This is a social startup. On the fourth day of lockdown, we were sitting and wondering how to spend the lockdown time. One of my friends, Juggy Marwaha, who is managing director of JLL called me and said that 'Can we do something for daily wage migrants' who because of lockdown have no income and have family to feed. So, the thought actually came from him. He and another friend of his called Venkat who is the CEO of Prestige Group, so three of us had a phone call and decided to do something. That's how We came together on the fourth day.

Our idea at that time was to serve 3 lakh meals in Bangalore and it  so happened that the power of cost was so strong that we were able to expand to 5 cities, we have close to 400 volunteers who came across the city and helped. We partnered with big corporations, donors, volunteers, government and police in each of these cities and started feeding upto one lakh meals a day and we have done 34 lakh meals. The whole concept has been running like a startup.

One of the biggest challenges in this was how to do it at  scale even at Bangalore  because a lot of NGOs, a lot of people have very good intentions at heart, all of us want to help but we don't know how to do it at scale. We are happy to donate some amount of money, to cook, to volunteer but we don't know how to multiply and scale it. That is why, the concept of minimum viable product (MVP) where startups principle come, we said that we have developed a minimum viable product that creates a playbook which we are able to replicate the process across multiple cities. So, there are four pillars to a startup or four distinct processes to this startup. One is donation raising money, we require a large amount of money to feed people

Second, how are we going to cook fresh meals every day hygienically at large scale and that too during the lockdown when getting groceries is a challenge.

Third, when there is a lockdown, how are we going to do logistics. How will cooks come, groceries, and distribution at various places to happen.

Fourth is how to maintain the social distance  and not spread the virus.

So we decided on these four pillars and how to use social media to be able to run 450 people startup started remotely without going out from home across 5 cities.

Krishnan Ganesh
Founder & Partner/Serial Entrepreneur, Promoter: Growthstory.in, BigBasket, Bluestone, Hungerbox etc