Entrepreneur doesn't need to change the world

Every entrepreneur starts with an objective " Let me Change the world". That one vision gives energy to like nothing else, in short that's the drug which most of us get hooked onto.

In our case, we quit our jobs to "make the world a healthier place". We started our journey triggered by loss of our immediate family members to life style issue. We thought, if anyone can make people EAT HEALTHY and STAY FIT then it can only be us.

We thought we had our learnings from two years in China :A place were most people Eat right at Right time and Cooked the right way.

First we went onto change the food availability issue at a place where all of us spend our 50 percent of life, At work. 12 months and gallons of green tea CHANGED us & not the world.

Leveraging the corporate network we had , we thought companies need to change the way they look at health of their employees , 18 months and lot of HR meetings CHANGED us as our vision weren't aligned with that of corporates.

What we were left with us then was some products and a bit of consumer knowledge, we believed NOBODY is sticking to core and offering healthy food online. We went to change that and build an ecommerce for packaged food & only food not supplements . Our inability to understand a business where unit economics wasn't in our reach CHANGED us again not the world :)

So after close to 6 years of trying to Change the world and instead world changing us, we thought to bite a different bullet. This journey gave glimpses of what customers want / how it could taste / why people are losing trust on packaged food. There is no brand out there who talks straight & thinks straight. That's when in late 2016, we thought let us CHANGE that and be TRUE in all aspects of food value chain. If you ask us then, were we confident ?

Of-course about our products but had our doubts whether we would change the world this time.

But then someone told when you have a clear WHY, then life becomes a bit easier. We had a clear why and we put that up on our name, "TRUE" ELEMENTS . We stuck to our principles and drew higher inspirational goals. But this time, goals were not for changing the world, but for us . We wanted to be TRUE, that's it.

Thus

1. When we couldn't put conventional dehydrated fruits in our muesli, as it comes with Sugar and ascorbic acid. We went and sought a solution, "Freeze dried fruits. It was 6 times more expensive, but we had a why to answer. 4 years later today almost everyone has moved to that OR contemplating that. You wouldn't have noticed the colourful sugary fruits are of past, yes we changed it.

2. As were using TRUE as guiding principle for everything, we thought our customers should know what they are eating to the "T". That made us build tech enabling our consumers to see details, journey & lab reports of all ingredients we use in each pack from Farm to Fork. We never realised, how big it was until globally we were ranked amongst top 5 CLEAN label stratups by US based non profit Startup insights.

3. When one of our mentor challenged, lets make clean Pancake/Dosa mix which is whole grain and even without Baking powder / soda. We told, challenge accepted, now the world has 100 percent clean Pancake / Dosa mix. We got to know last week, a big MNC food lab was testing our Pancake mix🙂 . Yes, thats the change dreamt of.

4. Our quest to get the ingredients in the back of pack to bare minimum got us a SINGLE INGREDIENT breakfast made of our humble JOWAR, 100 percent jowar. It is sweet, crispy & has industry leading bowl life and that is getting us a patent as well. We got a single ingredient breakfast for the world.

5. When we saw the amount of plastic which we are generating, we felt something has to be done here. That made us offer our products in 100 percent biodegradable cornstarch packaging from our website, the first one from India. Hoping this moves the needle for everyone.

6. Last week we also become globally first food brand which is certified by both WHOLE GRAIN COUNCIL & CLEAN LABEL PROJECT. FSSAI ( Govt food food body) shared this news from their social media handles , thats the impact which we dreamt.

Now back to the original question. Did we change the world, yes looking at above areas and many many more we could brag, we did realise this time we did change the world .

Being TRUE made us change ourselves and it is our guiding force , which is so engrained in you that

It enables our team to enforce no contract labour & all on roll across the organisation OR

It helped us convince our product development & Quality team to make our formulation public via traceability for customers.

Many such decisions which makes us what we are, TRUE Elements.

What has changed in our approach vis-a-vis what we used to be before True Elements is, Dont go out to change the world, just change things around you and give your team a solid purpose to change things around them . The compounding effect of this when your purpose is so strong that, you would see world changing. We may not be spending a lot of $$$ in customer acquisition , but feels nice when half the brands out there are watching you and acquiring your way.

But we are still humble experimenters, because you didnt change the world you just gave the purpose for people around to change.