Why I'm Starting to Write

I’ve been an entrepreneur for 14 years. Two ventures, two industries, countless lessons — and almost none of it written down anywhere.

That changes today.

The gap between doing and reflecting

When you’re building a company, there’s never a good time to stop and write. There’s always a distributor to onboard, a product to ship, a fire to put out. Writing feels like a luxury for people with more time, more certainty, or a bigger platform.

I’ve held onto that excuse for over a decade.

But here’s what I’ve come to understand: the act of writing is the reflection. It’s not a report on what you already know — it’s how you find out what you actually learned. And I’ve been leaving a lot of learning on the table.

What I’ve built

I spent 2011 to 2024 building a mobile gaming company. We made 40+ games and apps. Our flagship, Draw N Guess Multiplayer, reached 12 million downloads. We got into an accelerator in Estonia. We scaled a team. And then, when the economics of mobile gaming became unsustainable — when user acquisition costs outpaced what anyone could monetize — we made the hard decision to wind it down.

Selling the game and using those proceeds to fund a completely different venture might sound impulsive. It wasn’t. It was the most deliberate decision I’ve ever made.

In 2022, my co-founder and I started Cotton Candy Station — with a single retail outlet at Lulu Mall, Bangalore. What began as a direct-to-consumer experiment taught us the product, the customer, and the market. By 2024, we shut the outlet and pivoted fully into manufacturing — building India’s first premium multi-flavor cotton candy brand with in-house formulations.

The manufacturing pivot didn’t go smoothly at first. We hit losses. And that’s where the real work began: redesigning the supply chain, rebuilding pricing strategy, launching across new channels — D2C, Amazon, Blinkit, and a 150+ distributor network pan-India — and implementing AI-driven inventory and demand forecasting to get costs under control. Distribution revenue grew 6x within six months. Gross margins expanded by 20 points. The business turned profitable — not by accident, but through a deliberate sequence of decisions made under pressure.

Before stepping away, I made sure the business didn’t depend on me to keep running. The systems, the SOPs, the accountability structures — all built to outlast my involvement.

Two industries. Two 0-to-1 builds. Very different, and somehow the same.

What I want to write about

I want to write about the things that actually matter in building businesses — not the polished version you see on LinkedIn, but the messy, instructive reality of it.

A few topics I’m thinking about:

Why mobile gaming became unsustainable — and what the unit economics actually looked like
Turning a loss-making operation profitable — the specific levers: supply chain, pricing, channels, and the order in which you pull them
Building distribution from zero — how we went from 0 to 150+ distributors in 7 months without a playbook
AI in operations before it was fashionable — what we actually implemented, what worked, what didn’t
What it means to be a generalist — running ops, tech, sales, and finance at the same time, and what that teaches you about your own limits
Strategic decisions vs. reactive ones — how to tell the difference when you’re in the middle of it

Who this is for

Honestly, I’m writing this for myself first. To process what I’ve been through and figure out what comes next.

But if you’re an entrepreneur, an operator, or someone building something from scratch in a context that has very few templates — I think some of this will resonate.

I’m now looking for my next chapter: a COO, GM, or Country Manager role where I can bring what I’ve built into an established organization and help them move faster. Writing is part of how I’m building that bridge.

Thanks for being here at the beginning.

— Sri