Anyone can launch a product. Almost nobody survives what comes after.
Two Parul University students made a healthier chip and got it on a shelf. That was the easy bit. Here is the hard half they actually had to figure out: money, repeat buyers, and swallowing their own opinions.
Parul University, Vadodara.
The startup story you usually see ends at the launch. The product on the table. The first photo. The caption about a dream.
That is almost exactly where the real work starts. Devanshi Bhatt and Parth Parekh had already done the glamorous part. They had built a healthier, sun-dried snack and put it on the market. And then the actual questions arrived, the three that decide whether a company lives, and none of them care how good your product is. How do you fund it. How do you sell it. And how do you get someone who bought it once to buy it again.
They answered all three. Around Rs 30 lakh raised. Roughly Rs 5 lakh in revenue in the first three months. About 300 packets a day. But forget the numbers for a second. The useful bit is how they got there, because that part you can copy.
Money comes in rungs, not in one leap
Every student founder has the same daydream. One big cheque. One investor who changes everything in an afternoon. Neither one is how it happened for them. Neither one is how it tends to happen for anyone.
Crunchy Wavez climbed to its Rs 30 lakh one rung at a time. The first money was small and specific. A Rs 1.5 lakh grant under Gujarat’s Student Startup and Innovation Policy, spent on getting the product right. Then came support through the Startup India Seed Fund Scheme, which went into raw materials and building a supply chain. Only after that, once there was a real business actually running, did private money show up, from a High Net-Worth Individual.
Look at the order, because the order is the whole lesson. The grant said the idea was worth building. The seed fund made it something you could produce at scale. The private cash came in to grow a thing that already had proof behind it. Try to skip to the last rung first and you usually fall, because most investors are not buying an idea. They are buying evidence, and every stage is how you earn the next one.
For Devanshi, the real takeaway was not the total. It was what the money meant once it was in her hands.
“Raising money is not just an achievement. It is a responsibility. Someone is trusting you with their money, time and effort.” Devanshi Bhatt, co-founder, Crunchy Wavez
She learned that by grinding it out. Pitching the same business over and over. Fixing the proposal. Putting real numbers in front of real people. Explaining the plan until it actually landed. And she clocked something most founders miss. Investors were not only judging the opportunity. They were judging her, the energy and the seriousness of a student team. At that stage you are the product being weighed up, just as much as the chips are.
The sale that matters is the second one
Funding buys you a shot. Sales are how you prove you earned it. And for a snack brand, one number towers over the rest.
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The one that counts is not the first sale, but whether anyone comes back for a second. So after launch, the founders locked onto two questions. Will a shop actually stock this, and will a customer who tries it buy it again. The early answers were good on both. Selling through the university, supermarkets and nearby shops, they got to around 300 packets a day and roughly Rs 5 lakh across the first three months. And after about a month, the thing that really counts kicked in. People were buying it twice.
Here is why that beats any launch-day spike. One sale means your marketing worked once. A repeat sale means the product is genuinely good, that taste and price and quality are all pulling the same way, because nobody buys a snack they did not enjoy a second time. That is the signal worth chasing, and it is a far harder test to pass than a splashy opening.
Hand the design over to your customers
This is the part most founders cannot stomach, and it is the part that made those repeat sales happen. They let the customers design the product.
They did not ship what they thought was perfect and then defend it. They put out ten to twelve experimental flavours and watched. The field narrowed to five: Desi Garlic, Tomato Chatpata, Onion Tadka, Salty Hungama and Chilli Lemon, with garlic and onion pulling clearly ahead. And it was not only about flavour. The first batch came out too thick, so they made the chips thinner. Chilli Lemon only exists at all because a customer suggested mixing the two.
The discipline under that is the actual lesson, and it is harder than it sounds. Every comment, including the ones that stung, got treated as data instead of as an insult to their taste. That goes against every founder instinct, because the urge is to protect the version you poured yourself into. Overriding that urge is precisely how they ended up with a snack people wanted, rather than the snack they had assumed people would want.
The founder behind the numbers
None of this came out of nowhere. Devanshi did not walk in as a blank slate, and that matters for why she spotted the opening in the first place.
She arrived with a diploma in Food Technology and six months inside the snack-manufacturing industry, time that taught her how food actually gets made and convinced her she could build her own. That grounding is what let her look at a boring everyday product and see a problem worth solving, where most people just see chips.
She is also honest about the price, which is rarer than it should be. Running a company while studying full-time cost her a smaller social circle and real stretches of loneliness, got through with guidance from her Head of Department, Dr Vijay Kale, and steady backing from the PIERC incubation centre. And the clearest sign of how far she came is in how she now measures success. At the start she wanted recognition. Now she measures it by impact, and by the thing that kicked the whole venture off: making a healthier snack cheap enough for an ordinary household to actually buy.
What you can take from it
Strip it down and five things carry over to anyone with an idea, each one learned the hard way instead of read in a book.
Fund in stages, not in one jump. Start with grants, show traction, then earn your way up to private money. Chase the repeat buyer, not the launch spike, because coming back is the only proof that counts. Let customers shape the product, because your first guess is almost never the best version. Treat raising money as something you owe a person, and back it with honesty and real numbers. And take an incubator seriously, because mentorship, funding help and a network are the whole difference between a student idea and a company that runs.
What makes Crunchy Wavez worth studying is not that two students made a snack. It is that they did the unglamorous second half, the funding ladder, the repeat-sales grind, the swallowing of their own assumptions. That is the half nobody photographs, and the half most ideas never live through.
The hard part of a startup was never the launch. If you are sitting on an idea you keep meaning to start, the question is not whether it is good enough yet. It is which single rung you could climb this month. One flavour to test. One shop to pitch. One grant to apply for. That is where a company actually begins.
