Brought up on ample lessons in trust and empathy, the entrepreneurial journey of Chaitanya Ramalingegowda has inadvertently been shaped by his childhood experiences. And what keeps him awake is ensuring a perfect-night sleep for Wakefit users
Chaitanya Ramalingegowda in front of the Balarama Jayarama Gate of the Mysore Palace in Mysuru
Image: Selvaprakash Lakshmanan for Forbes India
Suddenly, the young boy turned anxious. He started counting money again. Dejected with the outcome, he tried his luck for the third time. The result was the same. Seven 10-rupee notes were firmly clutched in his fist. Three were still missing. It was a pleasant Saturday morning, the schools were closed, and he had stepped out to buy medicines for his grandmother from a local pharma store, which was a few blocks from his house. The shop was vacant, there was no queue outside the cash counter, and the boy looked baffled. He timidly put his hands inside his pockets, but he couldn’t find anything.
The owner of the pharmacy was keenly watching his actions. “Paisey kam hain [Falling short of money]?” he asked. The boy nodded gingerly. “Koi baat nahin. Agli baar de dena [No stress. Pay me next time],” he said in a reassuring tone, flashed a warm smile and handed over the medicine to the boy. “Don’t run, and be careful while you cross the road,” he said and gave a toffee to the boy. “He was Shenoy uncle. I still remember his name,” recalls Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, who cleared his dues the next day. “He trusted me, and I kept his trust,” says Ramalingegowda, who was born in Mysuru, completed his primary schooling from Challakere, a small town which is some 200 km from Bengaluru. “Trusting somebody you don’t even know,” he underlines, “is such a quintessential small-town thing.”
Over 20 years later, it was Ramalingegowda’s turn to trust people he didn’t know. It was 2016 and the young boy was now an adult. After two failed startup ventures and a slew of corporate gigs, Ramalingegowda was into the early days of his third venture which was headquartered in Bengaluru. “I had put failures behind me, and made a fresh start,” says the 35-year-old entrepreneur who finished his 16 years of formal education in 10 schools across eight small towns in Karnataka, including Mangaluru, Belgaum and Tumakuru. “My father was in government service. So, I had a nomadic childhood,” he smiles. Many moons later, in March 2016, he co-founded Wakefit—a sleep solutions company selling mattresses online—along with Ankit Garg, who hailed from Agra.
Big city Bengaluru, interestingly, sprung a rude jolt for the guys from sleepy towns. The duo wanted to disrupt the traditional way of buying mattresses. There was one small problem, though. The offline segment had been the only ‘trusted’ medium known to generations of shoppers who had bought mattresses from physical stores.
Wakefit’s pitch fell flat. Nobody would trust an unknown brand, and an online medium of sales which lacked touch and feel. Ramalingegowda knew that the orthodox way of selling was flawed. Why? The human body requires 14 days of regular sleep on a mattress to know whether the body can adjust to it or not, he reckons. But the new way of selling, too, had serious limitations. There was no touch, feel and warmth. “The biggest issue was trust,” he recalls. The buyers didn’t trust an online brand.
(This story appears in the 15 December, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)