Most early brands don’t fail because the logo was ugly. They stumble because the name was already trademarked, the Instagram handle belonged to someone else, and every deck, post, and invoice looked like it came from a different company.

This doesn’t need a design agency or a ₹2 lakh brand book. It needs a name that’s actually available, a simple logo, two colours and two fonts used consistently, and templates that make the next hundred designs look like the first one.

The flow is straightforward:

Name check → Buy the domain → Logo → Colours and fonts → Templates → Social handles

The Stack

There’s no need to over-invest here. Almost everything in this stack is free- enough to look like one company everywhere, until you have the revenue to hire a designer who can build on what you’ve started.

Name Check

• IP India Public Search: The official trademark registry’s free search- no login needed. Run a wordmark and a phonetic search in your class before you fall in love with a name, not after.

• MCA Name Check: Free check on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs portal to see if a similar company or LLP name is already registered- worth doing before you file your incorporation.

• Namechk: Free, no card required- checks a name across 100+ social platforms and dozens of domain extensions in one search, so you see the whole picture before you commit.

Buying the Domain

• Cloudflare Registrar: Sells domains at cost with no markup- a .com is roughly $10–11 a year, and renewals cost the same as the first year. No surprise jump in year two.

• Porkbun: Low, flat pricing with free WHOIS privacy, a free SSL certificate, and email forwarding included- a simple choice if you want everything in one place without upsells.

• Namecheap: A .in domain starts at around ₹550 a year with free WHOIS privacy- a good fit if your customers are mostly in India and you want the local extension.

• GoDaddy / Hostinger: Often the cheapest first year on a .in, but check the renewal price at checkout- it can be noticeably higher from year two, and add-ons like privacy are sometimes extra.

A quick rule here: compare the renewal price, not the first-year price. The ₹99 domain is rarely ₹99 the year after.

Logo

• Shopify Logo Maker (formerly Hatchful): Completely free, no watermark, and commercial use is allowed- a quick way to get a clean, usable logo in under ten minutes.

• Adobe Express: Free plan includes the logo maker, templates, and Adobe Fonts, with PNG, JPG, and PDF downloads- more room to customise than a one-click generator.

• Looka: Designing is free; downloading is around $20 for a basic file and $65 for the full vector set. Worth it only once you’ve settled on a direction and need print-ready files.

Colours & Fonts

• Coolors: Free palette generator- press the spacebar to cycle colours, lock the ones you like, or pull a palette straight from a photo.

• Google Fonts: 1,800+ free font families, with a curated pairings tab on each font page- the safest place to pick fonts you’ll never need to license.

• Fontjoy: Free, AI-generated font pairings for heading, subheading, and body- lock one font and reroll the rest until it feels right.

• Realtime Colors: Free, no login- previews your colours and fonts on a mock website, with a built-in contrast check, so you see how they actually look together, not just as swatches.

Templates

• Canva: Free plan covers the editor, 1.6 million templates, and 5GB of storage, plus one Brand Kit with up to three brand colours. Logo and custom font uploads to the Brand Kit sit behind Pro.

• Adobe Express: Same free plan doubles as a template library for posts, decks, and flyers- useful if you already built your logo there.

Social Handles

• Namechk: Run your final name one more time on the day you claim handles- availability changes faster than you’d expect.

• Buffer: Free plan covers three channels with ten scheduled posts queued per channel, plus an AI assistant- enough to keep new profiles from looking abandoned in week one.

A useful principle: the best brand tool in this stack is consistency, not the logo maker. A simple logo used the same way on every post, invoice, and deck will build more recognition than a beautiful one used each time differently.

A sensible starting default: IP India and Namechk for the name check + Cloudflare or Porkbun for a .com (Namecheap for a .in) + Shopify Logo Maker for the logo + Coolors and Google Fonts for colours and fonts + Canva Free for templates.

The Build Checklist

☐ Check the trademark before the domain: A domain is easy to change. A trademark dispute six months after launch is not.

☐ Claim the domain and all key handles on the same day: Even the platforms you don’t plan to use yet- it costs nothing and stops someone else from taking them.

☐ Grab the .com and .in together if both are available: It’s a few hundred rupees a year, and it stops someone else from sitting on the other one.

☐ Pick two colours and two fonts, then stop: One primary colour, one accent, one heading font, one body font. More options usually mean less consistency.

☐ Test the logo at small sizes: If it doesn’t read as a 32-pixel profile picture or a browser tab icon, simplify it.

☐ Write a one-page brand sheet: Logo files, hex codes, font names, and two lines on tone of voice- so anyone helping later doesn’t have to guess.

☐ Build five core templates before you need them: A social post, a story, a deck cover, an invoice, and an email signature cover most of what an early startup actually sends out.

Measuring Whether It’s Working

Track four signals- together they tell you whether the brand is building recognition, or just looks finished:

• Consistency score: Pick ten things you’ve published or sent this month- posts, decks, invoices- and count how many use the right logo, colours, and fonts. Anything below eight out of ten means the templates aren’t being used.

• Handle coverage: The number of key platforms where you own the exact same handle. Mismatched handles quietly make you harder to find and easier to impersonate.

• Branded search: How many people search your startup’s name directly, visible for free in Google Search Console. A number climbing over time means people are remembering the name, not just stumbling on it.

• Time to make a new asset: How long it takes to produce a new post or deck from your templates. If it’s still taking an hour, the templates need work- not the brand.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

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What happens when 180 million shoppers head online for festive deals, but your website isn’t ready for the rush?

Redseer projects India’s festive e-commerce GMV will reach USD 15–16 billion in 2026, roughly 25% higher than last year, with 180–185 million online shoppers expected to participate. The growth is increasingly coming from beyond the metros, too, with tier-2 and smaller cities outpacing urban centres in categories such as fashion and beauty.

For e-commerce businesses, that means more customers and greater sales potential, but also a greater strain on the systems that keep orders flowing. Millions of shoppers, many relying on patchy mobile networks, may arrive at online stores within the same few weeks, sometimes within the same few hours.

When traffic surges, a slow website, a failed payment gateway, or an inventory mismatch can quickly turn a promising sale into a costly setback. So, how can businesses prepare their websites and operations for the festive rush, identify weak points before customers encounter them, and respond quickly when something goes wrong?

Why E-commerce Stores Fail During Festive Sales

A website that works perfectly on an ordinary day may struggle when thousands of shoppers arrive at once, all looking for deals and trying to check out at the same time.

• Website performance: Slow page loads, timeouts, and failed checkouts can cause customers to abandon their carts before completing a purchase.

• Payment failures: Even when product pages load correctly, payment gateways may struggle to handle a surge in transactions. Customers may face failed payments, delayed confirmations, or money debited without an immediate order confirmation.

• Inventory mismatches: When multiple customers purchase the same product simultaneously, stock levels may not update quickly enough. This can lead to overselling, cancelled orders, and disappointed customers.

• Third-party integrations: E-commerce stores depend on external services for payments, shipping, analytics, customer notifications, and promotional campaigns. If any one of these services slows down or fails, it can disrupt the buying journey even when the core website remains operational.

Finally, not every customer experiences the sale in the same way. Shoppers accessing a store through slower mobile networks or less powerful devices may face longer load times and failed transactions. This is particularly important as festive e-commerce reaches more consumers in tier-2 cities and smaller towns.

How to Prepare Your Store for the Festive Rush?

1. Start With Your Numbers

Before preparing for a festive sale, you need to know how much traffic your store can realistically handle. Start by looking at your past performance to understand what a normal day looks like and when your website has experienced its highest demand.

Review last year’s festive-sale data and identify three key numbers:

• Your peak website sessions per hour

• Your highest orders per hour

• The maximum number of visitors on your site at the same time

If this is your first festive sale, use data from your biggest campaign or busiest sales day so far.

Once you have a baseline, set a target for the traffic and order volumes you expect this year. As a starting point, consider preparing for three to five times your previous peak, adjusting for your marketing plans, expected demand, and available infrastructure.

2. Test Your Site Speed Under Pressure

Start by understanding the difference between two types of testing.

A load test checks how your website performs under the traffic you expect, while a stress test pushes it beyond those expected limits to identify where performance starts to break down. Both help you understand whether your store is ready for a sudden surge in visitors.

In a 2026 analysis of active Shopify stores, Shopify found that conversion rates tended to be around 3.5% lower for every additional 100 milliseconds of load time.

The takeaway is simple: every delay in the shopping journey deserves attention. But how you test your website depends on the platform you use.

If You Use Shopify or Another Hosted Platform

With hosted platforms, much of the server infrastructure is managed by the provider. However, your store’s performance still depends on how efficiently its pages load.

Start by reviewing your theme, compressing large images, and removing unnecessary apps or plugins. Third-party scripts, however, can add significant loading time, particularly on mobile devices.

If You Run a Custom-Built Store

If your store runs on a custom technology stack, test it in a staging environment that closely mirrors your live setup. Avoid experimenting with high traffic volumes on your production site, where tests could disrupt real customers and orders.

Gradually increase simulated traffic, then introduce a sudden spike to mimic the effect of an influencer reel, promotional email, or push notification. Monitor page response times, error rates, and resource usage to identify bottlenecks.

Don’t Forget the Mobile Experience

Your website might perform well on a high-speed office connection but struggle on a budget smartphone or a slower mobile network. Test key pages on an affordable Android device using a throttled 4G connection, paying particular attention to product browsing, cart updates, and checkout.

This is especially important during the festive season, when shoppers across tier-2 cities and smaller towns may be accessing your store under very different network conditions.

Tools that help you get started

• Google PageSpeed Insights: A free snapshot of how fast your pages load on mobile, with specific fixes.

• WebPageTest: Tests load times from different locations, devices and network speeds.

• k6: An open-source load-testing tool for teams comfortable writing simple scripts.

• Apache JMeter: A long-standing open-source option for simulating heavy traffic.

• Loader.io: A simpler, browser-based way to run basic load tests.

3. Test Your Checkout Before Customers Do

A simple way to spot issues with the checkout is to ask three people outside your team to place an order using their own phones. Choose friends, relatives, or neighbours who haven’t used your store before, and watch them go through the process without stepping in to help. Watch where they hesitate, get confused, or need extra time.

Next, test the scenarios that could trip up your checkout during a busy sale. What happens when a coupon reaches its usage limit? If a product goes out of stock while it’s still in someone’s cart, does the customer get a clear message? What happens when a customer enters an unserviceable pincode or their OTP takes 40 seconds to arrive?

Test failed payments, duplicate payment attempts, and delayed order confirmations to make sure customers aren’t charged twice or left wondering whether their order went through.

4. Keep Payments Working When Traffic Spikes

During a festive sale, even a short-lived issue with a bank or payment app can leave customers unable to pay and cost you orders.

During a festive sale, even a short-lived issue with a bank or payment app can leave customers unable to pay and cost you orders.

There are a few practical ways to reduce the impact:

• Start by offering multiple payment options so customers can switch methods if one fails.

• If your payment gateway supports intelligent routing across multiple payment processors, explore enabling it before the sale begins.

• Where supported, send customers a retry link through SMS or WhatsApp shortly after a failed transaction.

Depending on your business, you can set Cash On Delivery (COD) limits for high-value orders, verify orders by phone or message, or add extra checks for suspicious orders.

Before your campaign goes live, place a small test transaction through every payment method you offer and verify that the payment, order confirmation, and status updates work correctly.

5. Get Inventory and Delivery Ready for the Festive Rush

If you sell through your own website as well as marketplaces, make sure your inventory updates across all channels as quickly as possible. Keep a small stock buffer for bestsellers, too, so a sudden surge in orders doesn’t leave you selling products you can no longer fulfil.

Next, look beyond your website and assess how many orders your team can actually process. How many packages can you pick, pack, and dispatch in a day? Do you have enough staff, packaging materials, and storage space to handle a sudden increase in orders?

Also, talk to your courier partners early. Share your order forecast, confirm pickup slots, and ask what happens if volumes double. Having a second courier partner ready is far easier to arrange in September than on Dhanteras.

Finally, be realistic about delivery timelines. Show customers accurate estimates at checkout, taking into account their location and the possibility of festive-season delays. This is particularly important for tier-2 and tier-3 cities, where delivery timelines may vary by pincode and serviceability.

6. Make Sure Your Support Team Can Keep Up

During a festive sale, shoppers want to know when their orders will arrive, whether Cash on Delivery is available, or what to do if a payment fails. A few days later, questions about tracking and delivery delays start rolling in, too.

Start by creating ready-to-use replies for the most common queries, including delivery timelines, COD availability, returns and refunds, failed payments, and order changes. Set up automated replies on WhatsApp and email to handle basic questions quickly, and display a clear delivery update on your website so customers know what to expect before placing an order.

Festive sales don’t always stick to office hours, either. If your campaign goes live in the evening, someone should be available to respond when things go wrong.

The idea is to make sure customers know what’s happening with their orders and can get help when they need it, even during the busiest days of the sale.

7. Run a Dress Rehearsal Before the Sale

Don’t wait until your biggest sale of the year to find out what doesn’t work. Ideally, run a dress rehearsal about two weeks before the main event. You could start with an early-access sale for loyal customers, giving your team a chance to handle real orders and traffic without the pressure of the full campaign.

Then put together a simple war room plan for the main event:

1. Assign owners: One person each for the site, payments, inventory, logistics and support.

2. Build a contact sheet: Phone numbers for your hosting provider, payment gateway account manager, courier partners and key app developers, in one place.

3. Decide how you’ll respond to common problems: If the site slows down, pause ads. If payment success drops, check gateway status and push alternate methods. If a product sells out, update banners and campaigns immediately.

4. Avoid last-minute changes: No new apps, theme edits or major code releases in the final week before the sale.

5. Monitor performance as a team: Set fixed check-ins every hour on peak nights, so issues surface early.

Final Thoughts

You don’t need every part of your store to run perfectly throughout the festive season. What matters is knowing where things could go wrong and having a plan to deal with them. Test your website before the rush, check your payment methods, keep your inventory in sync, and make sure your team knows what to do when problems come up.

Some things may still go wrong. A courier might run late, a payment gateway might go down, or orders might come in faster than expected. That’s part of running a business during peak season.

The fewer surprises you leave for sale day, the better prepared you’ll be for the rush.

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Hey Everyone! ✨

If September had a checklist, our founders would’ve ticked off quite a few big things. From funding announcements and YC selections to building at hackathons and taking startups global, the Rize ecosystem had a lot to celebrate. We also launched new ways for founders to connect, build, and grow.

So, grab a coffee and let’s take a little walk down memory lane.

MILESTONE MOMENTS 👑

Every month, our favourite updates come from the founders themselves.

We've witnessed some jaw-dropping milestones within our community, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

A big congratulations to these founders- each step forward is a victory on the path to success. So, keep pushing and growing!

ARTICLES OF THE MONTH 📜

Missed our articles last month? Check out the top ones that fuelled our Founders!

✍️ Ad Spend & CAC Survival Guide for Festive Season

Make every marketing rupee count with smarter ad spending strategies and practical ways to keep customer acquisition costs in check this festive season.

✍️ Shopify Widgets - Festive Edition: Tool Stack Checklist

Discover the must-have Shopify widgets to boost conversions, create better shopping experiences, and make the most of festive sales.

✍️Customer Onboarding & Activation: The Free (Or Low Budget) Stack Checklist

Explore budget-friendly tools to streamline onboarding, improve user activation, and turn more sign-ups into engaged customers.

Discover more such insightful reads in the Vault! The collection is growing every day.

Vault by Razorpay Rize

Thoughts from a thriving community of founders and entrepreneurs to fuel innovation, learn from each other's journeys, and Rize together.

STORIES FROM RIZE-PRENEURS 📎

This month, we spotlighted Aviral Shah, a fourth-generation entrepreneur building Almighty Organics, a bootstrapped FMCG brand with a global footprint. He’s now focused on scaling a vegan Omega-3 line that offers an alternative to fish oil.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS THIS MONTH💡

New initiatives, exciting launches, and everything you need to stay ahead.

✨Rize Global Readiness Program✨

Building for one market is hard enough. Taking your startup global? That’s a whole new game.

That’s why we launched the Rize Global Readiness Program, a 6-day cohort bringing together 60+ founders to learn from experts, get mentored, and access resources to help them navigate new markets because your next big customer could be halfway across the world!

✨Razorpay x Replit | Hackathon✨

Great ideas are everywhere, but bringing them to life is what counts. So, we teamed up with Replit for a hackathon that brought 100+ founders, developers, and builders together to turn their ideas into working products using Replit.

With a focus on building, experimenting, and solving real-world problems, participants got hands-on with the tools and resources to go from a rough idea to a working demo.

✨Rize Startup Directory Launch✨

Ever wished there was one place to discover what our Rize startups are building? Now there is!

We launched the Rize Startup Directory, bringing together 1,700+ startups across 50 categories & 150+ cities, all in one place. Whether you're looking for inspiration, exploring what's happening in the ecosystem, or trying to connect with founders building in your space, the directory makes it easier to find your people.

Meet the Rize startups shaping the ecosystem

Explore Now

What’s Coming Next? 👀

If you thought September was busy, October has a lot more in store. Here’s what to look forward to at Rize:

• Demo Days: AI, Consumer Tech & MedTech Edition: New ideas, ambitious founders, and products worth watching.

• Rize for YC W27: Helping founders gear up for their next big leap.

• Festive Season: It’s that time of year! Get ready for all things festive, with fresh opportunities for startups to make the most of the season through coupons of joy, festive showcases, and more.

Stay tuned. We’re just getting started. 🚀

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

Subscribe now

For SaaS companies selling to enterprises, security becomes part of the product and, increasingly, part of the sales process. Today, 83% of enterprise buyers require SOC 2 certification before they’ll even sign a SaaS contract.

But what does that architecture actually look like - the practical version a lean team can build, operate, and evolve without slowing the business down?

This guide breaks down the essential components of B2B SaaS security architecture, how they fit together, and what founders and engineering teams should prioritise at different growth stages.

1. Start with a zero-trust security model

Traditional security often works on the idea that people and systems inside a company’s network can be trusted. But once someone gets in, they may be able to access other internal resources without much additional verification.

For a modern SaaS platform operating across cloud infrastructure, distributed teams, third-party integrations, and customer environments, a zero-trust model is the way to approach security. Its underlying principle is simple: no user, device, service, or network connection should receive access solely because of where it originates.

A B2B SaaS startup can apply zero-trust principles through three foundational controls.

• Verify identity explicitly: Every user and service must authenticate before accessing protected resources.

• Apply least-privilege access: Users and services should receive only the permissions necessary to perform their assigned tasks.

• Always assume a breach is possible: Design systems to limit the damage caused by compromised credentials, vulnerable applications, or malicious insiders.

The approach is consistent with NIST’s Zero Trust Architecture framework, which emphasises protecting individual resources rather than relying on traditional network boundaries.

2. Build a strong identity and access management layer

Identity and access management (IAM) determines who can access and which actions they can perform. It is one of the first security capabilities enterprise customers are likely to evaluate.

A scalable IAM architecture should include the following capabilities:

• Multi-factor authentication (MFA): Multi-factor authentication adds another verification step beyond a password.

• Single sign-on: SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect allows customers to integrate your application with identity platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID or Okta.

  Single sign-on (SSO) reduces the number of passwords employees must manage and enables organisations to centrally administer authentication. For B2B Saas startups targeting mid-market and enterprise customers, SSO should be part of the product roadmap.

• Role-based access control: Not every user should have the same permissions. Crucially, permissions must be enforced by backend services.

  For example: A typical B2B SaaS application might support three roles:

  

  Automated user provisioning: When an employee leaves a customer’s organisation, their access to your SaaS product should be revoked promptly. This is where Support for the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) comes into play.

  If your startup doesn’t have SCIM yet, that’s okay. Start with the basics: make sure admins can manage user access, revoke active sessions when needed, and follow a clear offboarding process.

• Production access: Production environments should not be accessible to everyone with a standing set of credentials. Use just-in-time (JIT) access so engineers receive production privileges only when they need them, for a limited period and, where appropriate, with an approval or audit trail.

  Maintain a documented break-glass account for genuine emergencies. Access to this account should be tightly restricted, strongly protected with phishing-resistant MFA, logged, and reviewed after every use.

• Session management: Authentication does not end when a user successfully signs in. Your application should have clear controls for managing active sessions and tokens.

  At a minimum, cover:

• Session timeouts

• Session revocation

• Revocation on role changes

• Refresh token rotation

• User visibility

3. Design multi-tenant isolation from day one

Most B2B SaaS platforms use a multi-tenant architecture, where multiple customers share the same underlying infrastructure while their data remains separate and private.

For example, a SaaS platform is used by 100 different companies. They may all run on the same application servers and database infrastructure, but that doesn’t mean they can access each other’s data. Company A should only ever see its own records, not anything belonging to Company B.

There are 3 common approaches to multi-tenant data storage.

A shared database is a reasonable starting point for many early-stage startups, provided tenant isolation is enforced and thoroughly tested.

Please note: Add automated cross-tenant tests (IDOR) in CI. This is the #1 real-world B2B SaaS bug.

4. Protect data at every stage

B2B SaaS platforms frequently process commercially sensitive information, and data protection should cover information while it is transmitted, stored, processed, backed up, and eventually deleted.

Note: Protect encryption keys through a dedicated key-management service, with restricted access & rotation procedures. API tokens, database passwords, signing keys, and cloud credentials should never be stored directly in your application code. Instead, keep them in a dedicated secrets manager and make sure access is limited to the workloads that actually need them.

If the product uses LLMs, cover prompt injection and tenant data leakage via AI.

5. Secure your cloud infrastructure

Cloud providers offer a wide range of built-in security features, but simply running your application in the cloud doesn’t make it secure. Your startup remains responsible for how you configure those services, who can access them, how you protect customer data, and how you secure your application workloads.

• Keep production and development separate: Production environments should be kept separate from development and testing environments. Avoid using real customer data in development systems whenever possible.

• Minimise public exposure: Not every system needs to be accessible from the internet. Databases, internal admin panels, and other sensitive management services should remain private unless there’s a clear business reason to expose them.

• Manage infrastructure as code: Tools such as Terraform and cloud-native infrastructure templates let teams manage infrastructure through version-controlled code. This makes infrastructure changes easier to review, test, reproduce, and audit.

• Secure the software supply chain: Your application’s security also depends on the code, libraries, containers, and tools used to build it. Keep an inventory of your dependencies and container images, scan them regularly for known vulnerabilities, and use trusted build environments.

6. Make API Security a core architectural requirement

APIs connect your application to customer systems, mobile apps, third-party tools, and internal services. Every new integration adds to your attack surface, so security needs to be built in from the start.

A secure API should include:

• Strong authentication and authorisation: Make sure every request is properly authenticated and that users can only access resources they’re allowed to see.

• Rate limiting: Prevent a user, integration, or tenant from overwhelming shared resources. Rate limit per tenant, not only per user.

• Input validation: Check incoming data and reject unexpected or malformed requests.

• Secure credentials: Use scoped API keys, support rotation and revocation, and never expose secrets in URLs.

• Webhook protection: Sign outgoing webhooks and verify incoming signatures to prevent tampering and replay attacks. Also, use an HMAC signature plus a timestamp to block replays.

Finally, add automated API security tests to your development workflow, especially when launching new endpoints.

7. Implement security monitoring & incident response

Your startup must be able to detect suspicious activity, investigate potential breaches and restore affected services.

• Centralise security logs: Collect relevant security events like unsuccessful login attempts, privilege changes, unusual data exports, production configuration changes & any other suspicious activity.

• Establish alert priority: Define alert severity, ownership, escalation procedures and expected response times.

• Create an incident response plan: Maintain an accessible incident contact list and conduct periodic tabletop exercises. Use the 6 functions of NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, such as Govern, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond & Recover, to organise the wider security program.

India’s CERT-In requires incident reporting within 6 hours, and DPDP has its own board notification. Founders often miss this!

8. Prepare for enterprise security & compliance requirements

Two widely recognised assurance mechanisms are SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001.

SOC 2 is an attestation framework used to report on controls relevant to security and, where included in the engagement, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality and privacy.

ISO/IEC 27001 specifies requirements for establishing, maintaining and continually improving an information security management system.

Neither should be seen as a replacement for secure engineering.

If your startup is preparing for an audit, start by getting the basics in place. This means having clear processes for access reviews, employee onboarding and offboarding, vulnerability management, incident response, change management, and vendor risk.

9. Build privacy into your SaaS architecture

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023, along with the DPDP Rules, 2025, sets out requirements around how organisations collect, use, store, and protect digital personal data.

Start with the basics:

• Know your data: Map what personal data you collect, where it lives, who can access it, and which vendors process it.

• Limit access: Use role-based access controls and give employees and services access only to the data they need.

• Protect the data: Use appropriate encryption, logging, monitoring, backups, and other security safeguards.

• Define retention: Know how long different types of personal data need to be kept and have a process for deleting it when it is no longer required.

• Secure third parties: Make sure vendors that process personal data have appropriate security and contractual safeguards in place.

• Prepare for incidents: Have a documented process for detecting, responding to, and reporting personal-data breaches.

• Understand your role: A startup may act as a Data Fiduciary for some activities and a Data Processor for others, depending on who determines the purpose and means of processing.

A Practical Security Roadmap for B2B SaaS Startups

You don’t need to build every security control from day one. Your priorities will depend on the kind of data you handle, how complex your architecture is, what your customers expect, and the threats you’re likely to face.

The roadmap below is a practical starting point, not a one-size-fits-all checklist. As your product and team grow, your security needs will evolve too.

Final Thoughts

Security can feel like a lot when you’re building a startup. There’s always another tool to add, another vulnerability to fix, or another compliance requirement to think about.

The most important thing is to get the fundamentals right early. Know what data you collect and where it lives. Make sure the right people have access to the right systems. From there, build security into the way your team works.

If security hasn’t been a priority yet, it’s not too late to start. The best time to build security into your SaaS product is before your customers have to ask for it!

The recommendations outlined above are general security recommendations based on common industry practices and expert guidance. The appropriate controls may vary depending on the company’s size, architecture, risk profile, regulatory requirements, customer expectations, and business needs.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off your shoulders and make your journey just a little bit easier.

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

Subscribe now

A fourth-generation entrepreneur, Aviral Shah, moved through investment banking in Tokyo, cryptocurrency and parking startups in India. After a decade in SaaS, he eventually bet on something far more offline: clean, organic ingredients. Today, as founder of Almighty Organics, he ships globally and is preparing to scale a vegan Omega-3 line designed to replace fish oil.

I’m the fourth generation of entrepreneurs in my family, and for a long time, that fact confused me more than it inspired me.

I used to wonder why I couldn’t just take a job, do well at it, and be content. Ten years and about ten different work experiences later, I think I finally have the answer. It comes down to your mindset.

If you have that urge to build, create, and take something from an idea to reality, a job may not always satisfy it. You can try to ignore that feeling, but it keeps coming back. Eventually, you realise that maybe the only thing to do is listen to it and go build the thing you’ve been thinking about all along.

It All Started in Tokyo

My career started far away from India, in Tokyo, at Rakuten. I spent two years in the securities investment division, working on application and network architecture, before moving into the founder’s office. After returning to India, I worked in two startups back-to-back. One, launched by me, was in cryptocurrency. And the other, interestingly enough, was in the parking industry.

My journey then took me to Dubai, where I worked as a product manager for a SoftBank-backed communications company. Over four years, I helped launch approximately ten products.

Back in India, I started another technology company. About a year later, almost as a side hustle, I started something completely different: an organic food company focused on clean ingredients.

I’ve always been passionate about organic food and clean ingredients. I genuinely believe that what we put into our bodies plays a big role in how we feel, how we live, and ultimately, our quality of life. I wanted to build something around that belief.

Looking back, I think two things naturally pushed me towards entrepreneurship. The first was my career. At almost every company I worked with, I found myself involved in building something from the ground up. The second was the desire to create something I truly believed in. With the organic products business, the idea was simple: if we can eat a little better, we can live a little better.

What began as a side project eventually grew into Almighty Organics.

Learning to Sell Food Like Software

FMCG was a completely new industry for me. I had worked across ten-odd businesses by that point, but tech had always been digital. This was the first time I was building something offline.

And yet, once we got going, it became one of the most rewarding journeys I’ve been part of. Today, we have more than 700 SKUs and ship our products across the globe.

Looking back, I’ve realised that a lot of what I learned along the way found its way into this business. The business development experience I gained while building SaaS products became incredibly useful when we started working with enterprise customers in food. Even the finance experience I picked up at an investment bank, something I never imagined I’d use again, has played an important role in running the company.

Steve Jobs once said that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. I’ve found that to be incredibly true. You rarely know how something you’re learning today will help you years later. You just have to trust the process and have faith that, somewhere down the line, the dots will connect.

The Hardest Decision

The hardest part, honestly, was walking away from the comfort of a job and the kind of packages that come with it. They can be incredibly hard to say no to, and making that decision was exhausting at first.

But I think, eventually, it comes down to how badly you want to build something of your own. There are days when things feel really low, and you question everything. And then, somehow, you wake up the next morning with a little more energy, a little more conviction, and you keep going. For me, that desire has always been stronger than the fear of giving up what I had.

Of course, you also need something outside the business to keep you grounded. I play badminton almost every day for about two hours, and the cardio really helps me reset. Meditation and yoga help too. When you’re building something this intense, you need something that takes your mind away from it for a while, something else to hold onto.

The Crash That Taught Me to Keep Going

I remember my very first job interview in Tokyo, at an investment bank. The interviewer asked me one question: “Can you handle pressure?”

I said yes!

He asked me the same thing in five or six different ways. By the end of it, I was sweating, but my answer hadn’t changed. That was probably the first time I realised that staying calm under pressure was something I could genuinely do.

Years later, that same lesson came back to me while I was building one of my earlier startups.

We had just onboarded a large customer who was running close to a million minutes of video calls through our system. Then, without warning, the entire system crashed. The impact was serious enough that the customer had to switch back to another provider in the middle of operations, across multiple geographies. We lost the customer, along with the revenue that came with them.

It was a tough day. But the next morning, we were back at it. We fixed what had gone wrong, learned from it, and started looking for the next customer, one that was even bigger.

I think that experience taught me something simple: Things will go wrong, sometimes badly. What matters is whether you can pick yourself up, learn from it, and keep moving. For me, stopping was never really an option.

Building Almighty Organics

Exporting food turned out to be a learning curve of its own. There were certifications to understand, trust to build, and a lot of figuring out what customers in different markets actually wanted. None of it happened overnight, but slowly, we learned our way through it.

Today, we serve customers across international markets, with the business largely focused on B2B. We’ve built the company completely bootstrapped so far and continue to grow steadily across markets.

One area we’re particularly excited about is our vegan Omega-3 product, an alternative to traditional fish oil. We’re now scaling that business and exploring the possibility of raising external capital specifically for that subsidiary.

It’s been a long journey, but there’s something incredibly fulfilling about seeing a product that started in India make its way into homes and businesses around the world.

Advice for Other Founders

If I had to share a few things with someone starting out, I’d say: try not to begin a business with a lot of financial pressure already sitting on your shoulders. Building a company is difficult enough without worrying about a significant financial backlog in the background.

It also helps to start with something you understand. You’ll still have a lot to learn, but if you already know the space, the learning curve becomes a little less steep.

And over time, try to become a generalist. When you’re building a company, you’re going to find yourself dealing with questions across finance, sales, product, hiring, operations and everything in between. You won’t always know the answer, and that’s okay. You just have to be willing to figure it out.

If Not This, Then What…

I love travelling, especially when I’m travelling with people I care about. But beyond that, I’d probably still be building something. I’ve been in product management for almost a decade now, in one form or another, so I think building products is just something that comes naturally to me.

And if I wasn’t doing that, I’d probably be cooking. I genuinely enjoy it. I’m not sure I could ever turn it into a business, and maybe that’s exactly why I enjoy it so much. So, in one way or another, I’d probably always be making something. That’s just how I’m wired.

What makes Aviral’s story interesting is that very little of it seems to have been planned from the start. He built in cryptocurrency, parking, telecom and SaaS before landing, almost by accident, on clean, organic food.

And yet, every one of those detours turned out to matter. Almighty Organics is the story of a founder who trusted that the dots would eventually connect, and kept building until they did.

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Most early churn doesn’t look dramatic. It looks like a user signing up, poking around for four minutes, and never coming back- not because the product was bad, but because nobody showed them the one thing that would have made it click.

This doesn’t need a dedicated onboarding team. It needs a tour that points at the right feature, a message that shows up at the right moment, and a way to see who actually got there.

The flow is straightforward:

Guide the first session → Nudge at the right moment → Track what’s used → Ask why they leave

The Stack

There’s no need to over-invest here. Most of this stack is free at a founder’s normal scale- enough to fix the leaks in week one before paying for anything.

Product Tours & Walkthroughs

• Supademo: Free tier gives five demos with unlimited views and no card required- enough to walk a new user through the two or three actions that predict they’ll stick around.

• Arcade: Free tier covers 1 published demo + 1 published video (plus 200 AI credits/month),- good for a founder testing which walkthrough actually moves activation before committing to one tool.

• Storylane: Free basic screenshot demos- lighter-weight than a live product tour, useful for a sales-assisted or high-touch onboarding flow.

In-App Messaging & Announcements

• Quickhunt: Free plan bundles in-app messaging with feedback, changelogs, and a roadmap- one tool instead of four separate subscriptions for a small team.

• OneSignal: Free tier covers push and in-app messaging at meaningful volume- built for mobile-first products nudging users back into a half-finished setup flow.

• Pendo: Free tier covers guides and basic analytics for up to 500 monthly active users- worth it once a team wants messaging and usage data in the same place.

Usage Tracking & Analytics

• PostHog: The most generous free tier available- 1 million events a month, 5,000 session recordings, and feature flags, all in one dashboard.

• Mixpanel: Free tier also covers 1 million events a month, with cleaner funnel and retention-cohort views if that’s the primary use case.

• Amplitude: Free Starter plan covers 10,000 monthly tracked users and 2 million events, with session replay included- enough to watch where a real user actually gets stuck, not just where you assumed they would.

Drop-off Feedback & Retention Signals

• Tally: Completely free, unlimited forms and submissions- use its exit-survey template the moment someone cancels or goes quiet, before you lose the chance to ask why.

• The same analytics tool from above: Most of these double as retention-cohort dashboards- no need for a fifth tool just to see week-over-week drop-off.

A useful principle: the best onboarding tool in this stack is the three-minute call with a churned user, not the dashboard. The dashboard tells you where they left. The call tells you why.

A sensible starting default: Supademo for the first-session tour + PostHog for usage tracking and session replay + Tally for exit surveys the moment someone cancels.

The Build Checklist

☐ Define the one action that predicts a user sticks around, before building a tour around it.

☐ Point the first tour at that one action, not a feature list.

☐ Trigger in-app messages by behaviour, not by days since signup.

☐ Install session replay before you guess why users are stuck.

☐ Send the exit survey the moment someone cancels.

☐ Review the drop-off funnel weekly for the first two months.

Measuring Whether It’s Working

Track four numbers- together they tell you whether onboarding is actually working, or just looks busy:

• Activation rate: Percentage of new signups who complete the one action that predicts retention, within their first session or first week. This is the number the whole stack above should be built to move.

• Time to first value: How long it takes a new user to reach that action. A number climbing over time, even if activation rate holds, usually means the tour or messaging has quietly stopped working.

• Day-7 / Day-30 retention: Percentage of activated users still active a week and a month later. Activation without retention just means people find the button, not that they stay for what’s behind it.

• Exit survey response rate and top reason cited: A low response rate is itself a signal- churned users who won’t even fill out a form have usually already mentally moved on before they clicked cancel.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

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As a founder, a surprising amount of your day disappears into the same low-value motions - typing the same emails, retyping messy notes, writing up calls from memory, and switching between a dozen apps just to keep everything moving. Most of this work never gets faster, simply because typing is slow and your hands can only do one thing at a time.

Through this “How-to Guide” series, we introduce you to platforms across categories that reduce this operational load, so you can spend less time on the mechanics of getting words down and more time building your company.

Early-stage founders write all day: investor updates, sales follow-ups, support replies, Slack messages, product specs and most of it happens one keystroke at a time. Meetings pile up on top of that, and the notes either get scribbled badly or never written at all.

Wispr Flow fixes this by letting you speak instead of typing, anywhere you have a text field. Hold a hotkey, talk naturally, and its AI turns your speech into clean, properly punctuated, correctly formatted text, inside your email, Slack, docs, browser forms, or an AI chat. It also records and summarises your meetings.

Use Cases

1. Solo & First-Time Founders | Everyday Writing at Speaking Speed

Scenario: A founder who is the entire team - sales, support, product, and ops and whose inbox never empties.

Solo founders use Wispr Flow to clear the daily writing pile by talking through it. Emails, investor updates, Slack replies, and to-do notes get dictated in any app and land as polished text — no cleanup needed. Because the AI removes filler words and applies your self-corrections automatically, what lands on screen is the finished version, not a transcript of your rambling.

2. Sales-led Founders | Faster Follow-ups & Call Notes

Scenario: A founder losing deals because follow-ups go out slowly and call details fade by the next meeting.

Sales-led founders dictate follow-up emails and CRM notes the moment a call ends, while everything is still fresh. With Notetaker running in the background, discovery and demo calls are captured automatically, cleaned into a readable transcript, and turned into a summary with action items, so nothing important slips between calls.

3. Operations Founders | Bot-free Meeting Notes & Action Items

Scenario: A founder whose standups, vendor calls, and hiring loops generate decisions that never get written down.

Operations founders turn on Wispr Flow’s Notetaker to record meetings without a bot ever joining the call. It captures system audio locally, produces a clean transcript split by speaker, generates a summary with next steps assigned to real people, and lets you search across past meetings with AI, replacing the “wait, what did we decide?” problem with a searchable record.

4. Global & Content-led Founders | Multilingual Writing in Your Brand Voice

Scenario: A founder writing for customers, investors, and teammates across multiple languages and channels.

Founders working across markets dictate in 100+ languages and switch mid-workflow without changing settings. A custom dictionary teaches Flow your brand names, product names, and acronyms so they’re spelt right every time, and Personalised Style adapts the tone per app - casual in Slack, formal in an investor email- so the output already sounds like you.

How to Set Up Wispr Flow: Step-by-Step Guide

Example Use Case: Running your inbox and meeting notes entirely by voice

New to Wispr Flow? Getting started takes a few minutes. Follow these steps to replace slow typing and forgotten meeting notes with a voice-first workflow:

• Download & Sign Up: Visit wisprflow.ai and install the app on Mac or Windows. On iPhone, add Wispr Flow as a keyboard so it works inside any app. The free plan is enough to try it properly.

• Set Your Hotkey: Choose a hold-to-talk shortcut. From now on, holding that key anywhere on your device turns speech into text in the active text field.

• Build Your Dictionary: Add your company name, product names, and common acronyms so Flow transcribes them correctly from day one. This carries over into meeting transcripts too.

• Dictate Anywhere: Open an email, Slack, a doc, or an AI chat, hold your hotkey, and speak naturally. Flow adds punctuation, strips filler words, and formats to fit the app.

• Edit by Voice with Command Mode (Pro): Highlight any text and give an instruction like “make this shorter,” “translate to French,” “turn this into bullet points”, and the AI rewrites it in place.

• Set Your Personalised Style: Tell Flow how formal to be per app category (Very Casual to Formal) so Slack sounds casual and investor emails sound polished, automatically.

• Turn On Notetaker (Mac): Enable the meeting notetaker to record calls with no bot joining. You’ll get a live transcript, a clean summary, and action items after each meeting, plus AI search across your meeting history.

• Protect Your Data: Switch on Privacy Mode if you want zero data retention after processing; nothing is kept or used for training.

Tip: Your custom dictionary does double duty - the acronyms and product names you teach Flow while dictating are automatically applied to your meeting transcripts, so both stay accurate as your vocabulary grows.

Key Features for Startups

• System-wide dictation that types into any text field - email, Slack, docs, browser forms, and AI chats

• AI auto-editing that adds punctuation, removes filler words, and outputs your corrected sentence instead of your first attempt

• Command Mode voice editing to rewrite, reformat, or translate highlighted text hands-free (Pro)

• 100+ languages plus a custom dictionary for brand and product terms

• Personalised Style that matches tone to the app you’re writing in

• Notetaker: bot-free meeting recording, clean transcripts, summaries, and assigned action items (Mac)

• Privacy Mode with zero data retention, and HIPAA BAAs available across plans

Key AI Features

If you’ve ever wished writing and note-taking could just “handle themselves,” that’s exactly what Wispr Flow’s AI aims to do.

1. Clean Prose from Messy Speech

Flow doesn’t just transcribe; it edits as you talk. It drops the “ums,” fixes false starts, punctuates, and formats to match the app, so speaking a paragraph gives you a finished paragraph, at roughly 3–4x typing speed.

2. Command Mode | Editing by Voice

Beyond dictation, you can direct the AI. Highlight text and say what you want done, like shorten it, change the tone, translate it, or turn an outline into prose, and it rewrites in place.

3. Notetaker - Bot-free Meetings with Action Items

Launched in August 2026, Notetaker captures a meeting’s system audio on your Mac without joining the call, cleans up the transcript, splits it by speaker, and produces a summary with next steps. You can also ask AI to catch you up on what happened or search across every past meeting.

4. Context-aware Intelligence

Flow draws on the tools around it, pulling real names and company jargon from your calendar, Gmail, and Slack, so transcripts, summaries, and formatting reflect how your team actually talks, not a generic guess.

Founders lose hours every week to the slowest part of the job: getting words out of their head and onto the screen, and getting decisions out of meetings and into writing. That’s the gap Wispr Flow closes.

With Wispr Flow, you can write anywhere by voice at speaking speed, edit and translate hands-free, and turn your meetings into clean notes and action items, without changing the apps you already use.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

Curious about how we support startup founders?

Explore More

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If you run operations for a D2C brand in India, you know this feeling. An order ships, everyone moves on, and then a few days later it boomerangs right back to your warehouse. But it’s not just a box of sunk costs because it soon becomes a number in this week’s report that somehow becomes your problem to explain.

That number has a name: RTO, or return-to-origin. And if you’ve been doing this long enough, you already know it’s the kind of problem that eats into margins.

In this article, we’re sharing a few simple ways to reduce RTOs and make the festive season a little smoother for your business.

The Real Cost of RTO

Return-to-origin shipments can eat up a quarter to a third of everything you ship. Sit with that for a second. One in three boxes, coming back.

In India, RTO runs 25–40% of shipped orders for D2C brands. On a ₹100 Cr GMV business at a 30% rate, the loaded cost (logistics both ways, blocked inventory, packaging, gateway fees) totals ₹6–9 crore a year, hidden across four cost centres.

And here’s the part that rarely makes it to the boardroom slide: shipping is actually the cheaper part. The real cost of an RTO shows up elsewhere - in the ad spend you’ve already put in to acquire that customer, the warehouse hours spent processing a product, the packaging that now has to be thrown away, and the inventory stuck in limbo, neither sold nor available to sell.

RTO Benchmarks in India

The numbers vary depending on who's measuring, but the overall picture is consistent: RTO rates across Indian D2C brands average somewhere between 20 and 30 per cent, with high-growth brands typically running under 15 per cent and lagging ones drifting well above 30.

Geography matters just as much. Non-metro markets typically run 5 to 12 percentage points higher than metros, and in some tier-3 pin codes without active management, RTO can climb to 40 to 50 per cent.

The idea is simple: RTO is a business number that moves depending on how closely you manage payment mix, geography, and timing.

A 90-Day Roadmap to Lower RTOs

Before you can reduce your RTOs, you need to understand what’s actually causing them. Not every failed delivery has the same reason, and treating them all the same can make it harder to fix the real problem. Here’s how to break down your RTOs, spot the patterns, and figure out where things are going wrong.

Weeks 1–2: Understand What's Actually Happening

Pull the following data for every shipment from the last 90 days.

• Order details: Order ID, AWB, dispatch date, delivery/RTO date

• Location: Origin and destination pincode, along with the pincode tier (Metro/T1/T2/T3)

• Shipping: Carrier and service type (surface/air/express)

• Payment: COD or prepaid

• Order details: Order value, product category, and SKU count

• NDRs: Number of NDR events, reason codes, and resolution outcomes

• Final status: Delivered, RTO, lost, or damaged

• Customer history: Pin-level repeat rate, split between first-time and repeat customers

Weeks 3–6: The Quick Wins

• Encourage prepaid orders: A small incentive for choosing online payment over COD can make a real difference and reduce the chances of customers changing their mind when the order arrives.

• Fix address issues early: Catch incorrect or incomplete addresses right after checkout, when they’re easy to correct, rather than dealing with a failed delivery weeks later.

• Give customers the flexibility to edit their orders: Whether it’s changing a size, correcting an address, or cancelling an order, making these changes easy can prevent unnecessary failed deliveries.

• Treat every failed delivery attempt as a chance to recover the order: Reach out quickly, understand what went wrong, and try to get the shipment back on track instead of letting it turn into an RTO.

Weeks 7–12: The Structural Fixes

Choose the right courier for each pincode instead of assuming one courier works well everywhere. Give customers clear delivery timelines instead of broad three-day windows, and send a message or call before delivery to make sure someone is available to receive the order.

Final Thoughts

There’s no magic fix for RTOs. And if someone tells you there is, they’re probably trying to sell you something. What really works is simply paying attention to what’s happening, week after week. Keep one scorecard, review it regularly, and fix the small issues before they start becoming bigger patterns.

Give it 90 days of consistent effort, and you should start seeing a real difference in your RTO numbers. But the bigger change is in how your team thinks about RTOs. Instead of seeing them as just another cost of running an online business, you start seeing the actual reasons behind them - an incorrect address, a missed delivery, a COD refusal, a courier issue - things you can actually do something about.

If this only scratched the surface for your team, there's more where this came from. In partnership with ClickPost, we've put together the full breakdown - root-cause buckets, benchmark data by category and geography, and the complete week-by-week playbook.

Access the RTO Playbook

Heading into the festive season? Give this a read if you want to understand what happens beyond the orders and revenue numbers.

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Hey Everyone! ✨

Another month of little wins, big moments, new learnings, and plenty of memories made along the way. As we head into a new month, we’re taking a moment to look back at what made August special at Rize - the founders, the progress, and everything in between.

So, grab a coffee and let’s take a little walk down memory lane.

MILESTONE MOMENTS 👑

Every month, our favourite updates come from the founders themselves.

We've witnessed some jaw-dropping milestones within our community, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

A big congratulations to these founders! Each step forward is a victory on the path to success. So, keep pushing and growing!

ARTICLES OF THE MONTH 📜

Missed our articles last month? Check the top ones that fuelled our Founders!

✍️ Technical SEO for Founders Who Aren’t Marketers (2026 Edition)

A simple guide to improving your website’s SEO, visibility, and performance without being a marketing expert.

✍️ Festive Season 2026: What D2C Founders Need to Know

Key strategies, trends, and tips to help D2C founders maximise sales during the 2026 festive season.

✍️Export Logistics from India to the USA: A Complete Guide

Everything Indian businesses need to know about shipping, documentation, customs, and exporting products to the USA.

Discover more such insightful reads in the Vault! The collection is growing every day.

Vault by Razorpay Rize

Thoughts from a thriving community of founders and entrepreneurs to fuel innovation, learn from each other's journeys, and Rize together.

STORIES FROM RIZE-PRENEURS 📎

This month, we spent some time with Sachit Sharma, a Flipkart alum and the founder of Sign3.ai, to hear more about his journey as a builder. Today, he’s working on Deepsolv - helping brands make sense of ad performance, competitor signals, and customer feedback, and turn all that information into decisions they can act on.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS THIS MONTH💡

New initiatives, exciting launches, and everything you need to stay ahead.

✨Rize D2C+ Festive Program✨

The festive season is here, and we’re getting founders ready! 🪔✨

We launched the Rize D2C+ Festive Program - a space built to help D2C founders make the most of the busiest, most exciting time of the year.

Expert sessions, practical playbooks, mentorship, and resources across marketing, conversions, logistics, and payments - all designed to give founders the people, insights, and tools they need to gear up for the festive season.

Here’s to making this festive season your biggest one yet!

Sign Up

✨Razorpay x Elevation Capital | Basecamp✨

We brought founders, product leaders, and builders together for “Tune In”, hosted by Razorpay × Cartesia and The Product Folks, as part of the Elevation Basecamp Series.

With an evening of ice-breakers, candid conversations, and community networking, the event explored what the future of voice could look like for Indian consumer products.

Breakfast, business trivia, and a room full of curious founders also made for a lively morning of “Breakfast, Brew & Brains”, hosted by Razorpay × Basecamp and powered by Elevation Capital as part of the community-powered tech week. 6 competitive teams, 50+ enthusiastic participants, and 6 rounds of business trivia - the morning had everything: great conversations, unexpected answers, friendly banter, and plenty of laughs.

MEET OUR NEWEST FOUNDERS: ONBOARDING EDITION 👥

Say hello to the latest group of founders joining the Rize Communities! They're full of bold ideas and big dreams, ready to take the startup world by storm.

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

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There’s a paradox at the heart of Diwali commerce: Everyone has more customers to win, and everyone is paying more to win them.

You open the ads dashboard expecting yesterday’s numbers, only to find your CPC has jumped 40%. Nothing about the business changed overnight. The calendar did!

October and November are when Indian consumers spend more freely than at almost any other point in the year. In the first eleven days of the 2025 festive season alone, 90 million shoppers spent nearly ₹7,000 each, pushing e-commerce GMV past ₹1.15 lakh crore - the strongest festive pull in five years.

But the same surge in demand that creates the opportunity also drives up the cost of capturing it. Meta CPMs rise sharply through Diwali. Google CPCs can climb 25–40% during the same period. On some platforms, costs on peak sale days have even been known to triple.

The reason is surprisingly simple: Every brand sees the same demand spike and rushes into the same auctions at the same time.

This article is a practical guide to navigating rising ad costs during India’s festive season, from understanding why CPCs and CPMs rise to knowing when to increase budgets, when to hold back, and how to protect your margins when competition for the same customer gets expensive.

Why CAC Spikes During the Festive Season?

Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, is simply what it costs you to turn a stranger into a paying customer. During the festive season, this number climbs for a structural reason - everyone is bidding on the same limited ad inventory at the same time. When every brand in your category wants the same slot in the same week, the price of that slot goes up. It’s supply and demand.

A higher CAC in October doesn’t automatically mean a worse business. If your customers are buying at higher order values, buying more units, or coming back for a second purchase soon after, a temporarily higher CAC can still be a very healthy trade.

Consider a home decor brand that saw its CAC rise from ₹450 to ₹720 in October. But their average order value also rose from ₹1,200 to ₹2,100, because festive shoppers were buying gift sets instead of single items. Their CAC-to-AOV ratio actually improved. The number that looked scary was, in context, a sign of a healthy season.

Once you understand the difference, festive planning becomes less about instinct and more about discipline: setting your limits before the season begins, pacing spend rather than front-loading it, and being deliberate about which rupees you put into increasingly crowded auctions.

5 Things to Know Before You Scale Your Ad Spend

1. Set Your CAC Ceiling Before the Season Starts

Most founders set their ad budgets in a spreadsheet in September and then abandon the spreadsheet the moment the season begins. The fix is deceptively simple: decide your maximum acceptable CAC before the festive noise starts, based on your actual unit economics.

A reasonable starting point is your LTV: CAC ratio. If a customer is worth ₹3,000 to you over their lifetime, and you want a healthy 3:1 return, your ceiling CAC is ₹1,000. Write that number down somewhere visible. When festive bidding pushes you close to it, that’s your signal to pull back on that channel or that audience.

2. Don’t Front-Load Your Entire Budget on Day One

There’s a common instinct to spend the bulk of the festive budget in the first week, like Navratri or Dussehra, because that’s when “everyone else is spending too” and founders fear missing the wave.

Algorithms need a few days of consistent signal to find your best-performing audiences. Dumping your entire quarter’s budget into the first five days often means you’re paying premium CPMs while the algorithm is still figuring out who to show your ads to.

A first wave of buying happens pre-Diwali, and a second, sometimes equally strong wave happens after, as shoppers who held off during the rate transition come back to buy. Founders who go dark the day after Diwali, assuming the season is over, are quietly leaving that second wave on the table for a competitor who didn’t.

So, pace your spend across the full festive window, with modest step-ups around key dates - Navratri, Dhanteras, Diwali, and the two to three weeks after, when gifting, self-reward purchases, and that second demand wave all overlap. Reserve 15-20% of your total budget as a flexible buffer you deploy only toward whatever is actually converting, once you have real data from the first two weeks.

3. Diversify Beyond the Big Two Platforms

Meta and Google are where the auction gets most crowded, most expensive, most predictable. They’re also where every founder with a festive budget shows up first, which is exactly why leaning on them alone during peak season is expensive by design.

Meta CPCs run 20 to 30 per cent cheaper in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities than in the metros, and this year, 60 to 65 per cent of festive shoppers are coming from exactly those cities. If your product travels well beyond the big four metros, this is where the auction is a little less brutal.

WhatsApp Business campaigns to your existing customer list often deliver festive-season CAC that looks nothing like the auction-driven chaos on Meta, simply because you’re messaging people who already trust you and never enter the CPM auction at all.

And for brands with any offline footprint, festive pop-ups and local partnerships can quietly outperform digital spend on a pure CAC basis, because footfall during the festive season is real and doesn’t need a bidding war to capture.

Spread the bet, and once your channels are spread, the next discipline is making sure the creative running on each one doesn’t go stale before the season does.

4. Refresh Your Creative Before It Gets Tired

Ad fatigue moves faster during the festive season than any other time of year, because your audience is seeing more ads overall, from you and from everyone else in your category. A creative that performed beautifully in week one can stop converting by week three.

Plan for at least three to four creative refreshes across the festive window, not one big campaign asset you set and forget. Rotate hooks, not just visuals - a founder story angle in week one, a social-proof angle in week two, a straightforward discount angle closer to the final days when urgency does the work for you.

5. Know What Your Ads Are Really Driving

It’s tempting, in the middle of the festive season, to watch your dashboard and celebrate every rupee of “revenue attributed to ads.”

The more honest question is: how many of these sales would not have happened without this specific spend? That’s incrementality, and it’s harder to measure than a dashboard number, but it’s the only number that tells you the truth about whether your festive ad spend is actually working or just riding a wave that was going to happen anyway.

Even a simple proxy like comparing conversion rates in regions or audiences where you paused spend with those where you continued can give you a more honest picture than relying entirely on the platform’s attribution.

There are a few practical ways to get a better sense of what your ad spend is actually adding.

• Pause or reduce spend in a small set of comparable cities, pincodes, or regions while continuing to advertise elsewhere.

• Instead of turning ads off geographically, hold back a small percentage of your target audience.

• Track branded search volume alongside your paid campaigns.

• Separate your festive revenue into new customers and existing customers.

• Build a baseline from the weeks before the festive season: organic sales, direct traffic, branded searches, conversion rates, and new-customer acquisition.

• Run a spend-response test.

Tools for Tracking Festive-Season Performance

You don’t need a complicated tech stack to stay on top of festive performance. You need a few reliable ways to see what is actually happening and to see it before the numbers become a problem.

• Google Analytics 4: Use it to understand the customer journey beyond the last click. Festive shoppers often discover a product on one device, return later, and complete the purchase somewhere else.

• Meta Ads Manager: Break down performance by audience, placement, geography, and campaign every day during the festive period. When CPMs and CPCs can move significantly within a few days, a weekly review can be too slow.

• AppsFlyer or similar attribution tools: For app-led businesses, these tools give you a better view of where installs and purchases are coming from and make it easier to run controlled measurement and incrementality tests.

• A daily CAC tracker: Keep it simple. Track spend, new customers, CAC, revenue, contribution margin, and channel-level performance in one place. It’s about being able to spot when CAC is moving faster than the economics can support.

Final Thoughts

There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that hits in the last week of November. Diwali is over, the sales are done, the ad bills have landed, and you finally have a moment to look at the numbers.

It’s easy to look at a festive-season sales spike and call it a win. The harder question is what happened underneath it. Did CAC stay within range? Did margins hold? Did you spend because the numbers justified it, or because every competitor seemed to be spending more?

There’s nothing wrong with spending aggressively when the opportunity is there. The problem is spending without knowing where the line is. Know the CAC you can live with, how much you’re willing to spend, what signals tell you to push harder, and which ones tell you to stop.

The festive season will always be competitive. You can’t obviously control what your competitors spend or what the platforms charge. You can control whether you know what a customer is worth to you.

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Festive season buyers behave differently: they’re in gifting mode, comparing five tabs at once, and racing a shipping deadline in their head. The instinct is to install ten apps the week your sale starts. That doesn’t need a developer on retainer - it needs a short, tested stack and a plan for what to turn off in January.

The flow is straightforward:

Urgency & timing → Gifting & personalization → Engagement & discovery → Trust & social proof → Support & conversation → Checkout & shipping nudges

The Stack

There’s no need to over-invest here. Most of this stack has a usable free tier, and the paid upgrades only make sense once festive traffic actually justifies them. Pick based on how many storefront touchpoints you’re trying to cover versus how polished each one needs to look.

Urgency & Timing

• Hextom: Countdown Timer Bar: A sticky bar with a live countdown for flash sales, shipping cutoffs, or holiday-specific promos. Free plan covers the basics; paid tiers add daily, periodic, and per-visitor timer types.

• Urgency+ | All-in-one Countdown: Ships with 11 design templates, so the timer can actually match your festive banner instead of clashing with it.

• Hurrify - FOMO Countdown Timer Bar: Built for scarcity messaging; pairs well with a stock counter if you’re running limited festive-edition drops.

Gifting & Personalisation

• Wrapped - Gift Wrap & Message: Lets shoppers add paid or free gift wrap and a personal note before checkout. Free plan available, so it’s easy to test before the season without committing.

• Super: Gift Wrap, Gift Message: Same job, with festive theme presets already built for Christmas, Valentine’s, and BFCM.

• Giftship: For stores shipping to multiple recipients - lets one checkout send items to different addresses and auto-tags orders for fulfilment.

Engagement & Discovery

• Tada Pop-ups (Spin Wheel & Games): On-brand spin-the-wheel popups to capture emails or phone numbers in exchange for a discount. Free plan available; gamified formats convert better than a plain “10% off” pop-up.

• PB: Spin Wheel & Game Popups: A lighter alternative if you just want the wheel mechanic - free plan available, quick to theme in festive colours.

• Quiz Kit / Quizell: A product-recommendation quiz (”find the perfect gift for her/him”) - useful when shoppers don’t know what to buy and would rather answer four questions than scroll forty products.

Trust & Social Proof

• Avada Trust Badges & Sales Pop-up: Real-time “X just bought this” notifications plus trust badges - matters more in the festive season when buyers are making one-time gift purchases from brands they don’t know yet.

• SALES POP UP: Fomo + Social Proof: Free tier, does the same job if you’d rather keep this widget off the paid-app bill this quarter.

Support & Conversation

• WhatsApp Chat Widget (Meetanshi): Completely free, adds a floating WhatsApp button using the wa.me link - no API, no monthly fee.

• SL: WhatsApp Chat + Marketing (SuperLemon): Free plan includes the chat widget plus a WhatsApp CRM extension, with an upgrade path if festive volume justifies cart recovery and broadcasts later.

• Ctx: WhatsApp Chat + Marketing: Bundles chat, FAQs, and order tracking into one widget, so shoppers aren’t opening three separate tools to ask where their order is during peak shipping weeks.

Checkout & Shipping Nudges

• Free shipping progress bar: Usually bundled into the urgency apps above rather than sold separately - check your existing app’s feature list before installing a new one just for this.

• Selleasy: Cross-sell and upsell popups, including gift wrap, shown before checkout - a quick way to bump average order value on festive bundles without a dedicated app.

A useful principle: gamification and urgency widgets only pay off if the page still loads fast. Test each one’s speed impact before your highest-traffic week, not during it.

A sensible starting default: One countdown/urgency bar + one gift-wrap app + one WhatsApp support widget + a shared sheet tracking which discount codes are live where.

The Build Checklist

☐ Decide which festive moment you’re building for: Pushing the “last 48 hours before the shipping cutoff” gives every widget below something concrete to work toward.

☐ Theme every widget to match: A red countdown bar over a green spin wheel over your everyday brand colours reads as chaotic, not festive.

☐ Test on mobile before go-live: Countdown bars and spin wheels eat vertical space fast on a phone screen - check that your actual product content isn’t pushed below the fold.

☐ Turn off overlapping widgets: Two popups fighting for the same click (spin wheel and exit-intent discount) is a worse experience than either one alone.

☐ Set the end date before you launch: A countdown timer that quietly resets after it hits zero erodes trust faster than not having one at all.

☐ Recheck page speed after each widget goes live: Add them one at a time during a low-traffic day, not all five the morning your sale starts.

Measuring Whether It’s Working

Track these from the first campaign - together they tell you whether the stack is earning its shelf space or just adding noise:

• Page speed delta: How much slower the storefront gets with each widget added. If checkout abandonment rises alongside install count, something needs to come off.

• Conversion rate on festive traffic vs. baseline: Whether the urgency and gifting widgets are actually moving the needle, or just decorating a page that would have converted anyway.

• Opt-in and support volume through the widgets: Email/phone capture from spin wheels, and ticket volume through WhatsApp, both tell you which widget shoppers are actually using versus ignoring.

• Discount code redemption vs. leakage: How many gamified-popup codes get redeemed versus how many get shared on coupon sites - a gap here usually means the mechanic needs a cap or an expiry.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

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Your website can have the best content on the internet and still be invisible on Google. That’s because SEO doesn’t start with keywords.

Before Google can rank your content, it has to find your page, crawl it, understand it, and decide that your site is technically trustworthy enough to surface. That depends on decisions most founders never think about: how quickly your pages load, whether search engines can access your content, how your site is structured, and whether you’re giving Google enough context to understand what each page actually means.

This is the side of SEO that often gets buried under keyword research and content calendars. In this article, we’ll break down the technical side of SEO, from site speed and crawlability to indexing and structured data, and show how these behind-the-scenes factors can directly impact your rankings.

Crawlability

Before Google can rank your site, it first needs to find it. That process is called crawling- Google’s bots visit your pages, follow links, read the content, and work out what each page is about.

A single line in your robots.txt file, a forgotten noindex tag from development, or a sitemap that was never submitted can prevent Google from properly discovering your pages. Your site might look completely normal to a visitor while remaining effectively invisible to search engines.

India now has over a billion internet users, and nearly all of them- upwards of 96%- are coming in through a mobile device, not a desktop. Most Indian founders are, in effect, building for a mobile-first Google that indexes the mobile version of their site by default. If crawlability breaks on mobile, it doesn’t just break for some users. It breaks for almost everyone.

What to check:

• Google Search Console: Free, and the first thing you should set up. It tells you exactly which pages Google has indexed, and flags errors.

• robots.txt: A simple text file at yoursite.com/robots.txt. Make sure it isn’t blocking pages you want found.

• XML sitemap: A map of your site for search engines. Submit it directly in Search Console.

Site Speed

Portent’s analysis of more than 100 million pageviews across B2B and B2C websites found a clear relationship between speed and conversions: ecommerce sites that loaded in one second saw conversion rates of around 3%, compared with roughly 1% for sites taking five seconds to load.

That’s not a minor difference. It can mean the difference between turning the same amount of traffic into significantly more customers and leaving a large portion of that revenue on the table without realising that page speed is the culprit.

A one-second delay on mobile can also pull conversions down by as much as 20%, and Google’s own research has found that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned once a page crosses the three-second mark.

For founders without a technical background, “site speed” can sound like a problem best left to engineers. In practice, it often comes down to a handful of simple issues: oversized images, too many third-party scripts, bloated plugins, or a website builder that prioritises convenience over performance.

Tools that make this simple:

• PageSpeed Insights: Plug in your URL, get a score, and a plain-English list of what’s slowing you down.

• TinyPNG or Squoosh: Compress images before uploading, without visibly losing quality.

• GTmetrix: Goes a layer deeper if PageSpeed’s suggestions feel too technical.

Mobile-Friendliness

Mobile isn’t an afterthought in SEO anymore. Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, which means your mobile experience can directly shape how your site performs in search.

Most modern website builders take care of the basics automatically, but that doesn’t mean you should assume everything works perfectly. Open your site on your phone and look at it like a first-time visitor: Does it load quickly? Is the content easy to read? Can I navigate without frustration? And, most importantly, would I trust this business based on what I see?

Structured Data

Structured data, often called schema markup, is a way of giving search engines more context about your content.

You’ve probably seen the results without realising what powers them: star ratings, product prices, availability, recipe details, and other enhanced information that appear directly in search results.

For example, a small D2C brand could add product schema to its website and start showing prices and stock availability alongside its search listings. The brand hasn’t published a single new article, but its listings now give potential customers more information before they even click.

And that’s what makes structured data interesting for founders. Studies on rich results- the enhanced listings schema makes possible- have found click-through rates run anywhere from 20% to 80% higher than plain, unenhanced listings. FAQ-style rich results, specifically, have been recorded with click-through rates as high as 87%.

Where to start:

• Google’s Rich Results Test: Paste your URL and see what structured data, if any, Google can already detect.

• Schema.org: The reference library for what markup exists.

• Most website builders (Shopify, Webflow, WordPress plugins like Yoast) can add basic schema without you writing a line of code.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are three specific metrics Google uses to judge the experience of visiting your site- not just whether it loads, but how it feels to load.

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How long the main content takes to appear.

• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly the page responds when someone clicks or taps.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Whether things jump around while loading- that infuriating moment when you go to tap a button and the page shifts under your finger

As of mid-2025, only about 41% of websites achieved a “good” Core Web Vitals score on mobile, compared with 53% on desktop. That gap is revealing: the mobile experience, the version most users actually interact with, is still falling short across much of the web.

For founders, that creates an opportunity. Simply delivering a fast, stable, user-friendly mobile experience already puts you ahead of a large share of websites competing for the same attention.

Final Thoughts

Technical SEO is the foundation everything else depends on. A brilliant blog post on a slow, poorly structured, uncrawlable website is like building a beautiful room in a house with no front door. The work might be excellent, but very few people will ever find it.

You don’t need to become an SEO expert to get the basics right. Before you publish another article, make sure Google can find the ones you’ve already written. Spend 30 minutes in Search Console, run a speed test, check how Google is crawling your site, and look for the obvious problems.

Because the content you’re proud of deserves a website that’s built to get it seen.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off your shoulders and make your journey just a little bit easier.

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If you’re running a D2C brand, the festive season can make or break your year.

Months before the first sale goes live, you’re already making bets- how much inventory to buy, how much cash to lock into stock, how aggressively to spend on ads, and how much demand to expect.

In 2025, almost every one of those assumptions changed!

During the last week of September, India’s e-commerce market witnessed an unprecedented surge. In just 11 days, shoppers purchased over ₹60,000 crore worth of goods. Nearly 90 million people participated, and by the time the festive season ended around Diwali, online sales had crossed ₹1.15 lakh crore in GMV, growing 20–25% year over year- the best festive performance in half a decade.

If you’re building a D2C brand, that’s the part worth paying attention to before planning for October 2026.

In this article, we’ll unpack what changed in 2025, why it mattered, and what every brand should take away before the next festive rush begins.

What Actually Happened in 2025?

Looking beyond the headline numbers, the 2025 festive season revealed a market that is evolving on multiple fronts. Consumer spending patterns, category demand, logistics, taxation, and fulfilment strategies all moved in new directions.

1. The Impact of GST 2.0

The rollout of GST 2.0 coincided with the festive season. Rate cuts across apparel, electronics, and appliances made products more affordable and encouraged consumers to upgrade instead of postponing purchases. Brands like DaMENSCH passed on GST savings directly to customers on products priced below ₹2,500, and the impact showed up almost immediately in larger basket sizes.

GST 2.0 gave brands a demand-side boost, but it also changed how businesses need to operate.

Unified GST rules reduced interstate transit times and lowered logistics costs by an estimated 20–25%, making nationwide fulfilment across more than 19,000 pin codes increasingly viable even for mid-sized brands.

2. The Growth of Tier 2 and Tier 3 Markets

Another major growth driver was the increasing spending power of consumers outside metropolitan cities.

Interest rate cuts and rising rural incomes put more disposable income into consumers’ hands, particularly outside the metros. Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities accounted for nearly 60–65% of shoppers during the first festive fortnight. So, India’s next wave of e-commerce growth is increasingly coming from smaller cities rather than the country’s biggest urban markets.

3. Category Trends in 2025

Electronics continued to dominate festive sales, but they weren’t the most interesting part of the story.

The real growth came from everyday indulgences and lifestyle purchases- beauty products, home upgrades, premium food, gifting, and more. That’s especially important for D2C brands because these are categories where differentiated products and strong brand affinity matter far more than competing on price alone.

Source: Datum Intelligence - “Festive Barometer” Report (2025/2026 Editions), Redseer Strategy Consultants – India’s Festive E-commerce Market Report.

The broader retail market reflected the same trend. Overall festive retail, online and offline combined, grew by around 10–12% year over year, while e-commerce alone expanded by roughly 20–25%.

The difference highlights a larger trend: festive shopping is steadily moving online. With every season, e-commerce is capturing a bigger share of consumer spending that once went primarily to offline stores.

4. Quick Commerce Became a Core D2C Channel

Blinkit, Zepto, and Swiggy Instamart collectively closed 2025 with roughly ₹95,000 crore in annual GMV, while quick-commerce demand spiked by 60-70% during the festive week itself. Brands like IGP.com leaned into 30-minute delivery for last-minute gifting, while premium hampers remained on e-commerce platforms for more planned, considered purchases.

For D2C brands, this created a new opportunity to capture moments that traditional e-commerce cannot always serve. But the opportunity comes with a different set of economics.

For example, a skincare brand selling a ₹299 face wash. The brand may generate around 30% net contribution on a quick-commerce platform, compared with a significantly higher margin on its own website. On the surface, the quick-commerce sale looks less attractive. But the platform also gives the brand access to high-intent customers at the exact moment they are ready to buy.

In 2025, quick commerce proved that it could do more than deliver products faster. It changed when, where, and why consumers choose to buy them.

How Should Brands Prepare for Festive 2026?

A customer might see your product on Instagram in the morning, watch a creator talk about it in the afternoon, check reviews on Amazon in the evening, and finally order it through a quick-commerce app. The customer journey is no longer a straight line. For D2C brands, Festive 2026 is going to be about being present wherever the customer is shopping. I

Here are a few key points from 2025 that you should act on now to build a stronger Festive 2026 strategy, rather than waiting until October to make changes.

1. Paid Acquisition Is Getting More Expensive in 2026

This is probably the single biggest thing you should prepare for!

Paid acquisition is getting harder, with rising CAC putting more pressure on D2C brands to improve efficiency and retention.

One 2026 dataset from a D2C operator covering 200+ Indian brands found that Meta CAC increased from roughly ₹380 in 2025 to ₹502 in 2026. At the same time, repeat-purchase performance emerged as a much bigger driver of overall profitability.

2. Quick commerce is not optional for many categories anymore

Quick commerce has moved beyond “milk and groceries.”

Beauty, personal care, accessories, snacks, gifting, household products and other categories are increasingly finding their way onto these platforms. Meta reported that 45% of festive shopping in its 2025 research was happening through quick commerce, while quick commerce already represented nearly two-thirds of online grocery orders.

And in 2026, the expansion is continuing: large quick-commerce players are even exploring delivery of higher-value electronics and appliances.

3. Build a “Hero SKU” Strategy

A better approach is to build your festive strategy around a small number of products, with each one playing a specific role in the customer journey.

Start with 1 Hero SKU. This is your acquisition product, which you need to lead with in ads, landing pages, and campaigns. Then add 2–3 high-margin products that act as your profit drivers.

Introduce 1 bundle designed to increase AOV, and 1 premium product to capture customers who are willing to spend more. Finally, have 1 repeat-purchase product that gives customers a reason to come back after the festive season.

4. Creators become even more important in 2026

Consumers increasingly discover products through creators, short-form video and social content.

Meta’s 2025 festive research found that creators were particularly influential in helping shoppers evaluate deals, while AI was also becoming part of the shopping journey.

Google/Deloitte’s 2026 outlook goes even further, projecting creators to influence 30% of total retail spend as India’s e-commerce ecosystem evolves toward discovery, validation and instant purchase.

5. Regional India Is a Massive Opportunity

One of the biggest opportunities for 2026 is outside the usual metro cities. In 2025, Tier-II and Tier-III cities made up roughly 60% of festive orders in Unicommerce’s dataset. So don’t limit your festive strategy to Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore.

Cities like Chennai, Coimbatore, Jaipur, Lucknow, Indore, and Kochi are becoming increasingly important. But simply translating your ads won’t be enough. Understand what matters locally and build the campaign around that insight.

6. Build Your WhatsApp Database Now

A customer you acquire through Meta is valuable, but the real opportunity is turning that customer into someone you can reach directly through WhatsApp and CRM.

Start capturing key customer data like their name, phone number, city, product interest, purchase history, and purchase frequency. Then use it to build simple, automated customer journeys.

Day 0: Order confirmation
Day 7: Product education
Day 15: Cross-sell
Day 30: Review request
Day 45: New product launch
Day 60: Reorder reminder
Festive: Early access or exclusive offers

7. RTO and COD Will Matter More Than You Think

If you’re selling in India, especially across Tier-II and Tier-III cities, COD can have a direct impact on your unit economics and profitability.

Instead of trying to eliminate COD altogether, experiment with ways to reduce the risk:

• COD confirmation

• WhatsApp confirmation

• Small prepaid incentives

• Partial COD

• Address verification

• Pin-code level RTO scoring

Final Thoughts

The festive season can quickly turn into a race around numbers - GMV, orders, ROAS, growth percentages and sales targets. But behind all those numbers is a simpler story: people are feeling more comfortable spending, and they are shopping differently than they did a few years ago.

So, if there is one thing you should take away from Festive 2026, it is this: Don’t wait for the festive season to begin before preparing for it. Build your audience before the festive rush. Know which products belong on your website, marketplaces or quick commerce. Get your inventory, fulfilment and compliance sorted before things get hectic.

The festive rush will bring customers to your doorstep. What you do next will decide if they stay!

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Sachit Sharma spent his college years chasing the highest campus package, only to realise years later that the real education was watching founders build. At Flipkart, he saw the risks people took to turn nothing into something- and it changed what he wanted for himself. Today, as co-founder of Deepsolv, he's building the decision-making brain marketing teams didn't know they were missing.

I don’t think I always knew I wanted to become an entrepreneur.

I was born in Himachal and grew up in Delhi. In my family, everyone had jobs. Also, there was never really any pressure on me to follow a particular path. Being the youngest probably helped, as I was given the freedom to figure things out on my own.

But even as a kid, I liked building things..

During school and college, I was always organising events - chess tournaments, coding events, getting people together for activities etc. I didn’t call it entrepreneurship back then. I just enjoyed taking an idea and making it happen.

The 9-to-5 that inspired me

When I joined Delhi College of Engineering, I was honestly no different from most students around me. There was this huge craze around placements and getting the highest package. So I made that my goal. I wanted to be one of the students with the highest package, and fortunately, I put in the work, sharpened my problem-solving, and eventually got there.

That took me to Flipkart, and when I joined, I already had a plan in mind. I thought I’d spend two or three years there, learn as much as I could, build a network and then start something of my own. But two years became three, and three became five because I genuinely loved what I was doing.I was one of the early engineers involved in building a machine learning platform for Flipkart, working in the Marketing, Merchandising and Monetisation team and leading the AI engineering efforts.

But the biggest thing that Flipkart gave me was seeing how people build their own dreams. I saw the passion founders had, the risks they took and the amount of uncertainty they were willing to live with. That really stayed with me. Slowly, I started feeling that I wanted to experience that myself. I wanted to know what it felt like to take something from zero and build it.

My first startup

In 2022, I started Sign3.ai. If I’m being honest, we had no idea what we were doing when we started. There were three of us from tier-1 colleges and good backgrounds, but we didn’t have a perfectly validated idea. We eventually had a three-page Google Doc explaining what we wanted to build.

The crazy part was that we managed to find investors who believed in us even before we had built anything. They invested based on that idea and their belief in us.

We started building, got customers, worked with neobanks and marketplaces and eventually scaled the company to around $500K ARR. I eventually exited Sign3, and around the same time, ChatGPT was starting to take off. I was really excited by the possibilities LLMs were opening up and knew I wanted my next company to be built around AI.

Starting DeepSolv

After Sign3, I knew I wanted to build again, and this time around Gen AI.

That’s how Purby, my co-founder, and I started Deepsolv. We had known each other since college and had already worked together at Flipkart and Sign3.

Initially, we wanted to build around social commerce. We felt the space was evolving quickly, and saw an opportunity to use generative AI to help brands grow through organic social media. But soon realised it was a vitamin, not a painkiller. The problem wasn’t tied closely enough to business outcomes, and the subjective nature of content and engagement made it hard to productise. What we gradually realised was that the bigger opportunity was in helping marketing teams make better decisions around the parts of marketing most directly tied to P&L.

We kept talking to customers and experimenting until enterprise customers approached us with a different problem: managing negative comments on their paid ads. Unlike our earlier use case, they were willing to pay for it upfront.

If a customer is willing to pay you to solve a problem, that’s a very different signal from someone simply saying they like your product. It made us realise that we were looking at the wrong part of the problem. By the end of 2025, we decided to move away from organic social media and focus on performance marketing.

We started with solving the problems like:

Why did one ad work while another didn’t?

What should I test next?

What are competitors doing?

What are customers saying in comments and reviews?

What trends are emerging that could turn into a creative opportunity?

As AI makes it easier for teams to create and test more content than ever before, we believe the harder problem will increasingly be deciding what to create, what to test, and what to scale.

That’s what we’re trying to answer with Deepsolv. We bring together ad performance data, competitor intelligence, social trends, comments, reviews and other customer signals to help brands understand not just what is happening, but why it is happening - and what to test, iterate, scale or kill next. The goal is to build an intelligence layer that gets better as it learns from every campaign and experiment.

The hardest ‘No’

The hardest thing was learning not to confuse activity with progress. As engineers, it is easy to keep building because a customer asks for something, especially when there is money attached to it. But we realised that if every customer requirement became part of the roadmap, we would slowly lose sight of the product we actually wanted to build.

So we became much more disciplined about what we said yes to. If something didn’t fit the problem we wanted to solve or the direction of the product, we would rather walk away from the revenue. At the same time, we stopped treating interest as validation. We moved away from free trials and started asking customers to pay for pilots.

Interest is easy to get. The real validation is when someone is willing to pay to solve the problem.

The reality of being a founder

I think people often see startups through milestones, funding, customers, growth, exits. But the day-to-day reality is very different. There’s a lot of uncertainty, self-doubt, and plenty of moments when you question whether you’re solving the right problem or moving fast enough.

What I’ve learned is that you still have to show up the next day and keep going.

There was a time when I didn’t really understand what people meant by “creating value.” I used to hear successful founders talk about it, but it felt abstract. I understand it much better now.

You really feel it when something you’ve built starts changing outcomes for someone else, when a customer makes more revenue because of your product, when a team becomes significantly more effective, or when they can do something they simply couldn’t do before. That’s when you realise that building a company is ultimately about creating value for other people.

That, for me, has become one of the most rewarding parts of entrepreneurship.

The people and wins behind Deepsolv

One of the biggest moments for us at Deepsolv was getting one of the world’s leading marketing agencies as a customer. It was a huge validation, not only that the problem was real, but that the same problem existed within sophisticated marketing teams managing large volumes of campaigns and creative decisions.

I’m also lucky to have a cofounder who complements me well, a great team, and angels who believe in us. Purby takes care of product and technology, while I focus on business and sales. We don’t always agree on everything, but we’ve learned to trust each other’s judgment and give each other space to own our areas. It makes things a lot easier when things get chaotic, because we know we can rely on each other to figure things out.

And honestly, building a company can get intense, so I think it’s important to have things outside the work to look forward to. We’ve promised the team that once we close our current round, we’re taking everyone on a vacation. When you’re building something for the long term, you need reasons to pause, celebrate, and enjoy the journey along the way.

Five years from now

If you had asked me in college what success meant, I probably would have said getting the highest package. At Flipkart, success was about learning as much as I could and becoming really good at what I was doing. With my first startup, it became about building and scaling a company.

Today, I think about it differently. I want to build something that people genuinely need. Something that creates real value and can become much bigger than me.

For Deepsolv, the five-year vision is to become the decision intelligence layer for marketing teams. Today, we are starting with creative performance, helping teams understand what is working, why it is working and what they should test next.

Over time, we want Deepsolv to help teams make better marketing decisions across the board and gradually become the intelligence layer behind how modern marketing teams operate.

Life beyond building

Outside of work, I’m naturally curious about how people think and live. I enjoy geopolitics, spirituality, different cultures and philosophies, and I often go down rabbit holes that expose me to perspectives very different from my own, especially stories from unusual or remote parts of the world.

I think that curiosity helps me question my assumptions and broaden how I look at things. I also love cricket, badminton and pickleball, and enjoy meeting people who make me think differently.

Looking back, a lot of my journey has been shaped by the people I met, the things I saw and the chances I decided to take. I’ve always enjoyed turning ideas into something real, now I get to do it with a team, a product and a problem that matters.

At Razorpay Rize, we’re drawn to founders who build patiently, stay close to the problem, and don’t get carried away by the hype. Sachit Sharma is a great example. He spent months talking to customers, let go of an idea that wasn’t working, and kept iterating until he found a problem people genuinely cared about and were willing to pay to solve.

That's a version of entrepreneurship most founders will actually recognise in themselves.

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Shipping a product from a factory in Tirupur or Moradabad to a customer’s doorstep in Texas is far more complex than simply handing the goods to a freight forwarder. It involves multiple stages- packaging, documentation, customs clearance, freight, warehousing, last-mile delivery, and more. Each stage comes with its own costs, risks, timelines, and potential points of failure.

In this guide, we’ll walk through the complete logistics journey from the moment your goods leave the factory to the moment they reach an American customer’s doorstep. We’ll also look at why Amazon FBA has emerged as one of the most powerful distribution options for Indian exporters looking to build and scale their presence in the US market.

Warehouse to Port: International Freight

This stage of the export journey covers everything from inland transportation and port handling in India to international ocean or air freight and arrival at a US port or fulfilment centre. Choosing between air and sea freight, selecting the right shipping route, consolidating cargo, and working with the right logistics partners can make a substantial difference to your overall economics.

Ocean Freight vs. Air Freight

FCL vs. LCL

How to Choose the Right Freight Forwarder?

Your freight forwarder is arguably the most important logistics partner you will have. They handle booking, documentation, customs at origin, and coordination with your customs broker at the US end.

What to look for:

• Experience specifically with India-to-US shipments (not just general international freight)

• In-house or strong partner relationships with a licensed US customs broker

• Familiarity with your product category (hazmat, food, textiles, and other categories have specific documentation requirements)

• Transparent fee structures (watch for destination handling charges that are not quoted upfront)

• References from other Indian exporters you can actually call

Do not default to the cheapest forwarder. One documentation error can get your shipment held at US customs for weeks. The cost of that delay dwarfs any savings on freight.

US Customs

Once your shipment reaches the US, it still has one important hurdle to clear: customs. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reviews commercial shipments entering the country, and while most shipments move through smoothly, missing or incorrect paperwork can quickly turn into delays, extra charges, and frustrated customers.

Here’s what you’ll typically need:

• Commercial Invoice: Think of this as the primary document for your shipment. It should clearly state what you are shipping, the HS code, country of origin, and declared value.

• Packing List: This tells customs and your logistics partners what is actually inside the shipment, including the number of packages, weight, dimensions, and contents.

• Bill of Lading or Air Waybill: This is the transport document that accompanies your shipment, depending on whether you are shipping by sea or air.

• Certificate of Origin: Depending on your product and the applicable import requirements, you may need to provide proof of where the goods were manufactured.

• Product-Specific Certifications: Some products come with additional compliance requirements. Food products, for example, may have FDA requirements, while certain electronics may need FCC compliance and children’s products may fall under CPSC requirements.

For routine shipments, an experienced broker can often complete the clearance process within 24-48 hours of arrival, provided all documentation is in order.

While customs broker fees, typically around 150-400 per shipment for standard cargo, add to your logistics costs, they can be well worth it.

Fulfilment Centre to Customer Doorstep

The last mile is the final leg of your logistics journey, getting your product from a US warehouse or fulfilment centre to the end customer or retail location. Despite being the shortest part of the journey, it can often be one of the most expensive and operationally challenging.

For B2B shipments, last-mile delivery is relatively simple. If you are supplying a retailer or distributor, a trucking company can move pallets from the port or warehouse to the buyer’s facility, after which the buyer typically takes care of the remaining distribution.

DTC (direct-to-consumer) shipping is a different story. Instead of moving one large shipment to a single location, you may need to send hundreds or thousands of individual packages to different addresses across the US. Customers also expect these orders to arrive quickly, often within 2–5 days.

Some of the major last-mile delivery options in the US include:

• UPS and FedEx

• USPS

• Amazon Logistics

• Regional carriers: Companies such as OnTrac, LSO, and Spee-Dee can offer lower rates in the regions they serve and can be useful for larger-volume shippers looking to reduce delivery costs

For a typical 1 lb parcel, last-mile shipping can cost around 6–12, depending on the delivery zone, package dimensions, service level, and carrier. Costs increase as the package gets heavier or larger.

How Amazon FBA Simplifies US Logistics

If there is one logistics solution that has made it significantly easier for international sellers, including Indian exporters, to enter the US market, it is Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon)!

You send your inventory to Amazon’s fulfilment centres in the US, and Amazon takes care of what happens next. It stores your products, picks and packs orders as they come in, ships them to customers, and manages returns.

Products fulfilled through Amazon FBA are eligible for Prime, giving them access to Amazon’s fast delivery network and making them more attractive to the millions of Prime customers in the US.

In return, you pay Amazon storage fees for holding your inventory and fulfilment fees when orders are shipped.

FBA Cost Breakdown

FBA fees depend on product size and weight. For a standard-size item (let us say a 1 lb product in a box under 15 x 12 x 0.75 inches):

• Fulfilment fee: Approximately $3.50-5.00 per unit (picking, packing, shipping, customer service, returns)

• Storage fee: Approximately $0.75-2.40 per cubic foot per month (lower in Jan-Sept, higher in Oct-Dec peak season)

How to Ship to Amazon FBA?

You don’t send individual customer orders from India to Amazon. Instead, you ship your inventory in bulk, usually cartons or pallets, to Amazon’s fulfilment centres in the US.

The process typically looks like this:

1. Create your Amazon listings: Set up your products in Amazon Seller Central and enrol the eligible products in FBA.

2. Create an FBA shipment plan: Amazon will provide instructions on where your inventory needs to be sent and which fulfilment centre or centres to use.

3. Apply the required labels: Products need the appropriate Amazon FNSKU barcodes. You can label the products yourself or pay Amazon to apply the labels for you.

4. Ship your inventory from India: Your goods can be shipped directly to the designated Amazon fulfilment centre or routed through a US-based 3PL or prep centre that handles labelling, inspection, and Amazon-compliant packaging.

5. Amazon receives your inventory: Once Amazon receives and processes the shipment, your inventory becomes available for sale, and Amazon takes over fulfilment when customers place orders.

However, while FBA simplifies much of the fulfilment process, it comes with its own limitations like:

• Inventory placement fees

• Long-term storage fees

• Stranded inventory

• Return rates in some categories (apparel, electronics) can run 15-30%

FBA vs. 3PL: Which Is Right for You?

Third-party logistics providers, or 3PLs, are US-based fulfilment companies that store your inventory, process customer orders, ship products, and often manage returns. Unlike FBA, a 3PL isn’t tied to a single marketplace, giving you the flexibility to fulfil orders across Amazon, your own website, wholesale customers, and other sales channels from the same inventory pool.

A 3PL can be a better fit when:

• You sell across multiple channels

• Your products are large or heavy

• You need custom fulfilment

• You want greater control

Good 3PLs for Indian exporters entering the US market: ShipBob, Flexport Logistics (formerly Deliverr), Red Stag Fulfilment and regional 3PLs near your target customer base.

Building a Scalable Logistics Strategy

A scalable logistics setup might evolve like this:

Early Stage (Years 1–2):
Start with one reliable freight forwarder, a US customs broker, FBA for DTC fulfilment, and LCL ocean freight for smaller shipment volumes.

Growth Stage:
As volumes increase, move from LCL to FCL where it makes economic sense. Add a 3PL to handle orders from your own website and other non-Amazon channels. At this stage, you can also start negotiating better freight rates directly with carriers or through digital freight platforms.

Scale Stage:
With larger and more predictable volumes, you may move to dedicated container shipments, use a bonded warehouse near a major US port, and eventually bring in a US-based logistics manager or third-party logistics account manager.

Final Thoughts

A shipment stuck at customs, an unexpected freight charge, or a last-mile cost you didn’t account for can turn a profitable order into a loss. And the bigger you get, the more expensive those small mistakes become.

Before your first shipment, find a freight forwarder and customs broker you can rely on. Understand the numbers behind FBA before choosing it. And make sure you know exactly what it will cost to get your product from your factory to your customer’s doorstep.

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Hey Everyone! ✨

July was a little bit of everything- busy days, small wins, big moments, and plenty of memories in between. As we wrap up the month, let’s take a moment to look back at what happened at Rize, the moments that brought us together, and the things we’re proud of.

Here’s your July Rize Recap!

MILESTONE MOMENTS 👑

Every month, our favourite updates come from the founders themselves.

We've witnessed some jaw-dropping milestones within our community, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

A big congratulations to these founders! Each step forward is a victory on the path to success. So, keep pushing and growing!

ARTICLES OF THE MONTH 📜

Missed our articles last month? Check the top ones that fuelled our Founders!

✍️ The Half-Year Review: Questions Every Founder Should Ask By July

A practical guide for founders to reflect on progress, identify gaps, and reset priorities for the second half of the year.

✍️ Why “Made in India” Is Becoming a D2C Brand Advantage in the US?

How Indian D2C brands can turn their manufacturing heritage into a competitive advantage in the US market.

✍️ How to Kill Features Before They Kill Your Product Roadmap?

Why founders should regularly cut low-impact features to keep product roadmaps focused and effective.

Discover more such insightful reads in the Vault! The collection is growing every day.

Vault by Razorpay Rize

Thoughts from a thriving community of founders and entrepreneurs to fuel innovation, learn from each other's journeys, and Rize together.

STORIES FROM RIZE-PRENEURS 📎

This month we highlighted Yuvraj Dagur, co-founder of Clevrr AI and a first-generation, self-taught entrepreneur. Yuvraj is building at the intersection of AI, advertising, and D2C, helping brands get more out of every rupee they spend on customer acquisition.

Vault by Razorpay Rize

Building the AI Partner Every D2C Founder Needs: The Story of Yuvraj & Clevrr AI

Yuvraj Dagur is a first-generation, self-taught entrepreneur who started building companies in his second year of college- long before he had a name for what he was doing. He previously co-founded LocalEyes, a community-led app connecting locals to their city, and is now the co-founder of Clevrr AI, helping D2C brands make more money with the same Ad sp…

Read more

3 months ago · Razorpay Rize

KEY HIGHLIGHTS THIS MONTH💡

New initiatives, exciting launches, and everything you need to stay ahead.

✨Rize at Razorpay Conclave, Pune✨

Razorpay Conclave 2026 made its way to Pune this month, bringing together founders, operators, and business leaders for honest conversations, fresh ideas, and plenty of learnings from the trenches of building in India.

It was great meeting the people behind some of the country’s most exciting businesses and hearing what they’re working on next.

And we’re just getting started. Keep an eye out for the next Conclave- we might be heading to your city!

✨Rize D2C+ Festive Program✨

The Rize D2C+ Festive Program is officially live! As the festive season gets closer, we’re bringing you a bunch of practical sessions, resources, and playbooks to help D2C brands prepare, plan, and make the most of the biggest-selling season of the year.

Want to join the upcoming sessions?

RSVP Now

MEET OUR NEWEST FOUNDERS: ONBOARDING EDITION 👥

Say hello to the latest group of founders joining the Rize Communities! They're full of bold ideas and big dreams, ready to take the startup world by storm.

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

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Every founder ends up doing sales before they’ve hired anyone to do it. The problem isn’t finding a list of names- it’s the hours lost finding contact details, writing forty personalised-sounding emails, and losing track of who replied. This doesn’t need an SDR team on day one. It needs a few hours and the right stack.

The flow is straightforward:

Lead sourcing → Enrichment → Outreach copy → Sequencing & sending → Reply tracking → Analytics

The Stack

There’s no need to over-invest here. Most of this stack is free up to a modest monthly volume- enough for an early founder doing outbound alone. Pick based on how much manual list-building you’re willing to do versus how fast you need contacts in hand.

Lead Sourcing

• Apollo.io: Free tier includes a limited number of verified contact credits a month, plus filters by role, industry, and company size- the fastest way to a usable list without a data team.

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Not free, but the cheapest paid tier is often worth it for the search filters alone if your buyers are role-specific. Manual, but the data quality is hard to beat.

• Hunter.io: Free tier finds and verifies email addresses for a given domain- useful once you already know which companies you want, just not who to email.

• LeadsBridge: A marketing automation and integration platform that connects advertising platforms with CRMs, email marketing tools, and other business software.

Enrichment

• Apollo’s built-in enrichment: If you’re already sourcing from Apollo, its free tier fills in title, company size, and LinkedIn URL without a second tool.

• Clearbit Connect (free for Gmail): Pulls company and contact details straight into your inbox while you’re drafting- no separate dashboard to check.

Outreach Copy

• ChatGPT / Claude (Free): Drafts a personalised first line from a prospect’s LinkedIn bio or company description in seconds- the manual version of this is what actually burns founder hours.

• Lavender: Free tier gives real-time coaching on email length, tone, and readability as you write- catches the overly formal or overly long email before it’s sent.

Sequencing & Sending

• Mailmeteor / GMass (free tier via Gmail): Sends personalised mail merges directly from Gmail, which keeps deliverability closer to a normal inbox than a dedicated sending tool at low volume.

• Instantly.ai: Free trial covers a proper multi-step sequence with automatic follow-ups if a prospect doesn’t reply- worth it once single emails stop being enough.

Reply Tracking

• HubSpot Free CRM: Free tier tracks every email opened, clicked, and replied to against a contact record- no spreadsheet to keep updating by hand.

• A shared Google Sheet: Free, and genuinely fine at low volume- one row per prospect, one column for status, updated after every batch sent.

Analytics

• Built-in sequencing analytics: Instantly and Mailmeteor both show open and reply rates on their free tier- usually enough to judge if a message is landing.

• HubSpot’s free reporting: Rolls open, reply, and meeting-booked rates into one view if you’re already tracking there.

A useful principle: the best AI tool in this stack is the one drafting your first line, not the one sending the email. A well-personalised opener beats a perfectly sequenced but generic one every time.

A sensible starting default: Apollo’s free tier for sourcing + ChatGPT or Claude for first-line personalisation + Mailmeteor for sending + a shared Google Sheet for tracking.

The Build Checklist

☐ Define the exact person you’re emailing before opening a sourcing tool: A vague target (”startup founders”) returns a list that converts poorly. Be specific (”Series A fintech founders in India, hiring in the last 90 days”).

☐ Feed the AI real context: Paste in the prospect’s actual LinkedIn bio or company page before asking for a first line.

☐ Verify emails before sending: A bounced email doesn’t just fail to land- it quietly damages your domain’s sending reputation for every email after it.

☐ Cap the first send at a small batch: Fifteen to twenty emails on day one lets you catch a bad subject line or broken personalisation token before it goes out to two hundred people.

☐ Set a follow-up cadence before the first email goes out: Most replies come from the second or third touch, not the first. Decide the sequence in advance instead of manually remembering who to nudge.

☐ Log every reply, positive or negative: A “not interested” is still data. It tells you whether the message, the targeting, or the timing needs to change.

Measuring Whether It’s Working

Track four numbers from the first batch- together they tell you whether the problem is the list, the message, or the offer:

• Reply rate: Replies divided by emails delivered. This is the number that tells you if the message is actually landing with the audience you picked.

• Positive reply rate: Of the replies, how many are genuinely interested versus a polite no. A healthy overall reply rate with a low positive rate usually points to a targeting problem, not a copy problem.

• Meetings booked: The number that eventually matters most. Track it separately from replies- a lot of interested replies that never convert to a call signals friction in the follow-up.

• Bounce rate: Anything meaningfully above a low single-digit percentage means the list quality, not the message, needs fixing first.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

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Across 615 software products studied by Pendo, an average of just 12% of features generated 80% of daily usage. Other benchmarks land in the same uncomfortable zone: a separate analysis of product usage put the median feature adoption rate at around 6.4%, meaning for every hundred features a team builds, only six or so do most of the work.

For most founders, that means you’ve probably spent weeks or months building features you were genuinely excited about, only to watch them quietly disappear into the menu, untouched. They’re not causing obvious problems, so they stay.

That’s the real story of product debt. It’s the collection of features that no longer earn their place but continue to consume your team’s time and attention. It demands maintenance, multiplies QA cycles, clutters onboarding, and slowly bends your roadmap around its dead weight.

So in this article, we are going to talk about the side of product management almost nobody teaches: what to remove, what evidence to trust, and how to simplify your product without breaking customer confidence.

The Hidden Economics of a Feature You Keep

Founders tend to price a feature by what it costs to build- the sprints, the design hours, the launch. But that’s the cheap part because the expensive part is what it costs to carry, indefinitely, after launch.

Every feature you keep alive draws down four budgets at once:

• Engineering. Every dependency upgrade, security patch, and refactor now has to account for it. Lightly-used features are often the most fragile, because nobody remembers how they work.

• Quality assurance. It’s a row in every regression test, a path that has to keep working even when one user a month touches it.

• Support and docs. It generates tickets, needs articles, and trains your support team on edge cases that serve almost no one.

• User attention. This is what the founders miss. Every extra option raises the cognitive load for the person trying to do the three things they actually came for.

There’s a name for the real loss here: opportunity cost. Engineering hours spent nursing a feature 4% of users touch are hours not spent improving the workflows that matter most.

4 Warning Signs Your Feature Isn’t Working

Dead features don’t crash or throw errors. They just sit there, drawing down attention a little at a time. Here are four signs it’s time to take a closer look.

1. Adoption has drifted below your own success bar

A niche power-user feature might be doing great at 15%, while a core workflow at 15% is a serious problem.

The real question is: Did this feature meet the goal you set when you built it?

If you expected 40% of users to adopt it and it’s been stuck at 5% for months, that’s valuable feedback. The feature is already telling you it isn’t solving the problem you thought it would.

2. Nobody can name the user and the job

Try asking your team two simple questions:

• Who is this feature for?

• What job does it help them get done?

If the answers are vague, inconsistent, or start with “Well, it depends…”, that’s usually a warning sign. The strongest features solve a clear problem for a specific user. The weakest ones are often built to settle internal debates rather than real customer needs.

3. It’s why your codebase feels fragile

Some features become load-bearing walls in a house you’d otherwise renovate. When engineers start sentences with “we can’t, because of…,” you’ve found a feature taxing your future, not just your present.

4. It needs a tour to be understood

A feature that requires a tooltip, an onboarding step, and a support article just to be discovered is making your whole product harder to learn.

The simplest explanation: The feature doesn’t belong there in the first place!

A Framework for Deciding What to Cut/Remove

You don’t need a twelve-tab spreadsheet. You need a consistent way to ask of every feature: Is this earning its place? Two simple approaches do most of the work.

Approach 1: The value-vs-cost map

Plot every feature on two axes- value delivered against cost to maintain. Four quadrants emerge, and each has an obvious action.

The bottom-right quadrant is where roadmaps go to die. Start there.

Approach 2: Score it before you scrap it

Before removing anything, run it past four checks- a stripped-down version of the kind of scoring product teams use to prioritise what to build, applied in reverse to decide what to remove.

• Usage: Is anyone actually using it?

Real adoption among active users, and the trend over time. A feature falling from 20% to 4% is dying on its own; you’re just signing the certificate.

• Value: Is it creating meaningful impact?

Usage without context lies. A low-usage feature can still be essential- if the few who use it are your highest-value accounts, or it’s tied to retention or compliance. Always pair the number with what it drives.

• Cost: What does it take to keep it alive?

Honest carrying costs like maintenance, support, and the complexity it adds to everything around it. If the cost keeps growing while the value stays flat, it’s worth questioning whether it still belongs.

• Strategy: Does it still fit where the product is going?

A feature that made perfect sense two years ago may no longer align with your product vision today. As your company evolves, your product should evolve with it. If a feature no longer supports your direction and isn’t delivering value in another meaningful way, it may be time to let it go.

Example

Say your app has an in-built “team chat” you shipped early. The data: 4% of active users touched it in 90 days, down from 18% at launch.

Value: The people using it are mostly free users. Your paying customers are already communicating in tools they know and use every day, like Slack or WhatsApp.

Cost: Behind the scenes, the feature keeps demanding attention. It has its own infrastructure, creates problems whenever you make technical changes, and adds a steady stream of support questions.

Strategy: Your company is moving toward larger teams and businesses. But those customers already have communication workflows in place. The feature is no longer helping you move in that direction.

At this point, the question isn’t whether the feature works. It does! The question is whether it still deserves the time, money, and attention it takes away from everything else.

What Removing a Feature Looks Like (Example)

One of the best examples is Instagram’s Following Activity tab.

When it launched in 2011, the feature helped people discover content by showing what the accounts they followed were liking and interacting with. Over time, it found a loyal audience. Marketers used it to track competitors, and many users relied on it to keep an eye on what others were doing.

But in 2019, Instagram removed it.

Instagram’s head of product explained that the company wanted to simplify the app. Many users didn’t even know the feature existed, and the Explore page had evolved to do the discovery job the feature was originally designed for. The feature had passionate supporters, but that wasn’t enough to justify keeping it.

That’s what thoughtful feature removal looks like. You remove it when it no longer fits your product strategy, when there’s a better way to solve the same user need, and when the long-term benefits of simplicity outweigh the cost of keeping it.

How to Remove a Public Feature?

Removing a feature is a product decision and a relationship decision at once. Done carelessly, it teaches users your product is unreliable. Done well, most won’t notice. A handful of steps makes the difference.

• Segment before you cut: A feature with 4% overall usage might be a daily ritual for your top ten accounts. Slice the data by segment before deciding; aggregate numbers hide the people who’ll feel it most.

• Announce: A short, honest note- what’s changing, why, and what to use instead- goes further than silence ever will. The surprise is what breaks trust, not the change.

• Offer a path: Where you can, point to an alternative or a migration. People forgive change; they don’t forgive being stranded.

• Sunset, then remove: Hide it from new users first, watch what breaks, then pull it cleanly once you’re sure. A staged deprecation surfaces the hidden dependencies that a hard delete would detonate.

• Log the decision. Six months on, someone will ask why it’s gone. A one-line record of the reasoning saves you from rebuilding your own mistake.

Building a Culture That Isn’t Afraid to Subtract

That culture needs to be built deliberately. Celebrate feature retirements the same way you celebrate new launches. A roadmap shouldn’t only show what’s being built next- it should also show what’s being removed and why.

Make it a habit to review your product regularly. Every quarter, look at it with fresh eyes and ask one simple question:

Knowing what we know today, would we build this feature again?

If the answer is no, it’s worth discussing whether it still belongs.

This mindset is becoming more important than ever. AI has made it dramatically faster to build and ship new features, but users haven’t become any better at discovering, learning, or adopting them. So, removing features can actually help you out!

It will protect the user experience, keep the roadmap focused, and make sure every new addition has room to deliver real value.

Final Thoughts

Early on, building feels like the whole job. You add, and add, and for a while, more genuinely means better. But as the product matures, success is also about what you’re willing to remove.

Removing a feature rarely gets the same attention as launching one. There’s no announcement, no celebration, and no visible milestone. Yet it’s often one of the most valuable decisions a product team can make. It makes the product easier to use, the codebase easier to maintain, and the roadmap easier to execute.

So look at your product this week. Pull the adoption numbers you’ve been avoiding. Run your heaviest, least-loved feature through the four lenses. And if the answer is what you already suspect- let it go before it gets a vote on your roadmap.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

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Every founder ends up needing a page that isn’t the main website. A waitlist for a new feature. A one-off campaign for an event. A “coming soon” page thrown up before the product even exists. These don’t need a dev sprint- they need a few hours and the right stack.

The flow is straightforward:

Copy & design → Page builder → Hosting + domain → Forms → Analytics → Visitor

The Stack

There's no need to over-invest here. Most of this stack tops out at the cost of a domain name- often less than ₹1,000 a year. Pick based on how much design control you want versus how fast you need to ship.

Page Builder

• Carrd: Free plan covers 3 one-page sites (carrd.co subdomain, Carrd branding). Pro Lite removes the branding for $9/year, but connecting a custom domain needs Pro Standard at $19/year. Still the fastest way to a clean single-page site!

• Framer: Free plan is genuinely capable for design and prototyping, but a custom domain requires the Basic plan (~$10/month). Worth it once the page needs real animation or a multi-page feel.

• Notion: Turn any Notion page into a public site instantly, free, on a notion.site subdomain. Good for a quick microsite when design isn’t the point.

• Google Sites: Fully free, including a custom domain if you already own one. Basic, but it works, and it’s the zero-friction default.

Hosting + Domain

• GitHub Pages: Completely free static hosting if you’re comfortable with a bit of code or a static site generator.

• Cloudflare Pages: Free tier includes unlimited bandwidth, and 500 builds a month- one of the most generous free hosting options available for a code-based page.

• Netlify: Free tier includes forms and identity built in, which matters if you’re not using a separate forms tool. Bandwidth is capped, but rarely an issue at landing-page scale.

• Vercel: Free “Hobby” tier is generous and the smoothest option if you’re already building in Next.js. Worth knowing the fine print: the free tier is for non-commercial use, which is a grey area if the page is selling something.

• Cloudflare Registrar: For the domain itself, expect roughly $8-12/year at cost. Point it at whichever host you pick using free DNS.

Forms & Lead Capture

• Tally: Free, unlimited forms, no response caps. Embeds cleanly into any of the builders above.

• Google Forms: Free and familiar, though the embed looks more utilitarian than branded.

• Formspree: Free tier handles a modest number of monthly submissions if you just need a plain HTML form to post to.

Analytics

• Google Analytics (GA4): Free, and the default most people expect to see in a dashboard.

• Microsoft Clarity: Free heatmaps and session recordings- shows you where people drop off, not just that they did.

Uptime

• UptimeRobot: Free plan pings your page every few minutes and emails you the moment it goes down. Cheap insurance for something you’ll otherwise forget to check.

A useful principle: for a single-page campaign or waitlist, the builder-plus-domain combination matters more than the hosting choice underneath it. Don’t overthink the infrastructure for a page that’ll live for six weeks.

A sensible starting default: Carrd (or Framer, if you need more than one page) + a $9-12/year domain + Tally + Google Analytics + Microsoft Clarity

The Build Checklist

☐ Write the page around one action, not one product: Every landing page should ask the visitor to do exactly one thing- sign up, book a call, join a waitlist. Resist adding a second CTA.

☐ Buy the domain before you build: A custom domain takes ten minutes to point once you know where it’s landing.

☐ Wire the form to somewhere you’ll actually check: A Tally or Google Form response sitting unread is worse than not collecting the lead at all. Connect it to email or Slack.

☐ Add analytics before the first visitor, not after the first traffic spike: Retrofitting GA4 after a launch means losing the exact data you needed most- day one behaviour.

☐ Test the page on mobile, on a slow connection: Most first-touch traffic from ads or social lands on a phone. A page that looks great on your laptop can still load slowly or break on a 4G connection.

☐ Set up uptime monitoring if the page is tied to a launch or campaign: A dead page during a Product Hunt launch or a paid campaign is money and attention wasted for no reason.

Measuring Whether It’s Working

Track four metrics from the day the page goes live- together they tell you whether the problem is the page, the traffic, or the offer:

• Conversion rate: Visitors who complete the one action you asked for, divided by total visitors. This is the number that actually matters.

• Bounce rate: How many people leave without doing anything at all. High bounce with low time-on-page usually points to a mismatch between the traffic source and the page’s message.

• Load time: Anything over 2-3 seconds on mobile will quietly cost you conversions you’ll never see in the data.

• Traffic source breakdown: Knowing whether visitors arrived from a tweet, an ad, or a cold email tells you which channel is worth doubling down on- and which page needs a rewrite for that specific audience.

At Razorpay Rize, we get it- building a startup is tough. That’s why we’re more than just a space for connecting with other founders. We’ve got programs, tools, and services designed to take some of the weight off the shoulders and make the journey just a little bit easier.

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Yuvraj Dagur is a first-generation, self-taught entrepreneur who started building companies in his second year of college- long before he had a name for what he was doing. He previously co-founded LocalEyes, a community-led app connecting locals to their city, and is now the co-founder of Clevrr AI, helping D2C brands make more money with the same Ad spend. This is his story, in his own words.

I started my first startup in my second year of college, and I have never worked a job in my life. That sentence alone says a lot about my family- we come from a line of job-doers, and I was the first one who didn’t want to be.

It began earlier than that, really. My childhood friend and I used to build science projects together. By the time we got to college, we’d decided we were done building for competitions. We wanted to build something of our own instead. That something became LocalEyes- a community-led platform where people could ask questions, discover local events and connect with others in their city.

For the next two and a half years, we lived and breathed that product. We grew to over 2.5 lakh users across five states, became part of Google’s startup initiatives and eventually exited after the company was acquired by a competitor.

Finding the Right Problem

After the acquisition, I didn’t rush into another startup. Instead, I started freelancing for dropshippers and early-stage D2C brands, building custom technology solutions for their businesses.

Working closely with different founders exposed me to a pattern I couldn’t ignore. Every business generated massive amounts of data through Shopify, Google Ads and Meta, yet most of it eventually ended up sitting inside spreadsheets that nobody looked at again. It bothered me because that sheet had everything sitting inside it- inventory planning, marketing decisions, COGS, costing- completely unused.

Around the same time, Generative AI was beginning to reshape how software could be built. That’s when I realised the real opportunity was making data understandable for non-technical founders, and it led me to start Clevrr AI.

The Pivot: From a Suite of Tools to an AI Co-Founder

Clevrr AI began as a mission to build B2B SaaS, gen-AI-enabled products for non-technical founders. The first product was Clevrr Sheets- a tool that turned a spreadsheet into a dashboard in under 30 seconds, without needing to know Excel, SQL, or anything close to it.

Convinced that I had found the right opportunity, I packed my bags and moved to Bangalore with a one-way ticket.

The product worked, but the positioning didn’t.

I learned a lesson every founder eventually encounters: if you’re building for everyone, you’re building for no one. That’s when I stepped back and went back to my own data. Almost 90% of my retaining customers were D2C founders- non-technical, e-commerce operators. The gap was obvious once I actually looked for it.

As we narrowed our focus to D2C, we stopped relying on spreadsheets altogether. Instead, we connected directly to first-party data from Shopify, Meta and Google. That pivot transformed Clevrr AI from a suite of products into a standalone AI operating system for D2C brands- bringing sales, marketing, inventory, shipping and payments into one place, with intelligence and action built on top.

Building for the Future of D2C

Around this time, I was joined by my co-founder, Raghav, who was previously a VC at Dallas Venture Capital. Together, we started spending real time understanding just how serious the problem was before building more product.

Performance marketing is where we chose to go deepest. It drives about 70% of revenue for most D2C brands- cut it, and most of them simply don’t survive. Meta and Google are genuinely excellent at audience discovery, and there’s no better tool for finding your buyer than Instagram, YouTube, or Facebook.

Today we’re building a reasoning layer that walks through everything from metrics to creatives, explaining what’s working, what isn’t, what can be done about it, how, and for whom.

What the Journey Has Taught Me

Some of the hardest decisions had nothing to do with technology. Choosing the right co-founder, learning when to say no to customers, investors or opportunities, and staying focused have been far more difficult than building products.

We’ve now completed two years as a company, built a team that truly believes in the vision and earned the opportunity to learn from founders and investors I once only admired from afar. A year ago, some of the people I’m now in conversation with wouldn’t have accepted my LinkedIn request. That transition is its own kind of milestone.

The Good Days & The Bad Days

I’m still figuring this one out. I don’t celebrate the small wins as much as I probably should. The one moment that truly felt surreal was signing the lease for our first office. Beyond that, we usually celebrate milestones with the team over small get-togethers or dinners.

Personally, I tend to process both the highs and the lows on my own. And whenever I feel stuck, I head to the mountains.

However, I genuinely believe that if you love what you do, every day feels a little like a vacation. A big part of my identity is tied to what I’m building, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I’m naturally extroverted, so I enjoy meeting new people and having conversations, and entrepreneurship gives me plenty of opportunities to do both.

That said, building an early-stage startup comes with sacrifices. The biggest one, at least for me, has been my social life. It’s a trade-off that’s rarely talked about, but it’s very real.

What’s Next for Clevrr AI?

The next chapter looks a lot like the previous one- a one-way ticket, this time to the US, and another chance to build something from the ground up.

The challenges will be different, the market will be different, and the learning curve will probably be steeper. But the vision remains the same: To take Clevrr AI to a global stage and build something that helps D2C founders around the world make better decisions with the power of AI.

What we love about Yuvraj's story at Razorpay Rize is how human it feels. There's no perfect plan here, no straight line- just a guy who built science projects with his best friend, took a leap in college, freelanced his way into a real problem, and kept packing his bags whenever the next chapter demanded it.

That honesty is what makes his journey easy to root for, and exactly why we wanted to share it!

Dive into Vault today & unlock a world of possibilities. 

Subscribe now