Building Rocketfood: Startup Lessons Learnt During The 1st Month

Abhineet Kumar 
Abhineet Kumar is the founder of rocketfood.co and is passionate about public speaking, entrepreneurship and community-building.

It’s been just over a month since my childhood friend Anurag and I started working on rocketfood. For those of you who are unaware, here’s a brief about rocketfood:

rocketfood: Think of it as a go-to brand for North Indian cuisine, a la Domino’s + Uber for Indian food delivery and takeaway.

Why Indian food delivery and takeaway?

Both Anurag and I have faced this problem countless times that when we did not want to cook at home, we could not find any affordable, fast, Indian food brand which would not just satiate our taste but provide North Indian food cooked in a hygienic kitchen with healthy ingredients and optimal amounts of oil and spices. That’s the problem we want to solve through “rocketfood” — make ordering North Indian food cooked in a healthy manner extremely easy. We are angel-backed and plan to launch our first kitchen in Gaur Gravity, Indirapuram, Ghaziabad in mid-August and will be delivering food in the business districts of Noida (sec 57, 62, 62) and the residential locales of Indirapuram. Here are 3 key lessons learnt during this 1 month startup journey:

• Getting work done out of vendors is the most challenging part — in a business like ours there are a number of key stakeholders who are part of our core process — be it the real estate guys, the packaging vendors or the kitchen equipment manufacturers and so on. Most of them work fairly slow, and still follow rudimentary processes so our patience was and is tested on a daily basis. Also, we followed the practice of taking multiple quotes from a bunch of vendors which has saved us a good amount of money.
• You have to listen to a lot of bullshit from people and once they have spoken you may get your work done from them — in short be a smart listener, a diplomatic speaker, and genuinely care as to what people have to say. Inculcate the relevant advice provided, skip the bullshit and then ask for help. We found that most of the people we dealt with on a daily basis co-operated perfectly well this way.
• Not everyday is war — While working in a startup involves countless hours of toil, there would be some days when you’ll have nothing to do. In our case since our full-fledged operations are yet to launch, we’ve had a day or two when we had to wait for existing work to be finished by vendors before moving onto some other aspect. On such days, we chilled out, played football, and wrote long blogposts like this one and hopefully did justice to our time.

While there have been a lot of ups and downs, we have managed to make good progress.

As the hockey great Wayne Gretzky famously said,

Most people skate to where the puck is, we are skating to where it will be.

We aim to do something similar with rocketfood. Would love to have you guys cheer for us!