Meet Ayush Chauhan (DACBY)
I’m Ayush Chauhan, co-founder of DACBY and a second-year CSE undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur.
I am too much passionate about businesses and always wish to know more about them. I believe in persistence. I have experience of working in teams and have worked on a couple of robotics projects in the past.
When and How did you think about Dacby?
One Day I was sitting at the canteen of our college along with my 2 friends. In our college, there was a general issue that the canteen took a lot of time to serve food and also there was no guarantee that you would get your food after you reached there. We were there for lunch and it took them more than 45 min to serve us. During this time one of us claimed there should be a system to resolve this issue and so did the work on Dacby start.
We finally launched our company on 26 December 2020. This was the first idea of Dacby which unfortunately failed because we extended this system to restaurants and at the same time restaurants got badly hit by the Second Wave of Covid and Lockdown.
We failed in our first business attempt and we lost our invested money, but we had already left our college and there was no going back. We all were convinced that dining does not excite us. And we should do only what we truly love.
We analyzed all the mistakes we made and started again with the vision of making Dacby a subscription platform. We were better than before, equipped with the confidence and valuable experience and there was no back door for us. We started with a meals subscription (since we had knowledge of the food industry), then a snacks subscription, PS4 games subscription and it slowly took on well.
It took time but results started coming. Within a month we had more than 500 customers and revenue of more than 1 lakhs. So, this is how the concept of DACBY eventually evolved.
From whom you got the inspiration to start ‘Dacby’ and Who is your mentor?
In our college, there was a course called Engineering Design, where we have to present our ideas and build a prototype around it.
In my ED team, an idea for “shoes that charges your phone while you walk” was already chosen, but still, I expressed the idea of DACBY to my professor “Dr B.M. Krishnan Mariserla”.
He really liked the idea and suggested us start a company instead of pursuing it as an academic project. Thus, he was the one who inspired us to start DACBY.
Introduce Dacby Co-Founder/Founders and Team.
My co-founders are Bhawna and Chinmay Wahi, without whom, nothing would have been possible, they both are my classmates as well as my very good friends.
Bhawna handles sales and tech at Dacby and Chinmay handles operations. The team is the most important thing. We believe that the Team is where the power of any company resides.
New Markets, ideas, products can be made only if a group of people believe in the same cause and that is the reason, we believe that team is the most important part of the startup story.
Explain more about Dacby, What makes you special?
Dacby is an app that aims at fulfilling all the needs of people through subscription-based plans. Book worms can subscribe to books and read as many books as they want, by paying a basic monthly fee. No need for them to keep a stack of books.
For gamers, Dacby has PS4 games, video games consoles subscriptions. Meals and Snacks subscriptions for foodies. Fruits bowl subscription for health geeks. From video games to fruit bowls Dacby got all covered.
What’s special about DACBY is our keen focus on customer satisfaction. We are obsessed people. Providing top-class quality subscriptions to our customers is our highest priority. From designing plans to delivering these services, DACBY has one mission that is to leave a smile on our subscriber’s faces. Our plans are made to give the best experience to the customers.
What challenges did you face or facing while setting up ‘Dacby’? How did you overcome it?
Challenge – 1
We were into 2 things at the same time, we were not able to focus on business and college both at the same time, and it was becoming really difficult. We believe that when you are running a startup, you have to give your 100%, you can’t compromise on time and Of-course, you can’t do multitasking.
So, we finally left the college in order to focus completely on DACBY. We learned that if you truly believe in something, then you much be willing to take risks.
Challenge – 2
The main challenge is that the market doesn’t behave as we expect, many times we heavily invest on an idea that generally doesn’t work so testing ideas has been really challenging. Understanding and satisfying the needs of our customers is very challenging. For example, we invested heavily on the idea of zero wait dining that failed miserly. So, we have to keep testing our ideas and adapt according to customers’ needs and feedback.
We learned that Persistence and patience are the biggest success factor for anything. Many people quit because they lack persistence. We firmly believe that if you don’t quit, magic will happen.
What is Dacby’s revenue and growth rate?
Revenue – 2.6L months and growth Rate – 200% per cent approx monthly
What’s the Current Path, “Dacby’s funding status and What are the Future plans?
Currently, DACBY is being bootstrapped by the parents of all of us. We are very lucky that our parents are bootstrapping our company and are believing in us. Regarding our future plans, we aim to operate in all major cities (Bombay, Chennai, Pune, Ahmedabad) by the end of this year as well as start PAN India delivery for PS4 subscriptions, apart from that in a few months we are also starting book subscriptions.
Our chief target is to gain 5L subscribers by the end of this year.
Dacby Website | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
Mr.Ayush shares a few words about VID
“I really love Viral Indian Diary and I was very excited when I came to know that they also have a portal of “Share your startup story ”. Viral India has an amazing collection of stories which really motivates people and urges them to stick to persistence. For any businessperson or entrepreneur, motivation is very important and VID is a very good source of it“ _Ayush Chauhan
