Building a ₹100 Crore hair care brand in 2 years | Nikita Khanna, Moxie

Nikita Khanna spent fifteen years straightening her hair before she realised the problem wasn't her hair. It was that nobody had built products for it.

She was on partner track at McKinsey her only job ever when she started going down YouTube rabbit holes during COVID, trying to find a sustainable way to manage wavy, frizz-prone hair. She found the answers in Brazil: similar hair texture, dozens of local brands, none of it available in India. When she asked people in the industry whether it was a business, almost everyone told her the category was too small and too random.

Roughly 80% of Indians have hair somewhere on the wavy-to-curly spectrum. She built Moxie anyway.

In this episode of Unstarted, Nikita talks to Avnish Bajaj about validating an idea before you quit your job, the ABC framework she now uses to evaluate any new category, why she never thought she was cut out to be a founder, learning to delegate and build an org for the first time, running a company with her husband as co-founder, and what it actually takes to build a brand in a market where launching a product has never been easier.

Unstarted is a series for founders, by founders, with questions crowdsourced from the audience.

Chapters 

0:00 Intro: the company we should have invested in
00:00 Growing up in Delhi, watching her father build a business
00:00 DU, XLRI, and landing at McKinsey
00:00 Straightening her hair since 13, and deciding to stop
00:00 Finding the answer in Brazil
00:00 "Am I even cut out to be a founder?"
00:00 Q: How do I validate an idea before I quit?
00:00 The ABC framework: assortment, business, consumer
00:00 Everyone said the category was too small
00:00 Q: How does a young founder become a CEO?
00:00 Building with her husband as co-founder
00:00 Why viral products aren't the goal