Building the 2nd Most Influential Fintech Brand in the World With Scripbox CEO & Co-Founder Atul Shinghal

Rui: If you’re looking for stories, strategies, and actionable advice on how entrepreneurial careers start, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Rui, and this is the Startup Journey Podcast, the show where every week I sit down with different entrepreneurs, experts, and thought leaders to dig deep into what it takes to get a startup off the ground.

Today I’m joined by a business leader and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in Fintech, Atul Shingal. Atul’s career began in various traditional financial institutions. institutions, including Capital One. However, after identifying an inefficiency in the way insurance products were sold in India, he launched his own company to combat the problem.

Nine years later and his company’s script box has gone on to raise over 34 million in funding and become India’s leading digital wealth management service. Atul, thank you for taking the time to sit down with me. How are you today?

Atul: Well, thank you very much, Rui, for having me on the show. And yeah, I’m doing very well.

India is a great place to be, and yeah, all is well.

Rui: So let’s go straight for it. Could you give our listeners a quick overview of Scriptbox in your own words and the value you wanted to create when you first set out to build it?

Atul: So, uh, Scriptbox is a digital wealth manager, uh, in the simplest way to put it.

So we basically have used the power of digital and digital is not online. A lot of people confuse online and digital. Digital is a business, online is a channel. So we bring the power of science, math, data, online technology, all of these across the various aspects of wealth management. The intent always has been to bring what I would call simplicity, transparency, and best practices to a category which has traditionally been the want of sort of the offline, uh, financial advisors, banks.

And how do you make that process easy to understand, more efficient, more customer centric, more data driven? Uh, has been the purpose behind ScriptBox. Uh, we started a few years ago, as you mentioned. Uh, yeah, today we are, uh, we serve, uh, over 80, 000 families with their wealth requirements. Uh, and we do the whole stack.

So we basically first spend time understanding the customer’s requirements. Also understanding, see, uh, uh, in this category, it’s a lot about not only what will you invest in the future, but also to understand what you’ve already invested. So, uh, we have multiple tools like financial planning, portfolio audits, etc.

to understand the customer’s needs. Based on their needs on risk appetite, their current position, their needs in the next 20, 30 years, children’s education, retirement planning, we’ll create the appropriate portfolio. A lot of science goes into that in terms of asset allocation, portfolio optimization, fund selection, et cetera.

Based on that, then you obviously execute, right? Rather than filling any paper forms, writing any checks, it’s the traditional methodology. It’s all single click. It’s, uh, I mean, India is obviously a leading payment, uh, provider. So use all the leverage, all the power of that technology to make it very convenient for our customers.

And more importantly, review this in a regular basis, right? So very often you, if you look at anybody’s portfolio, and I’m sure this is a universal problem. It becomes a basket of products you have bought over time. Some insurance policies, some stock, some mutual funds, some liquid fixed deposits. How do you pull it all together into a systematic plan and do it on a regular basis?

And in India, money is a family matter rather than an individual matter. So how do you do it as a family level? So that’s ScriptVox’s core proposition. We’re not, we basically bring the power of digital and obviously that gives you great opportunities of cost, uh, gives you great opportunities of better research, uh, better outcomes for your customers because there’s no human bias and any lag, it’s all, uh, driven by science and math.

So that’s what it is. And that’s why we started to bring the power of, uh, digital to this category

Rui: and so far so good. Thank you. 100 percent clear. Now I have a couple of follow ups already, namely in because I mean, you’re bringing disruption to an industry, right? You’re changing behavior. And as you said, in India, this is a matter of there’s a culture matter there as well, because money, as you said, is a family thing.

So I’m assuming it was somewhat hard to change behavior. Usually traditionally it is. How did you deal with that early on?

Atul: So there are two types of behavior, uh, you need to change, right? So a lot of people mistake, uh, investments or wealth management with short term returns because of the way, I mean, all the pink papers and stock markets and people are really interested in where the indexes have gone, which actually is in a, in a large, and I actually don’t track it personally in spite of being.

The CEO of a wealth management company, because it does, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is your long term plan. So one orientation to change was to tell people to think about wealth in the long term and holistically rather than short term returns on their, on their mutual fund investments tomorrow.

And that is a mindset change, right? It requires people to, and I think it’s just about repeating the story of. Stay invested, keep investing, stay invested, keep investing. So I keep like a broken record. I keep saying these two things to all our customers. And it’s still, um, especially with the COVID crisis, customers who stayed invested have done very well.

Customers who panicked and did different things and wanted to time the market have not done so well. That’s one mindset change. The second mindset change was about Trusting that your money was safe in a digital space because it took some time because after all it is money. But as people got used to banking online, people got used to payments online, that’s accelerated our, obviously COVID has accelerated.

The third, obviously, any, any money manager, any wealth manager, the core proposition has to be trust, right? All of this, what I was talking about is basically enables and disrupts, but unless you’re able to win the trust of the customer, uh, the behavior change will not happen. And that’s taken us, uh, obviously it’s due creation.

It’s about staying true to our purpose of being simple, honest, transparent, which, uh, as I said, without sounding, because in our boots, we have an NPS of 60, right? And if you carry, if you track wealth management companies globally, I’m sure we are in the top, top decile, if not top 1 percent in terms of customer love.

Yeah. So we’ve been able to change behaviors to the extent that we’ve been able to convince customers. And again, it’s very unlikely that customers will trust you with all their wealth to begin with. These are, these are slightly longer journeys. Customers trial you out. They’ll start with say 5, 000 rupees or 10, 000 rupees or somebody will start with say a hundred thousand rupees, which is still a small amount before they start trusting you with the larger amounts of them.

So engaging with them, talking to them. So we are very, very heavily focused on. So the way we think about our business is learn. Plan, invest, and you have to go through that journey to start investing. Uh, at times it’s sort of counterintuitive to digital businesses and e commerce businesses, which are all about speed and getting it in.

But easy in is easy out is in our view. Our view is that unless you’ve engaged with the product, unless you’ve learned what it does for you, unless you’ve done your proper planning, it’s unlikely you will invest in the long term. So while, uh, Traditionally, you would want people to transact very quickly and you want to be the flavor of the month.

We’ve chosen to stay away from that. At times it does sound complex to sort of get to, you have to spend time using the calculators, figuring out what to do with it, which I think is the right way to do a wealth management business, not a transaction.

Rui: Absolutely. And I’m 100 percent agreeing with this because the stay invested, keep investing the consistency, right?

Repetition over time. That’s actually how, not only how you, you change behaviors, but actually how you build brands as well. So crucial lesson there. Let me go back a bit just to ask you, how did the idea for Scriptbox come up because we were preparing this, this conversation earlier. And I saw, uh, I think it was on your LinkedIn profile that the idea came out of frustration.

Can you expand a bit on that?

Atul: It was a combination of, uh, sort of experience, frustration, um, and a couple of personal episodes. So a little bit of background, right? So I had built a digital bank assurance venture in South Africa, part of my career, professional career. I was, uh, in South Africa with capital of an old YouTube for about seven, eight years in the last two of those, and probably before our time, and this is when I realized the difference between online and digital.

So we had built a full stack digital business, understood the power of digital. Eight came to sort of set up the old Mutuals asset management company, right? We applied for a license to become a mutual fund man manufacturer and a wealth management business similar to, similar to what Old Mutual has in say, UK called Scania or, but unfortunately Lehman Brothers happened.

But by that time I had got a good understanding that there was something. Fundamentally could be done better in the, in the industry. A lot of change was happening. Uh, upfront commissions had disappeared. So the distributor industry was in a flux. Then there’s an incident which happened, which was in about 2009.

I was in a sabbatical. Uh, I had shut down that AMC, uh, venture and I was sitting with my parents and God bless his soul. He is a retired three star general from Iran now. A very senior, very educated. And he and my mother were arguing about a hundred thousand rupees, which is a reasonable amount in India.

And he was saying, I’ll give this to a person X, right? And my mother saying, no, no, you don’t know anything as our wives, that none of you give it to Mrs. Y who’s our neighbor, who gives me 2000 rupees back. Right? So there’s a kickback commission available. So, and I was listening to this very carefully saying, hold on.

I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m actually the CEO of a asset management company. So if you want to talk about money, I might not be a bad guy. You stay out of this. And you know, I heard this whole conversation and then I tried to figure out the next time of what is happening. And I figured out that this was common practice, right?

It was either based on somebody told me so, so I did this. And it’s a highly educated, highly qualified and money is very precious to them. It is not. And when I spoke to this person who was investing, I asked him, how do you decide? And you’re in a small town. And he said, no, no, whatever the mutual fund company gives me.

As me, they tell me this is a good thing. I do that. So now that scared me. I said, see this. Something is wrong here because there is so much information available. In a sense, there was too much information available. So you had all these, uh, fantastic newspapers, and they’ll give you a list of top 50 mutual funds to invest in.

And as we sort of looked at the category, we realized that we could do better. So a combination of understanding the opportunity, digital, the broken systems, we said India deserves better. So, and that’s how ScriptVox came about and, um, yeah, our venture capitals were nice people and they said, yeah, if you’ve got the idea, we’ll help you execute it.

And we started to actually, uh, at a point in time, I mean, it’s quite funny. So there were 5, 000 schemes as they call it, and many funds, uh, at that point in time, and there were about 850. Equity funds, right? Equity linked or, uh, which are investing. When we unpeeled the onion, they were, they were all investing in 243 stocks.

So there were more mutual funds than actual stocks they were investing in. So you realize that this was just, everybody’s doing the same thing. And typical newspaper will tell you the top 50, top 75 funds to invest in. If I want to invest I’m just getting started. I’m going to start investing 10, 000 rupees.

Where will I stick my money? How do I decide where to do it? We said, let’s remove all this complexity, right? We’ll just make it so simple for customers. And, uh, we, there’s a, I mean, we have to, we owe it to a lady called Srini Iyengar, who’s a behavioral finance scientist. She had proven that keeping it simple matters.

So we actually went to market with only four funds, uh, doing that. So typically anybody would give you lots of choice and we took away all choice, right? It was a completely counterintuitive, but I think the best thing since sliced bread because customers didn’t, uh, they just came to simplicity. The example we give is that, uh, when people want to, when people are hungry, they want to eat a sandwich.

They don’t want to go to the kitchen and figure out where to find the mayo and the butter and the bread and the cheese and then figure out which cheese to use Gouda or Edammer. Brie, right? They’re just from a sandwich. They’re hungry. So we said, we’ll figure out what you’re, how hungry you are, and we’ll figure out what your appetite is, and we’ll give you the right sandwich.

So that’s how, uh, ScriptBox is always believed, by keeping, keeping it very simple for the customers, while obviously using all the science available to us at the level below that.

Rui: You mentioned earlier that now you offer, and actually I know, the service, and you provide multiple tools, right? But I’m assuming that right from the start, that wasn’t exactly the case, because as you well said, you, We’re always very user centric, bringing simplicity to the process, trying to listen to your users and then adapt accordingly, which is also a crucial lesson for entrepreneurs.

Uh, but I’m assuming that the result that we see today is iteration is the result of iterations over time. How did all, how did you start? What was there in the core product from, from, from the start?

Atul: So the core proposition of using the power of data and science to do the right curation for our customers has always been integral to what we do.

Now, you combine that with the simplicity and ease of use, right? We’ve always said that the UX or CX has to be so intuitive that it just works. And yes, the product and the services and the experience have obviously evolved over time. So earlier when we started, uh, we sort of second guessed the customer’s needs and went with one product really for long term wealth, which had four equity funds in it because that time four diversified funds were sufficient because our customers were just getting started.

They were early savers. Uh, and when you did a risk profiling, they probably all scored between a six and a seven and they were all looking to create the wealth. But as customers grew with us, we added something, what we call short term money, uh, which is Something will require in the next one year, three years.

We added a tax saving product. We added an emergency corpus because people required. And that’s what we kept building on. So as our customers grew with us and their needs and their wealth buys grew, uh, about 24 months ago, we did a deep dive again. Right. And we said, okay, let’s go back to the basics and figure out what our customers want from us.

There is a, there’s a very famous, and I’ll use Hindi words here, Dil Mange More, which basically it’s a Pepsi ad, which says, I, the heart needs more, it wants me to do more for us. So when a customer is telling us that we love what you do, but can you do more? Can you do insurance for us? Can you, can you add stocks to us?

Can you add fixed deposits, bonds? That’s okay. That’s what your need is. We’ll go build around. But before we do that, we want to spend more time understanding your needs. So we now, now have a full stack. Again, we’ve grown with our customers, we’ve listened to them. Uh, we have. Multiple outreach programs. We do user listening.

My email address is publicly available. They write to us. We do a monthly NPS survey. And more than the NPS code itself, we are listening to what they want. So yeah, the services have evolved. Now we are a full stack wealth manager. So we do enough time understanding the customer’s needs more discreetly and telling customers to tell us what they want.

Get them into creating the right portfolios. As I said, we started with four equity funds, uh, Baskets now typically 2023 funds, again, depending on somebody investing 10, 000 rupees is very different from somebody investing a hundred thousand, right? So the appropriate diversification approach, appropriate conservatism, appropriate goal based investing, but keeping true to the cause of simplicity, transparency, and science for data selection.

Unbiased algorithms for, for creating the portfolios. Now, as I said, we’ve added international equity to our platform. We added tax filing and tax saving. And over the next 12 months, we should, we should be, uh, our customers, uh, sort of one home for all their wealth as we call it. So rather than sort of have multiple, uh, places, obviously we can, can be, even if you’re not Investing all your money to us.

At least can you visualize all your money, right? So our current tools allow you to sort of import data from multiple sources So at least you know in one place what your total net worth is. Where are you? Where do you want to go to? so as I uh, you rightly said, uh The, as an entrepreneur, your job is to keep listening, keep building and be reasonably quick about sort of letting go of things, however precious they are to you if they don’t work.

So in, I remember in 2019, we pivoted very hard to becoming completely goal based investing. Right. We said, Hey, you have to have very clear goals. And when we realized that customers are taking a lot of time to articulate their goals, not only that, when they decided and they realized that to meet their goals, the quantum of corpus of money was so large, they were just saying, this is out of my reach.

They won’t even do it. So you were telling them, no, it’s very doable. Just do it systematically. The, the, the fear factor that this, uh, that I needed a million dollars to retire, whatever the number is, I’m just giving you an, I’m actually today at 10, 000. And the gap just seems so large, but where does it tell them that part of compounding, you just invest 10, and do it for so many years and you’ll get to your goal.

But that, So we said, Hey, stop the bus, right? This is not working for our customers. Uh, we’ll repack it. Whereas, so just as an entrepreneur, these lessons about listening, trying, being bold, but backing away, not getting, uh, not drinking your own Kool Aid as we call it, don’t, don’t get carried away. The other thing which we learned was, uh, Sort of as an entrepreneur that I think sometimes early success is a bad thing, right?

So if you have very early success, whatever metric you’re chasing at that time, you get carried away. This is a long journey. Uh, entrepreneurship is a long, long, as I In India, they, so I, any country, I mean, I’ve done this in South Africa, it always takes longer. It always costs more, right? These are two ground rules.

Uh, however good your Excel spreadsheet is, however good your projections are, just remember it’ll take slightly longer and it’ll cost you a little bit more. And so just, just have that patience to build it out.

Rui: Yeah. Perfect. And actually I want to highlight one or two things in there because One thing I see often working with entrepreneurs is that there’s a real threat, an entrepreneur looking at the market and seeing a product they like very much and they set out and say, okay, I’m going to think about the user experience.

I’m solving a different problem, but I have, I need to have all of these features because this is the suite that the user is going to want to use. And then they spend. Years building something without knowing if the market is willing to adopt it without having that user feedback, spending a lot of money, spending a lot of their, everything they have in the end.

And which is a great risk, right? Because if you think about not only ScriptBox, Amazon, for instance, it started as a bookshop, right? So you go to. the path of least resistance to solve one problem, the most crucial problem, then you listen and then you build on top of that, right? So that was one of the lessons I wanted to, to, to, to highlight because I believe it’s, it’s very important.

Then again, everything taking longer and costing more than you expect is also another one because there are no overnight successes, right? You look at any company in the world and there were struggles in there. So thank you for that. Atul, let’s talk about early adopters. What was the strategy behind acquiring those all important first users?

And here you mentioned going for funds, right? Yeah, I think it was all about learning,

Atul: right. To, to listen to them, to talk to them, figuring out why they bought the product, right? What did they like about it? And how do you scale while keeping that simplicity? So the fill it, shut it, forget it, uh, credo that, Hey, leave it to us.

You just tell us how much money you want to invest, where to invest, when to withdraw, leave that to us, right. Because there’s a lot of trust and early adopters love that solution. Yeah. We, we were able to. To our own surprise, uh, actually we were able to attract customers across life and wealth stages. So if you think about people who are just getting started, have a little bit amount of money, for people who are in middle management, people who are in senior management, the simplicity of our proposition really enamored it.

We had said that the simplicity will appeal to people who are just getting started and different, but people in even larger ticket sizes, larger amounts of wealth came to us. Uh, but obviously retaining them is a, is a very different challenge. You had to add more products. You had to add more experiences.

Yeah. To continuously listen. I mean, to your point you were making earlier, you don’t need to be finding the best example of this. I always feel as Google maps. They were never first to market, right? And even today, every, so every other week or every other month or every so often they will add one little feature, which becomes so critical to your life, but it doesn’t mean that you didn’t, when they didn’t have it, it was a bad product.

So this. Thanks. Desire to go to market at the perfect product is I think fundamentally flawed. You should have a good product, a reasonable product, be open to keep changing it and adding to it and keep growing with it, right? So for me, Google maps is the, is the classical ultimate example, how an entrepreneur should build their business out over time.

And the philosophy we follow is what we call refresh. Rather than rebuild, right? So you don’t need to break down the wall. Every time you think about it, a fresh coat of paint to make it look better. Right? So this, this approach of repainting the wall, when you see that, um, uh, marks, black marks or whatever, and giving it a fresh coat of paint and bringing out that joy to wear of something new is more important than trying to say, okay, I’ll break down everything and people.

So those two mistakes that have to build the perfect thing to begin with. And if it’s not working, I’ll break it all down. are both fundamentally wrong. I think people succeed, but build something, make sure you’re comfortable with it, and then just keep it going, keep it going.

Rui: Perfect. Atul, let’s change gears here.

Can you share some of the most important lessons you learned on how to deal with investors?

Atul: Be honest, be transparent. Don’t make false promises. See, we, we’ve always been, uh, sort of revenue focused, value focused. Luckily for us, our investors are aligned to our objectives. So they’ve not changed any vanity metrics.

I can tell you only from my own experiences, keep it, keep it as simple as possible. Obviously, if you look around you in today’s world, where there are crazy valuations all over, sort of say, Hey, what am I doing? Which is why are we not getting that? But we’re quite comfortable that we’re getting fair value for what we are building.

So my lessons from investors are, uh, always, uh, always be open to, uh, to investments. Don’t know because a cash is king, right? So the corollary is to that is that, especially when you come from somebody like me, I came from a big bank where you want a large corporate where you had budgets, et cetera, but you were never worried about cash and you were not going to run out of cash ever.

And so you might have a tight budget, but here cash is king. Right? If you don’t have the money in the bank, you can’t hire the right team. You can’t invest in marketing. You can’t get product. So just making sure that you are always open to, to raising capital, because that’s a core part of the entrepreneur’s role, especially if you’re going down a funded, right?

If you’re doing a bootstrap company, it’s a very different journey. But if you have decided to go down building scale, using capital, you can do that. Then being, being open, transparent about your plans, being available to entrepreneurs, to investors, to talk to them, uh, yeah, and, and, and, and delivering on their promises, uh, when you.

Rui: Absolutely. In your opinion, let’s assume we’re talking about founders that don’t want to bootstrap and that, that they are somewhere in their roadmap. They want to raise money. What would be your advice for the starting point? When should, when should founders start engaging with investors within the startup journey?

Atul: As long as they’re clear as to what they want to build and they have a view of the revenue monetization of their business. So if they’re not clear on the monetization, I think it’s going to be very difficult. The first and most important lesson in the initial years or in the initial round is don’t worry about valuation or direction.

I think that’s a That’s remember it’s the investor more often than not, I’d say 90 percent cases is interested in giving you fair value because they want it to scale, right? So they’re not interested in gouging out a large part of your business. So if them taking away 40 percent of your business for some small investment actually doesn’t happen.

Right. So I typically tell people that if somebody giving you a million dollar or two million, whatever the number you think is fair for you. So don’t worry about too much about valuation because every day you delay, you’re delaying go to market. So I would rather have the money in the bank quicker and then start using it effectively and then figuring out my next round.

So first, uh, have a very clear monetization plan, otherwise it’s not going to work. It’s very difficult. I mean, there are enough businesses I’ve met, uh, solve a large enough problem. And the moment you’re very clear in your mind that, uh, there is a path to monetization of this, this is a large enough opportunity.

I’m not solving the problem of pet foods in my limited building or something, but it’s a large enough problem I’m solving for. Go and talk to VCs because see also remember talking to investors is a very, very good check of your aspirations and your business model. They’re seeing so many business plans.

They give you a very good reality check. Right. So they are also very good people. You have to first assume positive intent on the part of the investor. You have to assume that they have your best interest in mind. They’re looking to partner with you. And thirdly, the valuation they will provide you is fair.

So you expect 10 X or what they’re giving, then you’re in the wrong place anyway. You want to negotiate 10, 15 percent here, there it’s okay. But uh, I’m It’s, it’s more than likely that the valuation they give you is well understood because after all they’re seasoned, that’s their job, valuing you fairly and giving you fair, taking a fair amount and giving you enough capital for you to deliver is their job.

That’s what they’re paid for. So that’s what they’re professionally. So your job is to build businesses. So that’s the, that’s the difference.

Rui: Perfect. Crystal clear. Now, Atul, who did you have with you in the early days? What was the team composition?

Atul: So we’ve been, I mean, uh, Ravi, who was obviously our co founder, we all brought complementary skills.

So one thing I have as a corollary advice is that it’s very difficult to be a lone founder. Right. How much ever you might think that’s more equity, but finding a good mix of technology, sales, and business in your founding team is critical. Obviously, domain knowledge matters a lot. I mean, uh, so luckily for us, all three founders came with domain knowledge, uh, about I said, management, capital markets, investments, et cetera, but having a healthy mix of people who can code or develop sales, I think is one completely underestimated value.

The number of technology founders I have sort of met and, uh, who, who just don’t respect salespeople. And I think that’s fundamentally wrong. Uh, having the right, uh, I think WhatsApp is the only success I’ve heard of where they don’t have a sales team, but everybody else, every company in the world requires sales.

And I mean, sales broadly, digital marketing, whatever you call it, but somebody who’s hungry to acquire customers and figure out what to get. So the early team was very small. We actually are a garage startup. We started in a garage. We have six of us. And, uh, Ravi brought solid domain expertise in terms of which funds to put into the basket.

Uh, I sort of understand how to build a business and Sanjeev brought lots of technology and architectural experience. So we were able to build a small team around us. Uh, initially we outsourced what we couldn’t do ourselves. So we outsourced some of the brand stuff, we outsourced, uh, some of the tech build out.

Uh, the moment we could afford it, we brought it all in house. One thing we’re very, very clear about always keeping in house is customer service, because that’s where we listen to customers. So we said that part we’ll always keep in house, because that’s our touch and feel of the customer, and that’s where we listen.

So that we, from day one, have kept in house. Now everything obviously is as much as possible, we do ourselves.

Rui: Perfect. So what did a day in your life look like back then? How many hours a day, days a week were you working? What was the focus split? Were you doing, I don’t know, hiring for 30 percent of the time, 70 percent selling?

What was it like?

Atul: Well, I think the first thing you have to remember as a, as a startup founder in the early days, it’s like boxing with the clubs, right? It’s, uh, it’s like you go at it all day. And at the end of it, there’s Um, a little too little to show for it because after all it always takes longer. Uh, yeah, I would say a healthy mix of visioning, uh, strategy.

Just bold experiments. Uh, so we were doing everything right. I was, I was accountable sales and marketing. So acquiring customers, talking to them, hiring the team on limited budgets, fundraising, going around with that, uh, bold to figure out how, who, who, who would believe in us, uh, meeting investors, getting the right brand name in place, the, the web design.

So I would say, uh, yeah, it was whatever excited you that day. You just got into it. And, but what we are very careful about is not to leave anything hanging. So if you went into a meeting, we said, we will take a decision on this. So we had to come up with a brand name or we had to decide the website colors, or if we set a timeline, we said, good, bad, or ugly, we’ll decide, we’ll not procrastinate on any of these decisions.

So that was a very critical in the early days that you are, you’re decisive. With other information, because you’ll never have the perfect information, right? So you decide and you go for it.

Rui: Educated guesses, of course. Yeah.

Atul: So obviously you lose your domain knowledge and you lose your feeling, but.

Rui: Yeah. In the end, that’s the goal, right?

It’s to reduce the odds of failure to a minimum, never to achieve the 100 percent success, successful answer, because that will never be there. And no matter the stage you are. Yes, absolutely. two crucial things in there. One is to actually not to procrastinate and to make decisions, even if they are not perfect, they will never be perfect, right?

So simply do it. Perfect. So how did you balance this? And to your point, founders at the start, everyone is doing everything right? You do whatever it takes. If, if you need to go out and get coffee for the developers that are building the product, that’s what you do as a founder. You do everything you can.

or what’s necessary to take it to the next step. So thank you for that as well. Now you were saying that you were doing everything and spending all your time at it. How did you balance this with your personal life?

Atul: No, that we’ve been pretty disciplined about, uh, so while your mind was working all the time, uh, physically you put a hard cut.

I mean, given that you were slightly older and had a bit of experience behind us, uh, we were very precious about work life balance. And that’s been a focus for us all that, uh, avoid getting any work home on the weekend, avoid emails after say six, six, 37. It just sets the right culture because it’s not that you’ll get more done.

Uh, it, and if you’re not able to do it in eight hours a day or 10 hours in a day, There are days when you have to, we’ve got a product release coming up, we’ve got some decisions coming up, but on a daily basis to, to, to imagine working 14 hours, 15 hours, people do it and I tell you to them, we did, we were quite precious about supporting our families.

I was all of 40 years old, children were young. And yeah, so we, we, we balanced it and we, we kept the mind that while the mind is working all the time, right?

Rui: Yes, absolutely.

Atul: Physical work that you’re not engaging with the family or you’re not attending family functions, no. Quite, quite engrossed in both, right?

In our families and our friends and doing what we had to do to build the business.

Rui: Yeah.

Atul: But also though I said we did everything, but we had very clear boundaries accountable for what and data decision was final on that, right? So it’s a technology decision, what tech stack to build out, what to buy, what to make.

Sanjeev would decide, uh, how to acquire customers, what brand to build, what promises to make, what the product look like. I would decide what funds go into it, how the customer would look like. So that way our boundaries are very clear. You can have an opinion. But the decision is somebody else’s. So having that very clear boundaries as to, uh, in the, within the founders, who’s accountable for what is very, very

Rui: important.

Perfect. Atul, we’re almost at our time. So let’s go for a set of rapid fire finishing questions. So short questions, short answers. Can you share one key lesson you learned on product? Convenience.

Atul: It’s all about convenience. Uh, it doesn’t need to be fancy. The customer should, it should be intuitive.

Customer should just get it.

Rui: Perfect. Can you share one key lesson you learned on marketing?

Atul: Try multiple things. Try as many channels, as many, as many things you can try. So Capital One taught me that, testing, testing, testing.

Rui: Always, always be testing. Absolutely. Can you share one key lesson you learned on managing people?

Atul: Transparency, empathy and transparency. Just put yourself in that person’s shoes and just be transparent. Tell them why you’re taking decisions. If you don’t have money to pay, don’t give a salary increase. Say it. If you have money, do it. Be absolutely, absolutely transparent. Transparent in whatever you do.

So knowledge abroad is not the right thing.

Rui: Perfect. And I feel that actually could answer the next question as well. Can you share one key lesson you learned on creating and maintaining a good culture?

Atul: Respect. Respect. The most, most critical part of our culture is respect. You assume positive intent and you respect everything.

So you assume trust, uh, unless broken. So you don’t have to earn anybody’s trust. You’re part of the team. We trust you. We respect you. Go hit the ball out of the park. If you don’t, we’ll figure out what

Rui: to do. Perfect. Now, can you tell me one resource that was invaluable to your success? This can be a book, a podcast, a mentor, whatever.

Atul: I would say, uh, capital. Uh, I think capital. Uh, just the ability to, to, to experiment, uh, requires money. And the fact that we had it early from our investors. has been invaluable to obviously the investor support, right? That they trusted us. But the access to capital, uh, is, is critical to, to a business.

Rui: Thank you, Atul, for taking the time out of your business schedule to sit down with me. If people want to know more about you, where can they go?

Atul: They can drop me a line at my email address, uh, atul. shinghal, S H I N G H A L at scriptbox. com. My LinkedIn, I’m responsible on LinkedIn. Yeah, these two are the best channels to get hold of me.

I look forward to hearing from you. And if I can help in any way, I’m a big, big fan of entrepreneurship, mentor entrepreneurs to the time available. Uh, and I believe all of us work for the world to build great businesses. Uh, I mean, as my father once said, if you’re not providing employment after all your education and your privilege.

You need to rethink about it. So yeah, I love entrepreneurs, would love to help anybody who I could possibly.

Rui: Thank you for that. Atul, it’s been a pleasure. I hope we can speak again real soon.

Atul: Thank you very much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it. To

Rui: our listeners. I hope you found the conversation useful.

I know I certainly picked up some valuable insights from Atul’s story. Thank you for listening. I’ll see you again in the next edition of the Startup Journey Podcast.