How 7 failed startups have led to one life saving idea

Artificial Intelligence

India

25 Years

Hi, I am Harsh and I am 25 years old. I started my corporate journey when I was 18. I always wanted to start and grow a business. I do not come from a wealthy family, but I kept hustling by doing a 9-5 job and, side by side, kept trying to build my own startup.
I started trading and failed! I started an e-commerce business and failed! I started dropshipping and failed! I started a digital marketing agency, and you guessed it, I failed! I started copywriting, started a call center and a fashion brand, but failed again! After seeing so many failures, I have always taken them as a learning and a never-ending restart process. One day, I decided to sit and write down all the learnings I had gathered from all of my startups and realized that I was just following the trends in the market. I wasn’t solving anything new. Then I took a pause, thought about real-life problems, and started Pulsee Tech.

Pulsee is an AI-powered safety device for children, which comes with an SOS button, real-time tracking, audio monitoring systems, AI-powered dashboards to monitor behavior, audio transcriptions, and many more features. Our aim is to reduce emergency response time.

"Our mission is simple: reduce emergency response time and save lives.”

What inspired you to start your own business?

I have seen how difficult it is to maintain family expenses and also manage time. Once the time is gone, it’s not gone forever. I’ve understood that very few people actually succeed after completing higher education. Maybe it's my never quitting and never settling attitude that keeps pushing me to achieve something bigger.

I celebrated my 19th birthday inside the Wipro campus, surrounded by MBA graduates — and I was just in the 3rd semester of my B.Com. I have seen my loved one facing safety issues; no one is safe, even in public places. After the Kolkata Rape case and seeing the failure of our system, I realised that it’s high time now we have to make this work.

With Pulsee, my mission is to decrease emergency response time. I mean, whenever you feel that you’re in danger or unsafe, you’ll see someone from Pulsee standing right behind you to help.

This is just the beginning, we have a long way to go.

How did you turn your idea into a business?

By this time, I knew exactly what problem I needed to solve. From my past mistakes, I’ve learned that most founders make one common mistake as soon as they have an idea, they quickly register a company, launch a website, start running ads, and change their LinkedIn job title to “Founder at XYZ.” But that’s the biggest mistake.

First, we need to understand whether the problem we want to solve is actually a real problem or just something we think is a problem.

I created a Google Form and started circulating it around societies, companies, internal groups, aunty groups, etc. I spoke with married colleagues who have kids, a few school teachers, and documented all the problems they shared.

Coming from a non-tech background with 6 years of experience in sales, I knew I needed someone I could trust, a tech person who believed in the vision of Pulsee. I started searching and convinced one of my very close friends, who’s excellent with tech and shares the same passion.

We combined our expertise and networks to build the prototype. The first prototype wasn’t great, but it worked. We enhanced a few features and built the second prototype, which completely failed. So we started again from scratch and built the third prototype and finally, we got it right.

After completing the research, validating market fit, and finalizing the prototype, we launched our website. And now, we’re ready to start taking pre-orders.

How did you get your customers?

We recently launched our website and are planning to go for the first 1000 organic orders because we have to understand the feedback from the customers and see if there are any issues that can be fixed. After that, we’ll go with paid marketing.

How are you funding your startup?

Pulsee is completely bootstrapped. We’re working at Stripe, doing our 9-5 jobs, and building Pulsee on the side. Yes, we’ve received offers from angel investors, but I know how it feels to put your hard-earned money into someone else’s idea.

We decided to first find product-market fit, solve some real-world problems, and then leave our jobs to work on Pulsee full-time.

How are you doing today and what plans for the future?

Initially, we started Pulsee with a focus on women’s safety. We spoke with the SP and Commissioner of Bangalore, but soon realized that, as a company, we would have to rely on police officers to respond in time. Pulsee can share live coordinates, real-time audio, and AI-powered auto SOS alerts but what if, even after sharing all this, the police don’t respond on time?

At the same time, we spoke with a lot of women to understand whether there was a genuine use case for the device. We realized that women are often too dependent on their mobile phones. And in any threatening situation, the attacker’s first move is usually to snatch the phone and throw it away to cut off communication.

That also raised another important question “How reliable is Pulsee?” It’s a very sensitive problem to solve, and if we claim to save lives, why should people trust us?

That’s when we decided to launch Pulsee in two phases. First, we’re entering the children’s market solving real problems, improving the technology, building trust through testimonials and success stories, and collaborating with schools. Once we’ve proven reliability and impact, we’ll launch the second phase focused on women’s safety.

What advice would you give to budding founders?

Go out and talk to real customers.
Don’t rush into company registrations, websites, or legal compliances. First, build the product, then think about all these things.
Don’t hide your idea. Share it with everyone. Don’t be afraid of someone copying it, no one has that much time or dedication to copy your idea exactly.
Start early so you can fail early and restart even faster.

Where can we find you?

Book Recommendations

Founder's Office by Sarthak Ahuja.