u/RevolutionarySlip292

I'm lead sales at deSal shampoo company.

I posted here around 2 weeks back when we crossed our 100th order, and the love I got is the reason I am writing again and sharing our progress after 50 days of operations ❤️

Now we quietly finished 50 days of operations. These were some of the hardest days of my journey for simple reason of taking things 0->1 which now I feel is itself a tough job. The reason was simple, we needed people to believe us early on and many did. Now that our product is highly rated and reviewed, AI tools recommend us, is a different story. But early on it was a different job at our hand.

So, I plotted all orders we've received for our hard water defense and swimmers shampoo, and we've reached > half of India already. Fifty days and there are 13 states where someone is washing there hair with something we built over months of R&D is a different feeling ❤️

I know much of India is still grey but reaching >50% of India by land is itself a big thing for me. Our next targets would be reaching out to all different regions, be it Kerala, Odisha, Assam, or the hill states.

And same as last time, I'm not going to spend energy on the noise.
Just the people who trusted us and the work. If you have inputs or advice, please do share your experience🫰

EDIT : There are 2 different products we have, one for hard water and a different one for swimming/pool water.

EDIT :
I'll request everyone an exercise, you can go to chatgpt and try
"<your current shampoo> vs desal hard water defense shampoo, <city>, <tds>"
eg. "L'Oréal Professionnel Serie Expert Metal DX Shampoo vs desal hard water defense shampoo in bengaluru and 400 tds"

Can share what you got in reply or message !!

Need an idea and input if anyone on this sub have used this shampoo or not ?

I posted here a few days back about how a total stranger reordered our shampoo and how it made my whole week. I honestly thought that was the peak of it 😭

Then this happened.
Someone from this very community r/IndiaBusiness , who had commented on that post saying hard water has been a chronic problem for them and they were literally washing their hair with mineral water, went ahead and ordered.
And few hours ago they came BACK to that same post, publicly, to say that even after just one wash their hair and scalp felt better than it has in years and they are glad they made the purchase 😭😭♥️

I read that comment like 20 times. Then I screenshotted it and dropped it in our team group.
Because these are the same people who made the formula and made it happen ♥️

- A stranger owes you nothing. If it didn't work they would have just quietly never spoken again.
- But a stranger writing it publicly, knowing thousands of people are reading, thats the one thing you simply can not manufacture 🫰

For a big brand one review is nothing but a rounding error.
For a tiny bootstrapped brand like us its literally the fuel for the next 2-3 months.

We are still very small. We will still have bad days. But now whenever thats happening I am just going to remember such things and work harder from there 🫰
So genuinely, thank you Reddit. You all have no idea what this does for someone building something small.

To anyone building business from scratch, work hard towards providing value, and I can assure success will follow. If you are facing issues, please do reach out. We need to be here for each other ♥️

Adding links incase someone wants to read the whole thing :

The original post : https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaBusiness/comments/1vkr93q/we_sell_shampoo_for_hard_water_and_swimming_water/

Their review comment : https://www.reddit.com/r/IndiaBusiness/comments/1vkr93q/comment/p3uon1n/

First time saw her in big boss, and from there, her career has just grown more and more.

And that's how vibe investing worked for me 😂

Context : https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianStockMarket/s/2zZT9mioSs

Yesterday I posted how I do vibe investing, I get the feel looking at graphs, buy, sell quantities, brand, and few other things about a stock. Was able to consistently make some money using it. Shared and result came today itself lol.

I'm genuinely confused about the whole concept of advance tax and hoping someone here can explain it to me.
Every single year I end up paying a penalty (interest under 234B/234C I think?) for not paying advance tax on time. And it's not just me - literally all 10 of my close friends are in the exact same boat. We all just pay the fine and move on.

So my questions are:

1. Why does advance tax even exist? Why can't we just pay everything at the time of filing our return?
2. What's the correct way to estimate and pay advance tax so I stop getting hit with these charges?

Edit : Just to add more context, its not usually salary income that is the issue, the income coming from other heads such as capital gains such as from groww.in or angelone.in, or part time/contract employment in business income [ ex. from desal.in this year etc. i worked at ], or FDs, or US market such as vestedfinance.com or I use indmondey.com , etc are where it gets difficult for me to predict.

I don't read balance sheets, I don't track P/E ratios, I just feel things.

My vibes tell me when something is about to happen to a stock, and somehow I end up making money lol.
This FY i have safely made 20%.
I've tried explaining this to multiple people but they dont get it and I cant quantify it.
Is anyone else out here running on vibes alone, or am I the only crack mind?

Don't ask me why I put the voltas stock photo. Its against rules to say that lol.

Continued : https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianStockMarket/s/vEj59FlxGl

I'm the sales head at deSal shampoo company.
Small thing but I can't stop smiling and am just so so happy about it😭😭

We got our first reorder from a complete stranger yesterday. He/She was someone who isn't a friend, not a friend of a friend, nobody we know at all.

They bought once last month and yesterday they came back and ordered again on there own ♥️

I know how small that sounds lol but it isn't. Let me explain my perspective.
- Cause the first time someone orders its mostly just curiosity, they might have seen our instagram or something, you can't really read much into it.

but but....

- But a reorder means the bottle actually finished or they wanted for there family/friends because they liked it(he/she gave 5 star review to us earlier) and they liked it enough to spend on it again 😭😭

I am really not sure if someone reading this can actually understand this feeling or my thoughts but I hope you do. Thats why I chose this community to post to !!

For context, desal was founded by 2 IIT Roorkee graduates from chemical and electrical engineering and we make shampoo for hard water and chlorinated swimming water, the kind of water most major Indian cities or pools have that just wrecks your hair over time.

We are a tiny new bootstrapped brand and honestly most of our early orders were people who knew us in some way. So a stranger buying once was already big for us ❤️

Its been a hard few months honestly, so many failed batches, so much redoing the formula from scratch. It recently posted when we completed our first 100 orders and received so much love that I had to post again ❤️

Anyways would genuinely love to hear, whats the smallest thing that quietly made your whole week/day that nobody else would get. I promise I would 🫰

Edit : If you want to visit or read out us, you can visit desal.in or whatsapp us +917676941245 [Sharing as someone asked in DM and in comments]

I'm the sales head at deSal shampoo company.
We crossed our 100th order last night, around 9pm. I was checking my inbox and saw the mail with #100 and I literally stopped and stared at it for a second like an idiot lol 😭😭

Wanted to write about it right then but the day had already run away from me, so I'm just doing it now.
I know 100 is nothing, a lot of you did that in your first week itself.
But it got to me and it's honestly still sitting with me today, so I'm putting it out somewhere.

I even went and checked who it was. Someone from an IT city(can't name) but is actually a hard water area, exactly the kind of person we made this for. Don't know why but that got me. It's just a number on a screen at the end of the day.
But I sat there a minute thinking it's a real person, in a city where the tap water genuinely wrecks your hair, who picked a small brand they'd heard of over online or via a friend and trusted us, our hardwork and expertise.

Cause getting here was not easy at all. The whole thing started because the two people from IIT Roorkee who founded it are engineers who moved to Bangalore and watched their own hair and skin get wrecked by the water there, and nothing reasonable on the shelf actually worked for them.
At some point they figured you can't fix a chemical problem with a plumbing solution, so they just started building it themselves. Thats when I joined them as well. And even after that, honestly, I wasn't always sure if this is a real problem or just something we convinced ourselves of sitting in a room at 2am. The product itself took months. So many versions, so many trials, batches that flopped, formulas we threw and started from zero again. Running around for testing, sourcing, water samples, everything. Our early versions were honestly not the best, but we got the criticism & feedback, tested all of it on us and that's literally how we reached the current formula. Not in one shot, just redoing it again and again till it worked.
Anyway. Last night it just quietly ticked to 100, and for a minute all the redoing and the doubting felt worth it. A hundred real people trusted us with their water problem, which still feels a bit mad to me.

One more thing cause it's true. I've been reading this sub quietly for a long time and the first sale posts, the first 40 order posts, the ones where someone's mom or family is helping them pack at night same as us 😭😭, I end up rooting for those people like I know them personally ❤️
Someone else's small thing starting to work takes nothing away from me. Honestly it's the only reason the bad weeks feel survivable. ❤️

And somewhere in all of it I made a small promise to myself. Stop giving the mean people so much space in my head. Take the ones who trusted us way more seriously then the ones who didn't. And just keep building instead of sitting and arguing with the noise.

Anyways would genuinely love to hear, what's a small win you secretly celebrated that would sound like nothing to anyone else?

I'm the sales head at deSal

Just wanted to share something because I don't think people talk enough about this specific feeling.

We built around one boring, unglamorous problem: water in most Indian cities is hard. Bangalore, Delhi, Jaipur, Chennai - high TDS, high calcium. It wrecks hair and nobody's shampoo bottle mentions it. Every brand here sells you "smooth silky shine" and nobody sells you a solution to the actual water coming out of your tap.

When we started, the honest internal fear was: is this a real problem, or a problem we invented in a room? You can convince yourself of anything at 2am lol.

Then the reviews started coming in. Not "nice product" - people describing the exact thing we designed for, in their own words, without being asked to. One customer wrote that her hair was falling out from hard water, that she'd cycled through shampoo after shampoo and nothing worked, and that she found us via instagram and it finally stopped.

I've worked on things that sold fine and meant nothing. This is the first time I've read a customer message and had to get up and walk around the office.

Two things I'd genuinely pass on to anyone earlier than us:

1. Pick a problem people can already feel. We never had to educate anyone that their water is hard - they've been complaining about it for years. We just had to show up with the answer.
2. Unprompted reviews are the only validation that counts. Strangers as customers don't lie.

Still early. Still figuring out distribution, still losing sleep. But this week felt like proof we picked the right problem rather than a convenient one.

To everyone here grinding on something unsexy - the boring problem is usually the real one.

Feel free to DM me with any suggestions.

Edit : What I wanted to share was a feeling but thank you for your response to this. We did get a fair share of feedback, orders, clicks, criticism, questions, abuses. But I feel its part of how being online is. We are all here to grow. Thank you all. This has been a good experience overall. Was able to chat on DM with many amazing people. Thanks again.

Tried a few of the free Figma MCPs out there to redesign part of my portfolio.

It was really nice being able to quickly explore different layouts, color palettes, and themes instead of getting stuck on the first idea. Ended up trying a bunch of variations before settling on the current direction.

I eventually switched to my own AI Connect MCP for one reason. Most of the existing Figma MCPs I tried generated lots of small tool calls, so I added a batch update operation that applies an entire design update in a single call. It cut down token usage quite a bit and made the whole workflow feel much smoother.

It's still a work in progress, but I'm pretty happy with how it's shaping up. I'll share the finished portfolio later, and I'll drop the MCP codebase in the comments as well.

Not trying to promote the MCP or anything—just sharing it in case it's useful to someone else. The source is open anyway.

Pic 1 & 2 are from Figma, while Pic 3 & 4 are the implemented website.

Also, I don't think an MCP replaces real designers. But for developers making quick UI iterations or personal projects, it's been surprisingly useful.

Tried the free Figma MCPs out there to redesign part of my portfolio

It was nice being able to quickly explore different layouts, colors, and themes instead of getting stuck on the first idea. Ended up testing a bunch of variations before settling on the current design.

The MCP I finally used was my own lol AI Connect MCP and i'll tell you the reason. One thing I noticed was that existing Figma MCPs generated a lot of small tool calls, so I added a batch update operation that sends an entire design update in a single call. It reduced token usage quite a bit and made the workflow feel much smoother.

Still a work in progress, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. I'll share the portfolio later. Will share MCP codebase in the comments.

To be clear, the aim is not to promote my mcp or something, sharing if it helps someone as it did for me. The source is open anyways.

Pic 1 & 2 are websites and Pic 3 & 4 are on figma.

The work for real designers cannot be replaced by an MCP but for casual development this helps.