How Caffeinated Started: The Idea Sat in My Notes for Months
How Caffeinated Started:
The Idea Sat in My Notes for Months
Caffeinated didn’t start as a brand. It started as a line in my notes app, between ideas I knew I wasn’t ready for. It had no name yet, but it was the idea I could actually act on.
I wanted a problem looking for a solution
I always wanted to build something of my own. What I didn’t want was to build a solution and then go hunting for a problem it might fit. I wanted the reverse: a real problem that was already looking for someone to solve it.
So I wrote ideas down, constantly. Some were big. I badly wanted to bring self-cleaning public toilets to India, the kind you see in other countries. But I knew what that would take: serious funding and a long runway. I also didn’t want to build my company around investors. I had my own ideas about how I wanted to do it.
So I parked the big ideas and kept asking the same question of every entry in that list: can I do this now, with what I actually have?
On a long ride, every stop counts
I’m a biker. I’ve ridden to the northernmost point of India and the southernmost. On our longer rides we’d cover 700 to 800 kilometres in a day, and at that distance, every kilometre counts. Every stop counts even more.
The moment you break momentum, fatigue starts creeping in. And riding in a group means stops have to be shared. You can’t have one rider pulling over every half hour. Everyone stops together to fuel up, eat, and use the washroom, and then you ride again. There was simply no time for a proper coffee break.
Eating coffee, and why it seemed ridiculous
So I improvised. First, I’d put coffee in water, shake it, and drink it. Then, to save even more time, I started eating the coffee and chasing it with water.
It sounded ridiculous, even to me. Eating coffee, really? But it kept working, and it kept nagging at me. There had to be something I could just pop in my mouth that tasted like coffee and hit like coffee. I went looking and found a coffee candy, but there was hardly any caffeine in it. Nothing that would actually hit.
So the gap was real, and I wrote the idea down like everything else. Then it sat there for weeks. Months, honestly.
One line, read out in a car
One day I was driving with a few friends, one of them a sharp guy. He asked if anyone had ideas for a project he was working on. It had to be sustainable and something no one big had done yet.
I started reading out my list. When I got to the coffee candy, he stopped me. “Hey, you know what? That one’s a good idea.”
That was the first time anyone outside my own head had reacted to it, and it changed how I looked at that line in my notes.
Figuring out zero to one
I was working at a tech startup at the time, so I understood how a business gets built and scaled. But I’d joined when it was already at “one.” The zero-to-one part, the part where there’s nothing yet, was something I’d have to figure out myself.
Once I started thinking about the product, it began forming in my head, though not in the colours you see today. And once it formed, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was something I wanted, I could see the gap, and more and more people were starting to drink coffee.
I’ll be honest, I didn’t know where to begin, and I procrastinated for a few days. Then I fell back on first principles. I picked a day and told myself I’d sit in one room, come rain or shine, and work out the next step. The answer was clear: I needed a food technologist, an R&D chef who could turn this from an idea into something you could taste.
Cold messages and absurd quotes
I went straight to LinkedIn and started reaching out. I sent connection requests with a message along the lines of: I want to start a brand and I’m looking for R&D chefs. Can you help? Call me on… and I left my number.
It wasn’t easy. I couldn’t find good leads, and the quotes people gave me were absurd. Eventually I talked to a close friend, who now handles our marketing, and she pointed me to Rushad.
Third Wave, Juhu
Rushad called me back after missing my first call. I told him what I wanted to build, and he said confectionery was exactly what he specialised in.
We decided to meet at Third Wave in Juhu. I explained the idea over coffee, and I could see he was excited. He seemed to be in on it. I walked out thinking that was a good win.
That’s how Caffeinated started. From there, the idea went through a lot of R&D, which you can read about in how we refined the perfect drop and why we chose confectionery over chocolate or gum. It eventually became our Espresso and Cappuccino drops, or both together in our Mix pack. But it began with a biker, a handful of stops, and a coffee habit that needed a better format.