a social initiative turned startup - staffchahiye.com (we also had thestaffcompany.com before it expired, same product), where we tried to help blue collar workers actually get hired in the fragmented HoReCa (Hotel Restaurant Cafe) industry. Millions of people are in that bracket in india & we can’t fix all of it, but we thought we could do something with technology.

The origin was partly my friends at BHU. they started working out of the AIC: Atal Innovation Center inside BHU campus where startups get incorporated. because of that we had contacts, common office space. i was remote, basically the CTO, handled everything on tech, also put in a small angel check from my side.

i was trying to contribute from wherever i was & ship the product stack.

  • we hired interns & two full-time folks. tried to grow it properly.

The product direction we liked: WhatsApp-first. blue collar workers aren’t going to install another app & make another account most of the time, they often don’t even know how. meet them where they already are. we integrated WhatsApp & it worked; the loop got fast when everything aligned. we literally got people hired in 10–15 minutes sometimes (partly our solution, partly luck as right person available at right time). if you had 100k people in the pool maybe that speed becomes consistent; we didn’t had that scale.

we also built Voice AI agents, that could talk to candidates & businesses, feed a backend matching engine (role, timing, location, relevance). could not deploy at scale due to SIP numbers, telephony infra, running cost - it adds up. we ran it small, proved the idea, couldn’t afford the production bill to go wide.

fast forward on numbers (rough but real enough): we reached at least ~20,000 candidate touchpoints across content, ads, & conversations. on the business side, 1000+ touchpoints with owners. not all converted obviously but the surface area got huge quickly.

operations was the other wall. HoReCa was a big chunk of demand & that industry is seasonal. festival months everyone wants staff tomorrow; other months crickets. many businesses wanted to try the service once & bounce. blue collar side & employer side both hard to get people to pay meaningfully for a service in that segment. we didn’t have tight SOPs early & scaling ops without that is just pain.

we tried to raise. didn’t have deep connections; i was busy & not full-time on this; friends couldn’t close a round alone. cash for infra + cash for runway = same problem.

i went on the ground too, tried to sort process, make handoffs efficient, fix what was broken in the ops chain. Overtime the software was mostly built so day-to-day became operations & my co-team kept pushing.

we were barely breaking even. not enough margin to fund the next scale step & not enough of me in the chair to will it through. slowly the momentum died down & we decided it’s better to move on.

Maybe we needed more capital & mentorship at the right time because now there’s literally big companies doing the exact same thing: vahan.ai etc.

my friend burnt out hard on this one: calls all day, coordinating people, organizing the team. i saw how much he put in.

it was still a great experience even in failure. We didn’t built wrapper SaaS but something real. real people depended on the service. that weight hits different. onwards to build more, but i’m glad we touched that ground.