Mohit and I had been talking about Vedikaura for so long that even the name had started to feel like a fantasy we both agreed to keep mentioning.
We had an entire product list. Supplier names. Sourcing routes written in a WhatsApp note. Early packaging ideas. We had a name, which we’d gone back and forth on for longer than I’ll admit. We had none of the actual business.
One evening — I don’t even remember what we were supposed to be discussing — one of us finally asked: “When are we actually starting?”
I don’t know why that specific question landed differently from all the conversations before it. But something shifted.
Vedikaura didn’t come from a good business idea. It came from a difficult period of life.
There was a phase where a lot fell apart at once. I was exhausted in a way that isn’t really about sleep. During that time I found myself going back to things that felt grounding — rudraksha, crystals, small rituals that gave the day some structure when everything else felt unstable. Simple things. But they mattered.
What I kept noticing was how hard it was to find products that felt genuine. Most of what was available online was either heavily marketed, unverifiable, or priced in a way that suggested the product had passed through five middlemen before reaching you. The connection between the object and its meaning had somewhere been cleaned out.
That gap wasn’t a business opportunity I spotted. It was just something I kept bumping into personally.
When we actually started, it looked nothing like I’d imagined starting would look.
I had some vague idea of a proper launch. A beginning that felt like a beginning. What happened instead was that one evening I found myself researching GTIN exemptions on Amazon late into the night. Mohit was messaging suppliers in Nepal about minimum order quantities. I was building a tracking sheet before we had a single product to track. We ordered a rubber stamp for interim packaging because waiting for printed boxes to be designed and produced wasn’t realistic — we would have waited ourselves into never starting.
That is what the beginning actually was. Not a launch. A rubber stamp and a spreadsheet.
Mohit and I are very different in what we bring to this.
He knows the products in a way I may never fully catch up to. Rudraksha varieties, what distinguishes an authentic bead from a processed one, which regions produce which malas, what questions to ask a supplier before placing an order. That knowledge isn’t from a course. It comes from years of genuine interest in the subject. It’s not something you can replicate quickly.
I handle the rest — the brand, the strategy, the platforms, the content, what we’re building toward and how we communicate it. The part that connects what we source to the person who eventually receives it.
Neither of us could run this alone. That’s something I think about often.
I’m writing this series because I want there to be a record of what building Vedikaura actually looked like — not what it looked like from the outside, but what it felt like from inside it.
The inventory decisions and why we made them. The things we got wrong on Amazon and had to redo. The product photography we couldn’t afford to outsource properly. The uncertainty of early months when there’s no revenue to confirm you made the right call. The specific challenge of selling products that carry meaning — because in this category, trust isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s everything.
I also want to write about what it feels like to build something that actually matters to you, while exhausted, while employed full-time, while not entirely sure it will work.
That story is worth recording. Even if only to look back at it later and understand how it went.
What have you been talking about for so long that the conversation has started to feel like a substitute for actually beginning?