The Harvard Grad who quit her job to build a deodorant for women | CEO, Laani | Unstarted

Nirja Bhatt looks intimidating on paper: Columbia, Harvard Business School, strategy consulting. But she calls herself "a duck in water” i.e you never see what’s moving beneath the surface. It took her two years of analysis paralysis, ten abandoned ideas, and learning to normalize embarrassment before she could finally start. Nirja is the founder of Laani, a pre-launch personal care brand for women, built around the categories nobody talks about. In this episode, she and Avnish go back to the very beginning. They get into: 1. How do you start when you have ideas but no capital? 2. Why validate a problem, not an idea? 3. How do you make peace with betting your own savings on yourself? 4. Should you raise money before you have a product? 5. And what actually separates the founders who make it? 6. An honest conversation about the part of the founder journey nobody photographs. Chapters 00:00 Intro: Meet Neerja Bhatt, founder of Laani 01:30 Growing up in Baroda, raised by grandparents 03:00 Rejected by every dream school: the USC detour 04:30 How a professor's letter got her into Columbia 07:30 Q1: How do I start with no capital and too many ideas? 08:30 Analysis paralysis: 10 ideas and the HBS trap 11:00 Moving back to India: the waste management chapter 16:30 Q2: Passion vs. market gap — how to pick your problem 19:00 Talking to 200 women: customer validation done right 21:00 Q3 (Gubbachi founders): Hero products vs. commodity staples 26:30 To raise or not to raise: funding pre-launch 29:00 Final advice: persistence and eating a lot of shit 30:00 Outro