Bangalore: A common issue faced by home delivery teams of any fast-food or restaurant joints is mainly related to keeping up with the customer contacts constantly, given the telephonic transactions. Highlighting the dire need to come up with an easy-to-track database where customers could just order once and expect fast delivery, by tracking their orders online, two Pune-based engineers-turned-entrepreneurs, started TastyKhana in 2008. Today, their venture is worth 1 to 1.2 crore.

The co-founders, Shachin Bharadwaj and Sheldon D'souza, befriended during their engineering days at MIT Pune. Both knew that entrepreneurship was their real calling, but decided to take a corporate detour first, in order to gain some fresh perspective. Fortunately in 2004, both started their careers with the same company and this gave them ample time to brainstorm on possible business ideas.

In 2005, the duo parted ways; while Bharadwaj moved to a company called Synygy, D'souza joined Codito. During his days at Synygy, Bharadwaj, who was accustomed to constant hassle of ordering food at crowded restaurants, began to brainstorm on an idea about ordering home deliverable food online. So in October 2007, Bharadwaj quit his job to focus completely on the new project.

In January 2008, with seed capital of 2 lakh, Bharadwaj spearheaded the opening of TastyKhana, while D'souza continued with his corporate job till February 2008. TastyKhana began with only 10 Pune-based restaurants on its list. The initial response was slow as they received only one order through their website within the first three weeks."Six months on, our business was so slow that we were actually thinking of shutting it down," says D'souza.

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