19+1: Terms & Conditions Apply

By Sai Kumkala | Story teller • Tech • Life • Experience 

Remember when we were 19? We thought building a company was a dream. At 20, we realised it was a full-time course nobody enrolled us in.

Yeah! And look how it started... registrations, applications, startup ecosystems, incubator interactions, meetings with government officials, vendor discussions, negotiations, and explaining our vision to people we'd met barely five minutes ago. Half the time, we were learning how to look confident before even understanding what was being discussed. Quite a useful skill, actually.

And those funding rounds! Applications, pitches, evaluations, rejections... We even made it to the final rounds a few times, only to miss opportunities worth lakhs. Apparently, getting close to an opportunity and actually getting it are two completely different achievements.

True. And we weren't just figuring out the business. We had an entire app to build! Trezin, from scratch. Servers, APIs, integrations, errors... honestly, we barely knew how half those things worked. Countless hours debugging, fixing and rebuilding. Who knew one small feature could demand an entire engineering degree? Somehow, we managed to turn an idea into an actual product.

Not to forget the vendors! Convincing them to trust a platform that was still being built, negotiating terms, building partnerships and explaining what we were trying to create. Basically, selling tomorrow's vision with today's unfinished product.

Problems don't wait for solutions; they arrive with their own deadlines.

Launch dates were announced, postponed, redesigned, and probably started having trust issues with us.At this point, even the calendar probably stopped believing our announcements!

We travelled to places where even the language was unfamiliar, worried about passports, rushed through GST verification in the rain, and somehow still found time for evening hangouts that turned into business strategy meetings. Play Store milestones that tested our patience more than our product.Every form needed another form, every opportunity came with another process, every meeting brought new questions, and every answer introduced three more doubts. Somewhere between chasing credentials, navigating startup ecosystems, and explaining our vision to people we'd met five minutes ago, two brothers who once had an idea started learning how the real world works. Apparently, entrepreneurship is 10% dreaming big and 90% proving your existence to portals, people, and processes. we just refused to let uncertainty become the reason we stopped. The destination is still ahead, the launch plan may need another update, and we still have plenty to figure out — but we took the first step knowing very little, and we've come too far to make taking a step back our strategy and while when you're living them; they look like chaos, cancelled plans, long travels, pending approvals, and two people saying, “Sare, next enti?” — until one day, that chaos becomes the story someone else needs to hear before they dare to begin.

And when November gives way to December, our long-awaited beginning will finally arrive.