Building Rocketfood: Setbacks Are Part Of The Ride

Anurag Singh
Anurag Singh is the founder of rocketfood. He is an internet savvy person and an admirer of Google. He is passionate about entrepreneurship and community building.

Sometimes by losing a battle you find a new way to win the war”— Donald Trump

Entrepreneurs must not be afraid of setbacks. In fact, initial setbacks should be considered as opportunities to innovate a promising approach to deal with the problems. Both Abhineet (childhood friend & co-founder, rocketfood.co) and me, consider life to be a series of experiences where good and bad are just two sides of the same coin.

Since the day we started working on rocketfood.co, we have had some major setbacks and we said the same to each one of them: “Bring it on!”

Here is a list of few setbacks which have made us stronger than ever and more persistent about achieving the goal, which we defined.

Expectation-Reality gap

While doing our research(online), we had an estimate of everything, right from real estate prices to price of onion. Once we started our offline research and taking quotes from vendors, we realized, we were living in fool’s paradise e.g. actual rent which we ended up paying is 3x the amount we had estimated. Our expectation was beaten by the reality, like it was the semifinals of WC 2014 between Brazil & Germany. That’s when we understood entrepreneurship is not just about dreaming but about hustling — Go out, run in the sun, ask for multiple quotes and never ever estimate without actual data.

Related: Building Rocketfood: Startup Lessons Learnt During The 1st Month

Rejection

While we were still building our business model, we thought of partnering with a co-working space to be their food partner. It was a brilliant deal to crack. We could have done our pilot run & generated a cash flow at the same time. After a series of meetings and discussions, we started to get confident & BANG…! Comes the rejection. It took us a day and a few shots to overcome the pain. We realized, you need to believe in yourself the most, when others don’t.

Mother of all setbacks

Once we started moving on from the daily dose of setbacks and thought everything should fall in place, life threw another challenge at us. Suddenly one of our co-founders decided to part ways and we became a team of two from three. Workload increased 1.5 times and we were left with two options : quit or persist. Having played cricket together in the same team, Abhineet & I share the same mindset, “Game is not over till it’s over.” Hence, we did what we do the best, “bounce back stronger!”

Fire in the hole

One fine day, when life was going good and finally things started to shape up, fire erupted in the basement of our office building. No, it didn’t kill us but yes, it killed our time and hampered the tech side of ourfood-tech venture. With no internet for 15 days we felt like living in stone age, online research, networking and tech development looked like a distant dream. We asked our neighbours for their wifi passwords to wrap things up.

In this short entrepreneurial journey, we learnt setbacks and failures are part and parcel of the game. The best way to deal with them is “hope for the best but be prepared for the worst”. You need to keep your chin up and face the challenges head on.