Manthan Maheshwari

Building @RaiseGate | Weekends
@proximamumbai

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

I don't think we underestimate how hard building is. I think we rarely get to see what building actually looks like.
By the time a product becomes well known, most of the failed experiments, wrong turns, and months of uncertainty have disappeared from the story. We end up judging the finished version while living through the unfinished one.
Maybe that's why progress always feels slower when it's your own.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

The easiest way I have found to become less defensive is to build things. Reality has no interest in protecting your opinions.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

I wonder what today's equivalent of "Why would anyone need a personal computer?" sounds like.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

Someone seeing it for the first time doesn't carry any of that context. They ask questions that sound obvious, or even stupid, because they haven't learned what they're supposed to accept. Most of those questions don't lead anywhere. Every once in a while, though, one of them uncovers an assumption everyone else stopped noticing.

Experience helps you build on what's already there. Fresh eyes are what occasionally change the direction altogether.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

I think people overestimate experience and underestimate fresh eyes.

The longer you spend in an industry, the more of its assumptions you inherit. Things that were once decisions slowly start feeling inevitable. You stop asking why something exists because you've seen it that way for years. That's what experience does. It helps you navigate the system, but it also makes the system feel fixed.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

One of the biggest mistakes founders make is giving up because "someone else is already doing it."

Most of the time, that someone else has a landing page, a few screenshots, maybe a waitlist, and an announcement post. That's enough to make the idea feel crowded, even though almost nothing has actually been proven.

Building a product is the easy part. Getting people to use it consistently is much harder. A market isn't competitive because ten people started. It's competitive when ten people have real users who keep coming back.

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

Will you be comfortable with your house help wearing a head mounted camera?
There is a reason why why 5-minute home services matter more than the privacy drama suggests.

@karansehgal47 and I looked at the numbers, here is what we found:

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

I think ignorance is an underrated advantage for founders. Expertise helps you move faster, but it also teaches you which questions not to ask. Over time, an industry's assumptions become invisible because everyone around you accepts them. Someone new walks in, asks what sounds like a stupid question, and accidentally uncovers the thing everyone else stopped noticing. Sometimes that's all a startup is: a question nobody inside the industry thought to ask.

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

https://t.co/8tqxssmEdx

[Kush Sheth @projektkush]

the localads team decided to do something crazy:

For the next 24 hours, we're doubling the free credits on @MakeLocalAds

Here's how to unlock it:

1/ Create your free account
2/ After you've logged in, send a message in the in-app chat with the code: "ADS"

Our team will manually add the 12 credits to your account.
With them, you'll be able to:
→ turn any product URL into scroll-stopping ad creatives
→ generate on-brand variations in seconds
→ test more angles

This offer is only live for 48 hours, so be quick!

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

Spoke to Adithya Kidambi, co-founder of Mossant Fermentary, for an hour yesterday. Here are the key takeaways from building a craft kombucha brand in India.

Flavour drives everything. They treat kombucha as a better everyday drink rather than a health product, which makes it far more approachable in a taste-sensitive market. Their Cola Kombucha, with 70 percent less sugar, became a turning point by giving people the familiar soda experience without the full guilt.

Consistency in fermentation separates small batches from national shelves. Mastering the process so every bottle tastes the same proved essential for scaling.

Quick commerce platforms like Swiggy Instamart and Blinkit helped early discovery in the past. Today they no longer work well as a first distribution channel. High commissions and strict performance targets make them suitable only for later awareness efforts. They entered the HORECA channel first with tonic water to build relationships with bars and restaurants, then introduced kombucha more easily.

The brand stayed hyper-local in the beginning and grew organically without heavy marketing spends. Building an FMCG business here demands real capital discipline.

Adithya sees the better-for-you beverage category in India reaching its peak in about two years. Mossant now works on new sodas using Indian ingredients to create a stronger local story.

The 40 percent GST on carbonated beverages adds a heavy burden and remains a constant challenge for the entire category. Founders learn to adapt to these systemic costs while keeping full attention on the product experience, which stays entirely under their control.

Valuable session on the real grind of scaling a consumer brand in India.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

@DagaKushagra Lmao, yes

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

Sometimes I wonder whether we're entering an era where execution becomes cheaper every year, but deciding what deserves to exist becomes more valuable.
That feels like a healthier problem to have.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

One thing that feels different about AI compared to previous technology waves is how quickly we've become impatient.

A model from six months ago is already treated like ancient history.

I wonder how much of that is real progress and how much is just the pace of the conversation.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

The easiest way to tell whether someone understands a product is to ask them what they deliberately refused to build.

Features explain ambition. Things you intentionally left out explain taste.

[RaiseGate @RaiseGate]

The report was shared via our Deck sharing platform :)
DM to get access!

[Yash Panditrao @yashpanditrao]

Everyone’s obsessed with Pronto recording household chores to train physical AI. But while the privacy drama played out, almost nobody looked at whether the home services category even makes economic sense.

@karansehgal47 and I dug into the numbers, here is what we found👇

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

That's what this article explores.

It starts with Chromium, but it's really about how engineering decisions age, why architectures evolve, and why systems often make much more sense once they're viewed through the constraints of their own time rather than ours.

If that sounds interesting, I'd love to know what you think.
https://t.co/FukGU3rgvs

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

https://t.co/lIKtNj4c7A

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

Architecture discussions usually assume there's a better design waiting to replace the old one.

Browser history suggests something less satisfying. Most architectural shifts don't happen because engineers suddenly discover a superior idea. They happen because the environment changes enough that the old trade-offs stop making sense.

[Manthan Maheshwari @manthanm30]

One pattern kept appearing across every major transition. The costs never disappeared.

Shared memory became process isolation. Function calls became IPC. Simplicity became coordination. Every generation of browser engineers accepted a different cost because the previous one had become more expensive to keep paying.