Homians started from a PG room. The food was bad, nearby house moms could cook far better, and nobody was paying them. I connected the two, and a bad meal became a business. It came after three failed startups, and it was the first one that paid anyone.
Where it started
After three failures, and one bad meal.
By the time I got to Noida I had already failed three times: a scholarship startup that shut down before launch, a logistics startup that closed at the prototype, and a leasing startup that Covid paused. I had no money, no team and no reason to believe the next one would work.
Then there was the food. I was living in a PG room, and it was poor and inconsistent. Meanwhile, the house moms next door were cooking the food I wanted to eat, with no way to earn from it. So I partnered with them and turned them into micro food providers. We delivered hundreds of meals before Homians even had a name.
Selling it by hand
Offline, door to door, and on cold calls.
There was no marketing budget, so there was no marketing. Everything Homians sold in the beginning, I sold in person.
- Door to door. I went house to house and sold meals one customer at a time.
- Offline, every day. I stood in front of people and asked. Most said no.
- Cold calls. 20 to 30 calls, again and again, until someone picked up and listened.
- Supply. I also went house to house on the other side, and onboarded home chefs one at a time.
I got scolded to my face, dealt with grey collar and white collar, got cheated, and learned more on the ground than any classroom taught me.
Running it
Operations with nothing.
- 01Orders
Took them, tracked them, and fixed every one that went wrong.
- 02Home chefs
Onboarded 50+ house moms and kept quality consistent across kitchens.
- 03Delivery
Handled delivery partners and vendors with no system at first.
- 04Team
Grew to a team of 30+, with no outside money to hire them.
- 05Numbers
Taught myself unit economics and pricing, because the business needed them.
- 06Tools
Learned LinkedIn, Canva and Figma when the people who knew them left.
What it became
For many of these women it was the first money they had earned on their own terms. That mattered more to me than the revenue, and it is still the part I talk about first.
Kindness is just attention paid to the right people.
Where it failed
COVID closed it.
Homians shut down because of COVID. Three things hit at once, and any one of them we might have survived.
- No funding. We had built everything on revenue, so there was no cushion when orders stopped.
- The second wave. People stopped ordering food cooked in someone else's home, almost overnight.
- A crowded market. Safety rules for food got much stricter, and the market filled up with players who could absorb that cost.
I do not count it as a failure anymore. It was the syllabus for everything after it.
Recognition
- Shark Tank India Season 2. Audition finalist, top 1,500 of 80,000.
- Horses Stable Season 5. Finalist on national TV, top 50 of 20,000+.
- Aawishkar Bhoomi Grant. College startup grant from NIET.
- Pitching. Winner of multiple pitch competitions, including at IIIT Delhi.
Identifies real market opportunities. Builds scalable solutions. A founder who understands growth, positioning, and value creation simultaneously.
Jatin Chaudhary, Software Engineer at Extramarks
What it taught me
How to sell, how to run operations with nothing, and how to learn the numbers because the business needed them. Unit economics stopped being a chapter and became rent.
What shipped
- 01. Shark Tank India Season 2 audition finalist, top 1,500 of 80,000.
- 02. Horses Stable Season 5 finalist, top 50 of 20,000+.
- 03. Aawishkar Bhoomi Grant from NIET, 2021.
