Around a year ago, I decided to build a healthy snack brand.

At the time, I had this very romantic idea of what entrepreneurship looked like.

Come up with an idea.

Find a manufacturer.

Build a website.

Run ads.

Sell products.

I genuinely thought that was the journey.

Fast forward to today...

I've learnt more about food manufacturing, ingredients, nutrition testing, FSSAI regulations, packaging materials, moisture barriers, shelf life, freight costs, barcode registrations, GST, payment gateways and shipping than I ever imagined.

Every time I think I'm at the finish line, another finish line appears.

First it was developing recipes.

Then sourcing ingredients.

Then making them taste good.

Then making them shelf stable.

Then packaging.

Then nutrition testing.

Then waiting for reports.

Then redesigning things because one small detail wasn't compliant.

And now...

I'm lying awake wondering if anyone will even buy them.

The funny thing is...

None of these were the problems I expected.

The biggest challenge isn't making the product.

It's believing enough people will care about it.

I'd love to hear from founders who've already launched.

What was the one thing you completely underestimated?

Rules 48 & 49 of India's Social Security Central Rules 2026 now require every gig platform to report worker exits to e-Shram in real time. Zomato, Swiggy, Rapido, Uber, Zepto all complied by June 21.

The problem: e-Shram records THAT a worker exited. Not WHY.

So a worker banned from Zomato for fraud joins Swiggy the same day. Clean record. No platform knows.

The fix is one field — exit_reason: voluntary / performance / fraud.

This transforms e-Shram into India's first cross-platform gig fraud prevention infrastructure. Exactly what CIBIL did for credit data.

I'm building Veravue — the fraud intelligence layer for this regulatory moment. veravue.dev

Would love to hear from anyone building in the gig economy space or who has faced the cold start problem for consortium models in India.