How did comet start selling 25,000 pairs of shoes a month? | Utkarsh Gupta, Co-founder | Unstarted

What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet? Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace. In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud: Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating? 1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you? 2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs? 3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years? A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession. Chapters 0:00 Introduction 0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family 1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940 2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing 4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11 6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale 11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet 13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck 14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant 23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet 27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra 28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway 31:40 3 metrics every founder should track 41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months) 43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea 46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence 49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)