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YouTuber Gaurav Taneja, aka Flying Beast, opened up about his whey protein business, and revealed some of his financials. Gaurav is a popular face on the video-sharing platform, and has nearly 10 million subscribers. He ventured into entrepreneurship not too long ago, and appeared on Shark Tank India as a contestant. He walked away without a deal, and had to face some harsh questioning from judge Anupam Mittal. In a new interview, Gaurav opened up about the biggest challenges that a founder can face in today’s ecosystem, and said that he is ready to offer Rs 10 lakh to anybody who can disprove claims made on the box of his products.
Appearing on the Think Ink podcast, he said, “The basic deficiency in the market is trust. I’m from Delhi, you can easily find cheap protein for a fraction of the normal cost. Gym trainers peddle it to their clients. It’s a full racket. The famous brands also inspire dupes. So we challenged our customers to buy our protein, get it tested at any lab in India, and if there is any irregularity, we’d give them Rs 10 lakh. Anyone who claims that our protein doesn’t contain what’s mentioned on the box, they can come and take Rs 10 lakh.”
Asked if anybody challenged his claims, Gaurav said no. “When you make such a claim, you should be confident about your product. We told our manufacturer if any irregularity is found, we’d take the Rs 10 lakh from him. But, in all seriousness, we’ve built a good professional relationship with him. They know that they’re getting good business from us, and they’re putting their best foot forward as well,” he said.
He also opened up about how the brand performed in its first year of operations. He said, “We’ve done Rs 30 crore, and if we talk about MRP sales, it’s Rs 50 crore. Minus GST and discounts, our profit is Rs 85 lakh. There are some months where we burned. But we knew that we would in advance. We were trying new things, so we anticipated the burn. We had to create awareness and receive on-ground feedback, so we were clear that we would burn towards the end of the year because of this activity.”
On Shark Tank, Gaurav had claimed that his brand has already earned a revenue of Rs 14 crore in six months, and that they are projecting sales of Rs 35 crore in a year. “These are mind-blowing numbers,” Vineeta Singh had remarked. But Anupam wasn’t impressed by Gaurav’s approach to doing business. “When I started, I was a lot like you. I thought of myself as a star, but when you think of yourself as a star, you think you’re infallible. you cant allocate time in startups, you have to be there all the time… It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I trust in Indian entrepreneurship, and they have so much energy, so much passion, they won’t let a part-timer like you win. That’s the reason I’m out,” he said.
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