Brisky: Zero to One Hyperlocal Quick Commerce

I was 25 when I quit Airtel.

I had just been part of the successful launch of Airtel Thanks, and honestly, things were going pretty well. But I was young, and I had this feeling that if I was ever going to try something completely different, this was probably the time to do it.

So I quit.

I moved back to my hometown to take a break and figure out what I wanted to do next. There was just one small problem: I had no idea.

"And then COVID happened. The country shut down. Suddenly, getting something as basic as groceries became a life problem."

People were stuck at home, local Kirana stores were struggling to figure out how to serve customers safely, and there was no Blinkit, no Swiggy Instamart, none of the quick-commerce infrastructure we take for granted today.

I remember thinking: "What if I just try this?"

I had no business plan. No funding. No team. And, importantly, no idea whether anyone would actually order groceries online in a small town in Bihar. But I wanted to try.

My designer instinct screamed "design the app first!" But I caught myself: What happens when someone actually places an order?

Taking the order wasn't the hard part. The real challenges were unsexy ground-zero operational bottlenecks:

With 3 Kirana partners and 2 delivery agents onboarded, the core fulfillment engine was fully operational.

• A customer places a grocery order list.
• A local Kirana partner packs it.
• A delivery agent picks it up and delivers within 45 minutes.

I needed an instant app platform to power grocery browsing and order placement.

I pitched dev agencies for a custom build. The cheapest quote? ₹3,00,000 and 3 months of dev time.

As a product designer, my instinct was: "Let's build it properly with custom design tokens and native builds." But I wanted to test the hypothesis first. I didn't want to spend 3 months and ₹3 lakh just to find out if people in a small town in Bihar would actually order groceries online.

"What is the fastest, cheapest way to test if this idea actually works?"

I dug deeper until I found a ready-made SaaS grocery delivery platform for ₹9,000.

The trade-off was obvious: lower design polish and off-the-shelf UI quality. As a designer, that hurt a little. But as a founder testing a new market, it was the smartest move. I traded perfection for speed. I paid the ₹9,000 and started delivering.

The end-to-end operational software stack powering Brisky: customer ordering flow, rider dispatch & route navigation, and merchant store order management.

I ran Brisky for about a year and a half.

And it worked.

It worked in the very real sense that people were ordering, stores were fulfilling those orders, delivery agents were delivering them, and the business was making money.

But there was a problem: I couldn't scale it.

When I started Brisky, my bigger idea was never to serve just my hometown. I wanted to take the model to smaller, remote parts of Bihar where the big players like BigBasket and Blinkit weren't going. I thought that was where the opportunity was.

But after running the business for 18 months, I understood something I hadn't appreciated at the beginning:

"Scaling a business is a completely different problem from starting one."

I could make Brisky work in my hometown with a handful of stores, two delivery agents, and a ₹9,000 SaaS platform. But taking it to ten towns meant more people, more delivery infrastructure, more technology, more operations, and significantly more capital.

And not a little more. A lot more.

I didn't have that kind of capital, and I didn't want to raise money just for the sake of keeping the expansion dream alive.

So I made another difficult decision:

I sold Brisky to one of the store partners I had started the business with.

Looking back, I don't see Brisky as a failed startup. It taught me something much more valuable than that.

I had entered the business thinking the hardest part would be building the product. Instead, I learned that the product was often the easy part. The hard part was getting stores to trust you, finding delivery partners, figuring out unit economics, managing operations, and eventually answering the biggest question every founder has to face:

"Can this work beyond the place where I started it?"

Brisky could work. I had proved that. What I hadn't proved was whether I could scale it, and I wasn't willing to spend money I didn't have just to find out.

So after 18 months, I sold it. And for the first time, I walked away from something I had built.

Not because it had failed. Because I had learned what I needed to learn.