In the year 2020, BOAT had become the fifth largest wearable brand in the world. It had beaten all the Indian brands and was in the leagues of Apple, Xiaomi and Samsung. Then, between FY20 and FY23, BOAT's revenue increased from Rs 700 crore to Rs 3400 crore. And that's a 5x growth in just 3 years. BOT's smartwatches and their earphones were everywhere.

And Aman Gupta was one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in India and his company was getting ready for a blockbuster IPO. But then things started to change. BOT's revenue started to fall. It started losing to other players in the segment.

In fact, things got so bad that both its co-founders Aman and Sameer quit their positions and moved to known executive roles. So what exactly went wrong with BOAT? And what does the future look like for the company? Welcome to our weekly Indian startup news show. I'm Pankaj, your host, and you're watching Backstage with Millionaires. So, let me take you back to where this story really starts, which is not 2014 when BOAT was founded, but in 2020, when Bat really took off.

See, when the pandemic hit, Boat was already an established and growing brand, but COVID helped them accelerate at an unprecedented pace. The screen time for people grew multifold. Also, almost everyone was working from home. And because of that, people needed headphones. In fact, demand for audio products grew 20% in the early months of pandemic alone and Bode, which had spent years building the most recognizable and affordable audio brand in India, benefited from it the most.

But that wasn't the only wave Bode caught in 2020. As people started tracking their health obsessively during the pandemic, smartwatches suddenly became a mass market product. And Bode saw this as an opportunity and launched their own smartwatch line in October 2020.

And this wearable segment of theirs, which did not exist until 2020, went on to bring 900 crore rupees in revenue within the next two years, which was nearly a quarter of everything the company made. And thanks to these two waves and Aman Gupta being on Shark Tank, Bote had crossed 3376 crore in revenue in FY23. But then things started to change. The two waves that Boat was riding suddenly started to disappear.

And let's first talk about their smartwatch business. See, once the hype of smartwatches started to fade after the pandemic, people started evaluating their smartwatches more critically. And what they found was that these entry-level smartwatches, the kind that BOTE made, which were typically priced below Rs 2,500, did not really have the most accurate health tracking.

Basically, the consumer expectations from these products had gone up, but these products failed to keep up with the consumer. And as a result of this, the smartwatch market started shrinking in India. In FI24 alone, it collapsed by 34% and Bote was the most impacted company. Bote's smartwatch segment that brought in 901 crore rupees in revenue in FI24 had gone down to just 330 crore rupees in FI25, a 63% decline in just one year.

But the thing to understand here is that consumers were not necessarily ditching smartwatches entirely, they were just ditching the low-quality ones. And I'm saying that because the market for premium smartwatches had essentially doubled during this time. The kind of smartwatches which are priced over 20,000 rupees. A segment where players like Apple and Samsung exist.

So, smartwatches was the first bad news for Bode. Next came its audio business. The segment that had essentially made BOAT also started declining. And I think this is a more deeper and existential problem for BOAT. See, when BOAT had built their reputation, they had a genuine edge. They were selling affordable products with cool designs.

But that edge is now gone. It worked for BOAT when they were the only player. But today, they have a tough competition from a bunch of new age Indian brands like BOAT Audio and Noise, along with international brands like Realme, Nothing and OnePlus. Basically, this category is being commoditized right now.

And when a category commoditizes, the brand that's perceived as affordable is usually the one that gets hurt most. And the culmination of all this happened when the two people who built Bolt, Sameer Mehta and Aman Gupta, decided to quit and transition to a non- executive role. And now the company has brought in a new CEO. In fact, Boat has changed three CEOs in the last three years. And that's not good for a brand that's already losing its market.

So is this the end for Boat? Or do they have a plan? Well, sort of. According to the DRHP, Boat now wants to focus on the premium segment, products above 5000 rupee range. And the company now wants to focus on building better technology instead products above 5000 rupee range.

And the company now wants to focus on building better technology, instead of just playing on the price. And that is the right direction. The premium audio market is where the growth is. But the problem with this segment is that it is owned by Apple, Sony, Samsung, and JBL. And competing with these brands won't be easy. All of them have spent decades building credibility for premium audio.

And BOAT has never competed at that level. And now repositioning a brand that builds its reputation on affordable and trendy to suddenly play in premium is one of the hardest things to do in consumer electronics. And before I wrap it up, let's quickly talk about their IPO. See, when they were at their peak.

And at that time, they were planning on raising 2000 crore rupees. But the company decided to postpone it because of bad market condition. Then they again filed for an IPO in 2025. This time with the plans of raising 1500 crore rupees. But again, these plans were postponed. And we don't know when the company will finally go public.

Also, there are some concerns with their DRHP as well. Boats own auditors have flagged that Boats quarterly returns filed with the banks did not match the company's internal books. And that too for three consecutive years. And that raises a lot of concerns. See, trying to go public with three years of bank versus book mismatches is not the best story to tell to the public market investors.

And that at a time when your revenue is also falling. So right now, Boat might have a plan, but they don't seem to have the right people to execute that plan let me know what you guys think do you think both will be able to make that transition or will it just suffer the same fate as someone like lava or micromax all right next up urban company has just announced that their quick housekeeping vertical insta health has crossed 1 million monthly bookings in march and that's a big number especially considering the fact that they had launched this business vertical

just one year back. And now the company is calling it their fastest scaling business unit in their history. And since they announced these numbers, their share price has climbed over 10%. Now, if you look at the service, it's pretty straightforward. They have on-demand cleaning, dishwashing, laundry, and meal prep, all fulfilled in 10 to 15 minutes from booking.

And the service right now is only live in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, and Pune. But here is where it gets interesting. This space is starting to look a lot like what happened with QuickCommerce a few years back, where you had new players coming up every day. Also, investors putting in millions of dollars to help these companies scale fast, and the media still questioning if this is even a profitable model.

Now, coming to this house help market, Urban Company's Instahelp currently leads this market with 49% market share, while Snabbit is next with 36% market and Pronto is at number 3 with 14% market share. But the thing to note here is that startups like Urban Company are burning money right now to acquire this market. In quarter 3 of FI26, Arvan company registered an EBITDA loss of 61 crore rupees. And same is with Snabbit and Pronto.

So the growth and all is good. But the real question is still the same as it was in the quick commerce. Will anyone be able to make this profitable at scale? Alright, moving on to some quick news updates. B2B manufacturing platform Zetwork has confidentially filed for their IPO papers and they are looking to raise around Rs 4,200 crore or almost $450 million.

The company was founded in 2018 and they basically help connect businesses with contract manufacturers across sectors like electronics, aerospace and industrials. The company posted operating revenue of Rs 12,798 crore in FY25 with a net loss of Rs 371 crores. Talking about IPOs, furniture and electronic appliance rental platform Rentomojo has filed for DRHP with SEBI to raise Rs 150 crore in their IPO.

But one of the co-founders, Ajay Nain, has filed a petition with NCLT claiming that he was misled into selling his 9.41% stake to an employee benefit trust back in 2023. And now, Ajay wants to void that share sale, restore his shareholding, and stop the company from its planned IPO. Alright, next up, Mirza International's MD Tauseef Mirza has acquired a 100% stake in D2C casual footwear startup called Solthreads.

And this company is already clocking a monthly run rate of 6 crore rupees and this deal will help mirza international to expand into india's youth focus semi-premium footwear market all right now let's move into the funding news segment for today's video this week indian startups raised a total of 47 million dollars which is significantly lower than last week's 268 million and now let's take a look at some of the startups that have raised funds this week. The first one I want to talk about is Batchat, which is a simple app that helps you

save small amounts of money every day automatically instead of big monthly investments. Basically, what they do is they take tiny amounts like 50 to 100 rupees via UPI and invest them in mutual funds. So even people with irregular income can build savings easily and they've raised 12 million dollars in their series A round.

Following that, we have Mumbai-based Amaha, which is an online mental health platform where you can talk to therapists, get medical help, and use self-care tools all in one place. And they've raised 50 crore rupees or $5.35 million. After that, we have the D2C nutrition brand Beast Life that sells things like protein powder and supplements. And they've raised 20 crore rupees or $2.

 million in their pre-series a round next we have cyber security startup called sign3 which is an ai powered fraud prevention platform and they help banks fintechs and online businesses to spot and stop scammers by analyzing device data and user behavior like typing patterns or mouse movements and they've raised 1.

 million dollars and finally we have epic an online e-commerce platform that lets you try gadgets at home before you buy them what they do is they basically send someone to your house with the product so you can test it in real life and decide whether you wanna buy it it's basically an online shopping with a real world trial experience and they've raised one million dollars in their pre-seed All right, that's all the startup news I have for you this week. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.

How to earn money online?

When an individual or enterprise wants to make money through internet media. It is also known as digital media. Seller in Amazon, Flipkart, affiliate marketing, services based work as remote jobs such as calling, Blogging business using website, etc. Our generation nowadays we having various options to earn money online, your neighbours or friends also worked if you connect with others or you can search on internet but today we will here make you easier by providing right guidance with facts and our experience. We will make easier so you can go through best way to start and grow yours business to make financially stable to fullfilled all dreams of yours and family.

Two types of earning mode:-

Offline Mode:- the way of earning money using offline channel without internet. As physical shop (General store, Sweets and Bakery Shop),  etc.

Online Mode:- the way of earning money using online channel using internet. As flipkart.com, amazon.com, blogging website, affiliate marketing, posting videos on youtube.com,  selling products online like cosmetics, footwears, apparels, accessories, electronics, etc

How we can start Online Business to earn and grow?

We are guiding you in steps :-

1. Research:- whenever you want to start a business online first you have to well research about products or services. When you select category with niche check what is actually market size with current demand and supply in market with history of that products or services.
2. Online:- To make your business online you need two type of services first is website design with development and mobile app development. If you have a good budget you can mention to service provider to first make design on figma if the design is desired and fulfil your requirements with proper sections for website and mobile app then you can proceed.
3. Platform: if you having minimal budget then you can choose website and if extreme then you can maintain to developed business mobile application also. For business website you can choose Laravel in backend, frontend should be basic if less budget as html, css, js for more you can choose reactjs, angular, etc. for startups with minimal needs you can choose flutter for mobile application development due to its single codebase feature it will works on both android and ios. The flutter uses dart developed by google.

Conclusion:- Prefer website if minimal budget if extreme then you should go for mobile application.

1. Finance management:- it plays an important role in every business how much you have to invest, running capital, backups. You have to prepare proper calculation with expense suppose you have x amount of money as 100  you have to invest 10-15% on platform, 5-8% on marketing per month, other expenses as rent, employee, electricity, etc and rest for maintain at least 12 months backup.
2. Products inventory or Services:- if you are selling products then you have to maintain inventory it blocks huge amount of money sometimes some products works and not also. So if you having manufacturing facility then you can stock minimal amounts of quantity with proper material facility and if you are borrowing from other sources then you have to check availability in meantime. If you are service provider then you have to maintain employee with proper availability when receiving any orders. You have retain, manage shortage everything as your business needs day and nights.
3. Business Registration:- if you are startup and with basic budget you can choose proprietorship firm if having extreme you can choose private limited company with 2 minimum directors required. Public Limited Company is for taking funding from public by filing dhrp for IPO. Small and Medium Enterprises can also file SME IPO.
4. Bank Account:- when company gets registered should have to open business current account many of currents banks are providing startups accounts with 1 yr free subscription model in which they don’t charge.
5. Office Space:- you have to choose office space in nearest metro city with proper connectivity. It should be less travel for employees to covers the distance shortly in meantime. Check also electricity uptime and if shortage then take backup with inverter or with generator for non-stop work. If you have not any backup then you face major losses due to this.
6. Office material:- when you purchase office space then you required office material such as machinery equipments, chair, boss table, etc.
7. Compliances:- you have to maintain compliances  if registered in ministry of corporate affairs because government needs many data of our business for this you need chartered accountant. If you have proprietorship firm you have to only report gst department in gst portal with monthly or quarterly return.  You also have to share office for departmental inspection to prevent fraud activity because many registered companies not exist as mentioned location in mca. Now government make more restriction to prevent this type of existing issues. The proper company board is also required as per guidelines and many other things.
8. Hiring :- when you start a company or business you need dedicated employee as team who will organised work properly with all dimension with flow by understanding requirements. You have to treat them well with appreciation now many are adopting this behaviour in many organisation as tata consultancy services, Amdocs, etc. you have to value your employees in both high or low times if you able to understand their problems they will also help organisation to grow. You have also to maintain salary on time because every employee have family, their expenses, rent, travel, etc.
9. Marketing:- you have to check based on budget you can choose ads based marketing using facebook, Instagram, whatsapp, can choose social media post for reach, for search engine optimization you can choose google. Seo take more time as compared to ads marketing.
10. Sales:- every business depends on sales and you have to manage all the things for servers, salary, rent, electricity, maintenance.
11. Business Expansion:- when you are getting sales you have to expansion with propriate team. You also have to add new machinery. You need to take regular meetings with team leaders, managers.

Conclusion:- if you are new to business then you have to invest step by step first website then mobile app. After select marketing type seo or ads based. If getting sales then expand the teams to handles all of the operation.

Note:- If you want to learn and earn we will provide guidance to earn passive income from yours home. Many platforms are now providing to earn money online.  

How to start Domain and hosting business

 Domain:-  the domain is  unique name which have to registered by registrar as ICANN. The domain support many extensions like .com, in, .ae, .co.in, .ai, .site, .xyz. for every country there is reserved extension for in for india, .us for usa, .cn for china and many more.

Web hosting:- host the any type of data like website, images, video is known as hosting.

There are many hosting provider as mrcloudhosting, hostingraja, godaddy, hostgator, namecheap, tmdhosting, utho, etc. In marketing there many categories available for hosting as web hosting, wordpress hosting, nodejs hosting, cloud hosting, vps hosting, video hosting, etc. the hosting company make categories in their own way to define the structure of hosting with pricings. The cheap of less price hosting has many limitations some of them it is mentioned and while some not as file and directory limits as inodes. Bandwidths, ffmpeg, email limits, etc

Plans:-

Web hosting:- many companies has this plans in which they categorised based on pricing as gold silver bronze, basic standard enterprise, etc. to purchase web hosting you have to visit the provider website and select the plan as per requirements to host, you have add2cart, checkout with details  by making payment you can use the hosting panel with purchased features.

Wordpress hosting:- if you need to host any wordpress website then you choose this plan.The wordpress is less time take to develop the website which helps to make business presence for small organizations. You can also host your local wordpress website to live. Then wordpress website has limitation in terms of scalability. For big companies they prefer coding website so they can make use to handle such large traffic, data sharding, docker, etc.

VPS hosting:- for full access or control of server you can choose vps hosting also known as virtual private server. It has dedicated ip  and you can install any operating system as mentioned in the available list like ubuntu, cloudlinux, almalinux, etc.  if you need  graphical user interface like management of panel as cpanel, aapanel, etc then you have to pay extra for license. If you don’t want extra pricing and you have experienced in cli for linux based you can save money by opting this. You can also see the resource usage of your server by installing package in your website to get realtime analytics.  In this hosting you have full control and also you can directly run cron jobs, queue jobs and can setup freepbx as siptrunk, etc

How to start the business?

To start this business you need to purchase a domain  and you have to purchase the vps hosting you can setup the whmcs for panel management to use the features like emails, remote database, mysql using phpMyAdmin, pgadmin, shh or terminal, jobs, billing information, myql wizard, ftp creation, redirection, git for version control, ssl installation as lets encrypt, etc.  To make this installation you have to visit whmcs installation website to begin the installation you have to make cmd as mentioned in the website and follow the instructions. When installed then you have to open the ip in the browser and mention the license key if you have purchased and want regular updates and support from panel company. After that you can configured with yours website so users can purchase the hosting with the desired plan as per their personal or business requirements. For domain booking you can purchase the reseller api as from bv and many other providers are available.

To open the datacenter for your business you will have to invest large amounts of money and  we are sharing some basic information or requirements for this:-

Space:-  you need to take land on rent if you have owned then it is a plus point.

Lease line:- you have to buy a lease line service with your nearest isp to support non-stop internet service.

Power Backup:- to run all devices the organization need to maintain power backup to restart the services like generator.

Racks:- to maintain the devices you will need racks to setup properly in that.

Server:- as per requirements you will need server with custom ram , storage, cache memory, workers, cpu generation, etc there are many providers for servers in the market are as dell, Lenovo, penguin, intel, etc

Switches:- to connect one server with our server you will need switches to establish the network between two or more servers.

Router:- to make your server live you will need router such as cisco, juniper, etc

Firewall:-  If you need an extra security then you have purchase the firewall as cisco, paloalto, Fortinet etc

IP:- you need to host your server to live then you need to buy the public ip form your nearest isp. That ip and ports you have to configured in the router.

Custom panel:- you can also make yours own custom panel like aapanel, cpanel, etc for the management of servers. For this you will need developers who are available to add the new features and provides customers support to the clients.

Engineers:- for this the organization needs networking engineers to maintain the healthy ecosystem, should have troubleshooting skills for every devices. In everyday the new issue will be arises for that you have ability to solve the any issue.

Security:- for security you can install immunify 360 for maintaining files security by detecting malware.

Business expansion:- for business expansion you need sales and marketing teams who will lead and make the sales to grow the business and fulfil the requirements of the clients by providing affordable pricing.

 Top companies for Datacenter

Rankbank

Serverwala

Equinix

LiveMNC

Nxtra

What is Ecommerce?

Ecommerce is known as internet commerce which products or goods will sell or purchase through online medium in which sellers can sell and buyers can buy their needs. Ecommerce plays a major role in boosting economy valued around $125-$148 billion in 2024, with projections to hit $340-$380 billion by 2030.  Due to huge demands of online products or services major companies goes online to scale their business. It helps to generate major revenue and it is opened 24*7 users can anytime book their orders for products or services.

Features of Ecommerce:-

Variety of Products:-   in any platform for ecommerce it has many variety of goods with many ranges and they can compares to find best with their needs.

Emi facility:- In shopping platforms they are now providing shopping with emi facilities with their banking and fintech partners. So it increases sales of businesses with flexible rate on interest on emi with autopay features which can deduct from their bank accounts.

Wide ranges:- products has wides ranges based on classification from low to high, colors ranges as white, black, blue, green, yellow, etc with brands selection as many listed brands as nike, puma, adidas.

Wide Categories:- now platsform provides wide ranges of multiple categories as fashions for mens, womens, childs, etc , shoes with various brands with multiple types, electronics and accessories as laptops, spare parts as cpu, ram, hardisk, etc.

Returns:- these platforms provides return features in which users can returns the products if they are not satisfied with  quality, size, color,  defective as expected you can return easily.

Refunds:- whenever your order products get returned it will get refunded within defined duration in amazon 5-7 days in some case.

How to Start business Online?

1. Market size :- first you have the products which are you want to sell you have to analyse how much is their market size.
2. Ecommerce Model:  you have to select the model in which model you wan to sell as D2C (Direct to Consumer), B2C (Business to Consumer), B2B (Business to Business).
3. Company registration:- you can analyse a suitable name for yours business for registration  with firm types as Proprietor, PVT LTD, LLP, OPC, etc. when it gets approval you have to apply for GST Registration. Then open a bank account with your business details with nearest branch of company headquarter. For startups which having minimal or basic funds can apply for proprietor gst registration, if they needed funds from investors then they should go for PVT LTD Company with Minimum 2 directors.
4. Domain Registration and Hosting:- they have to book a unique domain with their business name they should go for .com extension which is top level domain. For hosting they can purchased basic hosting if they have minimal budget if they have huge and they needed scale then they should choose datacenters or cloud platform providers as google cloud (GCP), amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft azure, etc. With our consideration you should choose datacenters rather than aws due to pricing of per request and many many other things.
5.  Business Website and Mobile App:-  To Make Ecommerce website choose best tech stack it can be html, css, js, jquery, ajax, php, Laravel, mysql, api, react etc. frontend should be load fast in less meantime. For backend you have to focus many parameters to make yours site should not be hacked by malicious code or hackers as XSS (Cross Site Scripting), SQL Injection, Rate Limiting, etc. when you get orders and when it comes for scale you should integrate load balancers, data sharding, if needed then integrate microservices, firewall security as cloudflare, etc. for mobile application you should flutter for development due to its cross platform features which will runs on both devices as android and ios simultaneously. For businesses like flipkart, amazon, meesho, bewakoof.com, etc they uses api (Application Programming Interface) to connect  their website to mobile apps. We can use firebase notifications to notify user in their smartphone as marketing stunt, offers, orders placed, etc.
6. Marketing:- when the development phase completed as mvp then you have to create and adopt the marketing strategy as content creation on social media platforms and paid advertising platforms as meta ads and google ads. Meta ads is based on CPI model and google ads based on CPC model. Based on budget you have to make budget division to run multiple ads with strategies.
7. Revenue:- Based on revenue you should scale your business in all direction as tech, marketing, support which will handle in every small to large scale operations widely.
8. Investment:- after revenue gets started you can connect with investing firm as contrary capital, accel partners, tiger global, softbank, etc to make pitch  and scale yours operation by dilution of shareholdings.
9. IPO:- If needs major investments you can consult with IPO consulting firms which can build yours DHRP for public investment after yours company will be listed as in NSE or BSE for Indian listings after SEBI approval which regulates public investments.

When yours platform is growing and stable then you con thought about other business that is the process how enterprise works as Adani Groups, Reliance Groups, Zoho Corp, etc. you have to be success in one domain then you have to go in another domain. Never do multiple businesses in first one is not stable it will lacks in failures as Anil Ambani done due to opening  of its multiple businesses in meantime. Every businesses should follow pipelines to grow their business with their teams. Teams is major core part of yours business which helps to scale with their expertise, feedbacks, leading in a way the usp matters. When company grow you should focus on culture that really matters how you treat them. If you understand yours employee problems and customers issue you will definitely build the business.