By: Naveen Upadhyay

Entrepreneurship is all about solving problems for customers and helping them grow through your products. Our journey to onboard our very first customer and 1^st product was full of challenges, surprises, and valuable lessons—it was nothing short of a roller coaster ride.

As founders without a background in finance, we weren’t fully aware of the vast array of financial products in the market. Our goal was simple: use capital to solve real-world problems.

We started by launching a product aimed at retailers in India—offering them term loans to expand their shops. From October 2020 to December 2020, we traveled extensively across the Pune market, speaking to countless retailers. However, we quickly realized that most retailers operated out of rented spaces, which made them less reliable in terms of business continuity and loan repayment. Despite collecting documents from 16 retailers, all applications were rejected due to poor CIBIL scores.

After three months of effort, we had zero customers.

We immediately understood that our initial strategy wasn’t working. In January 2021, we shut down the retailer loan product and went back into the market to identify more viable pain points for MSMEs.

During one of these visits, we met a relative who was a sales executive for MNC Ice cream company in Pune. He suggested we should focus on distributors instead of retailers, as they tend to be more financially stable. He introduced us to three distributors in Pune of his company where he was working. The first two declined our offerings within minutes. We were demoralized and almost skipped the third meeting—but that meeting turned everything around.

The third distributor invited us to a café. We arrived an hour early. When he arrived, he explained the cash flow challenge in his business: he received a shorter credit period from the brand, but his retailers were taking longer to pay, leading to a credit period gap.

That was our “aha” moment. Without even knowing supply chain finance term at the time, we realized we had an opportunity in supply chain finance in FMCG industry.

We immediately said yes and scheduled a follow-up meeting at his warehouse the very next day. That night, we stayed up designing a new product tailored to his needs. We called it “Distributor Credit.”

Here’s how it worked:

• The distributor could submit unpaid invoices from his retailers.
• WALKfin will fund 100% of the invoice value for a period of 1–30 days.
• Distributor would pay interest only for the number of days the funds were used.
• The distributor was the borrower, responsible for disbursal, utilization, and collection—since he knew his retailers better than anyone.

The next day, we presented this to the distributor. He was thrilled and immediately asked to be onboarded to our platform, WALKfin. In May 2021, after eight long and tough months, we finally onboarded our first paying customer.

Since then, we’ve never taken customer relationships lightly. Every customer has a dedicated relationship executive who visits them weekly to ensure they’re satisfied and to resolve any service issues.

That very first customer, who had a turnover of INR 2 crore in 2021, has now grown to INR 100+ crore in 2025 and expanded into Dubai and Africa—still using our platform to fuel his growth. The two distributors of same ice cream brand who initially declined to engage with WALKfin were no longer active in the market just six months later, largely because our first customer-empowered by access to funds from WALKfin-was able to take over their business. This outcome highlights a critical reality in the distribution sector: access to timely and sufficient capital is often the deciding factor between growth and failure.

Most of the distributors frequently fail due to insufficient capital, negative cash flow cycles, and poor financial management. When a distributor cannot bridge the gap between paying suppliers and collecting payments from customers, their business becomes vulnerable, regardless of sales volume. In above our case, the distributor who partnered with WALKfin gained the financial flexibility to extend credit, procure more inventory, and ultimately outcompete others who lacked such support.

This scenario underscores how innovative financing solutions can fundamentally shift market dynamics, enabling well-capitalized distributors to expand rapidly and even absorb competitors who struggle with cash flow constraints and limited access to working capital.