Late one evening in a Bengaluru lab, Vaibhav Sai bent over his notebook filled with complex diagrams and calculations. For months, he had been working on an idea that felt urgent and deeply personal — designing living cells that could detect pollutants in water and food.

The science thrilled him. The potential impact was enormous. But everything beyond the lab left him paralysed.

“I could build a product, but I didn’t know how to build a startup,” he says, recalling that phase with a laugh. Questions swirled: Who would buy it? How much funding should I raise? How do you explain something this technical to an investor?

He pauses, then admits: “I didn’t even know what customer discovery meant.”

For many young innovators like Vaibhav, this is where the dream often ends—not because the idea isn’t good, but because the gap between a breakthrough and a business feels impossible to cross.

But then something changed.

The turning point: Finding a tribe

In 2022, while searching for direction, Vaibhav stumbled upon Climate Ninja, a programme run by a collective with an unusual name: Sustainability Mafia.

“I was sceptical, but curious,” he recalls. Could this really help him? Still, with few other options, he decided to give it a shot.

That decision changed everything.

“It wasn’t just a course. They literally hand-held me through the process,” Vaibhav says. Over the next few weeks, he interacted with founders who had walked the same uncertain road, mentors who had built successful ventures from scratch, and peers who were dreaming as big as he was.

“They pushed me to step out of the lab,” he says. “Talk to customers, validate ideas, and learn what works in the market.”

Those conversations opened his eyes to India’s biggest gaps in climate solutions. Water pollution and food safety kept coming up again and again.

“That’s how I pivoted my startup, ‘Technobox’, to focus on affordable tools for contamination detection,” he explains.

But it wasn’t........

© The Better India