At four in the morning in Pittsburgh, Saahil Goel was already at work, and not for his employer. The day job, as a full-time consultant at an IT services firm, started later. This was the other job, the one nobody was paying him for.
He told Entrepreneur India that he and his friend Gautam Kapoor started KartRocket, a platform to help small businesses sell online, and that he worked on it before dawn until he could move to India to do it full time. Press profiles also say he had been building websites since seventh grade. It was a long itch, scratched in the small hours.
Press profiles also say he had been building websites since seventh grade.
The pitch was simple: an Indian Shopify. According to accounts of the origin, it began when a family friend wanted to launch a shoe brand online and had nowhere good to do it. Goel moved home, and the product met the problem every early company dreads. Product-market fit, he has said, was the early challenge. Sellers could build a store, but that did not make them successful.
What almost nobody outside the company noticed was where the pain really was. Small merchants were not stuck at building a storefront. They were stuck at shipping. At low volumes they could not get good rates or reliable pickups. Goel decided to stop doing many things and do one. He has said in interviews that focusing on building one thing at a time was crucial.
So in 2017 Shiprocket was incorporated with Kapoor and Vishesh Khurana, and Akshay Ghulati joined as a co-founder in 2020. The first year was bootstrapped. Then angels came, and later Zomato and Temasek among others, for about $310 million across nine rounds. The company turned net profitable in March 2019, and by 2022 it was processing more than seven million shipments a month. In August 2022 it crossed a $1 billion valuation.
The price of that focus was giving up the thing he first set out to build. The platform he dreamed of in the dark mornings in Pittsburgh became the side project, and the humble logistics layer became the company.
Goel says he wants to build a platform that outlives him. The lesson he offers by example is quieter: the company you start is rarely the one you end up with, and the early mornings are only worth it if you are willing to let the idea change.