How 3 IIT engineers built one of India's biggest beauty brands | Manish Taneja | Unstarted

Do you need an original idea to start a company? Do you need to be a consumer of your category? Do you need the "right" co-founders? Manish Taneja was none of those things. He grew up in Faridabad a self-described "frog of his own well." He went to IIT and "felt very small." He became a banker, then an investor, then started a beauty company with two other male engineers, with no female co-founder, and no personal stake in the category. He still built Purplle into one of India's largest beauty platforms. In this episode of Unstarted, Avnish Bajaj and Manish sit down to work through the questions that every founder without a clear edge asks themselves: 1. Do you need an original idea, or is it okay to be a "copycat entrepreneur"? When VCs tell you your team is missing something 2. Do you fix the weakness or back your strength? – How do you find a wedge in a category where everyone else has more money, more experience, and more insider knowledge? 3. What do you do when your ego won't let you leave — and is that the thing keeping you in the game? 4. How do you build responsibly without losing your edge? Manish's answer to all of it, in the end, comes down to two lines: back your strengths, and build responsibly. This conversation is about how he got there. Chapters 00:00 The $100 million mistake 01:55 Faridabad, the frog in the well 03:03 Feeling small at IIT, and the speech that changed everything 05:31 Lehman, Avendus, and the long apprenticeship 08:52 "I was the original copycat entrepreneur" 12:58 The feedback from Matrix: no woman co-founder 14:54 Why beauty, and why now 17:52 Dabau early: the rosemary water playbook 22:00 How Purplle won Kerala (and met the priests) 26:02 The internal compass, and saying no to Thrasios 28:53 Why your ego won't let you leave 30:36 Why he built in Bombay 33:17 The IPO question 35:49 Build responsibly