woman. Anshul Khandelwal failed twice before she started making any money. Her current startup Upside9, a studio model for app development, has created a slew of apps that will bemonetized later this year. But before she tells us about Upside9, she narrates how her learnings from her low phase have made her a stronger entrepreneur.

After graduating from engineering college in 2006, she moved to Bangalore to work with a large IT Services firm. But entrepreneurship was always on her mind. While she was working, her friends told her about opportunities in Mathematics tutorials, if lessons could be delivered over the Internet. Anshul, who founded Upside9 in 2013, says, “I was good at Mathematics, so a friend and I decided to start a chat-based tutorial.” The company was called Epadai.com.Anshul Khandelwal, founder of Upside9, launched Karosell, an app which is a platform to sell used collectibles and accessories

Anshul decided to aggregate NCERT Math Text Books onto her site and then train students, from Classes 8 to 10, based on queries posted on the site. The website also offered one-on-one lessons, which cost Rs 250 per chapter. She created an audio file of all the formulae, which could be downloaded to any MP3 player. Anshul tied up with four schools in Bangalore and began to scale up the idea. She also created voice recordings of all chapters for students to revisit in case they had doubts about a problem. But she faced certain challenges.

“We would work in the day and start training students from 5 pm in the evening,” she said. After two years of running the business, the workload of running a startup and working in a corporate had taken its toll. The two things that she learnt here were:
When the business model works, quit your job and give your entire time to the startup
You need to build a great team

“My partner walked out in the middle of us scaling up and I could not tie in the pieces to run operations,” says Anshul. Epadai.com was shut down in 2009. But the amount invested in the company was less than Rs 1.5 lakh. It was not a costly error, but more a waste of time and energy. However, she lost the opportunity to scale up the idea, which was perfected by TutorVista and sold for more than $127 million to Pearson PLC in 2011.

Anshul would not give up her dreams of working on her own. She continued working in IT Services till 2013, when she started a food delivery startup, which would deliver meals late in the night for working professionals. Two months into the business, she realised that the operational costs, in the form of managing deliveries, would be too high for her. The money required to scale up such an idea was a lot and she found it could burn her savings in six months.
The learning from this short-lived stint was that not all ideas can be scaled up and that some ideas require a lot more capital to manage the complexity of the business.
The stickiness of the customer was very important. On average, an individual would have to order five times a month to keep this business running.

That was when some introspection, when she travelled across Rajasthan for six months, helped her realise that she should leverage eight years of IT Services experience. She took the leap and turned full-time entrepreneur, opening an app studio called Upside9.