TROUBLES IN STARTUP LAND

PLANS MADE AWRY BY A COVID-19-AFFECTED ECONOMY, STARTUPS WILL HAVE TO RETHINK THEIR SURVIVAL KIT TO EMERGE FROM THIS CRISIS WITHOUT TOO MUCH DAMAGE.

- DEBOJYOTI GHOSH

TILL THE MIDDLE OF LAST YEAR, Sandipan Mitra and Uttam Kumar, co-founders of HungerBox, a Bengaluru-based B2B food-tech startup, were confident that their four-year-old company would break even by March 2020. Unit economics were in place and the path to profitability was clear. Then, in late 2019, the company decided to make investments that would ramp up its services, add new business verticals, and explore overseas expansion. This, the founders knew, would mean a slowing down in its journey to break even. They were prepared for that. What they didn’t—and couldn’t have—foreseen was the delay that would be caused by the Covid-19 (novel Coronavirus) pandemic. Their break-even target is now March 2021.

“In the short term, seeing 95% of our business getting wiped [out] by a 0.06-micron character is no fun for any of us. In the mid-term, we’ll have to do a lot of tactical initiatives to reduce the overall impact,” Mitra wrote in an email to employees on March 26, just after India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a 21-day national lockdown to contain the spread of the virus.