The Data DropFirst Hire
The first hire you’ll regret
Across 1,200 early-stage Indian teams, 43% regretted their first hire within a year. The 57% who didn’t shared three unglamorous habits.
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The operator’s decision desk for early-stage India.
Across 1,200 early-stage Indian teams, 43% regretted their first hire within a year. The 57% who didn’t shared three unglamorous habits.
Pre-seed founders are raising later, smaller, and on better terms than the headlines suggest. The story is discipline, not drought.
The 50/50 split is not the problem. The unwritten assumptions underneath it are. A four-question test for a split that holds through the first hard year.
Why the WhatsApp group is a better first product than the MVP — and how to run a demand test in a week with no engineering at all.
India’s data law is now operational reality for every app collecting a phone number. A plain-language list of what a two-person team actually has to do.
The quarterly aggregate from 0to1 workspaces — what changed in how India’s earliest founders validated, hired, and raised in the last ninety days.
Our answer to the “30 Under 30”: companies in their first 1,000 days, ranked on the decisions they got right — not the cheques they cashed. Methodology published in full. No pay-to-play.
See the IndexOne pattern, one framework, one founder story. 800 words. No noise.