Bengaluru entrepreneur bans team from talking to Indian customers: 'Skip India movement'

Hindustan Times

26-05-2025

Bengaluru-based millionaire and founder of Wingify, Paras Chopra, shared that he had banned his team at Lossfunk, an AI lab, from engaging with Indian customers. Chopra was replying to a post that claimed that more and more tech startup founders are choosing to bypass the Indian market under a "Skip India Movement".
Vaibhav Domkundwar. a prominent investor and founder of Better Capital, claimed that AI founders are intentionally avoiding Indian customers for exploiting their startups for free trials or discounted work.
"AI founders finally skipping selling to Indian customers after doing PoCs [Proof of Concepts] after PoCs and then being requested for even more 'free' PoCs. There is a limit to this and founders are saying screw it and skipping selling to Indian customers. Enough is enough. Even unicorns are using these startup founders (who are 10x better than their internal teams) for freebies," he wrote.
Domkundwar claimed that his insights were based on 'primary data,' hinting at firsthand accounts from founders in his network.
"I have banned builders at Lossfunk to talking to Indian customers. It's a tiny tech market, but a comfort zone. Many times, founders end up optimising for the Indian market and realise they can't scale further," Chopra said in a reply.
The posts have sparked debate in the startup community, highlighting an uncomfortable pattern where Indian buyers engage in multiple unpaid product trials but rarely convert to paying clients. "Indians are 2x hard to convince and 1/4th willingness to pay. Not worth it at all. I have stopped marketing for the Indian market and will probably deprioritise Indians in the US too," said another founder.
Another user said, "Same for new-tech hardware brands, tiny market, not many early adopters, low paying capacity." Others criticised the founder's move, calling it a mistake while trying to build a global startup.