u/danielabinav

Need some honest opinions because I've been going back and forth on this for weeks and can't decide on my own.

Here's the situation.

I've been working from home since I joined my company. WFH lets me live with my parents in a smaller city. My expenses are minimal. No rent. No Swiggy. No commute costs.

Food is taken care of. Whatever I earn, most of it goes into savings and into building my own thing on the side.

The side thing is VerifiedMRR, a private revenue verification tool for Indian SaaS founders using Razorpay OAuth. I'm an approved Razorpay technology partner. I built it solo. It's live, it's free for founders, and I've been pouring nights and weekends into it for the last few months.

It's the most real thing I've ever built.

Last week my manager called and said WFH is ending. I need to come back to office. Full time. Company rules.

The office is in a different city. Moving there means I pay rent. I pay for food. I commute. My savings drop. My family time drops. And most importantly, my bandwidth for building verifiedmrr drops from "nights and weekends" to "whatever energy I have left after commuting and office politics," which for most people is nothing.

I told my manager I didn't see the point of going in. He said it's mandatory.

So now I'm stuck.

Option 1: Go back to office. Keep the stable job. Accept that verifiedmrr becomes a weekend hobby that slowly dies.

Option 2: Quit. Stay with my parents. Focus fully on verifiedmrr for 6-12 months. Risk running out of runway before the product finds users.

Option 3: Go back, try to push through the exhaustion, hope I can still build on the side.

I'm not going to lie, I'm leaning toward option 2. Staying home is the unfair advantage I have.

No rent, no dependents, no overhead. A lot of founders would kill for this runway situation. Going back to office feels like trading the best setup I'll ever have for a salary that doesn't even give me freedom to build.

But I also know that "quit your job for your startup" is advice that works for the people who make it and destroys the people who don't. And I have zero paying users right now. Not low. Zero.

So I want to ask people here who've been through this. When is the right time to quit? Is it when you have MRR? When you have runway? When the gap between job and startup becomes unbearable? Or is "quit now" just the exciting answer that feels good in the moment and ruins you in six months?

Also asking this because I genuinely don't have anyone in my life who has done this. My parents don't fully understand what I'm building. My friends have jobs. Reddit is the closest thing I have to a room full of people who've actually faced this decision.

Any honest take is welcome. Especially if it's "don't quit, you're not ready yet." That's the answer I need to hear if it's true.

And if you're curious what I've been pouring my savings and my weekends into, it's VerifiedMRR. That's the dream I'm trying to decide whether to protect.

This has been bothering me for a while and I finally want to ask it out loud.

Last week I was looking at MyFitnessPal. 300 million downloads. Premium tier is $10 per month. People genuinely pay for this. The core functionality is "type in what you ate, get a calorie count." You can do this in ChatGPT in one

prompt. You can do it with a free Google search. You can do it with a two year old app someone built for free. And yet the premium tier has millions of subscribers.

Same thing with Strava. $12 per month for running tracking that your phone already does for free. Same with Calm. $14 per month to play ambient sounds and count your breaths. Same with a hundred other American SaaS apps that charge real money for something that is technically replaceable by a free alternative or a five minute hack.

Now I look at India.

I build a tool that takes a real pain point. Saves founders time. Razorpay partnership, official integration, watermarked security, the whole thing. Free tier. Zero users in a month. Suggest ₹99 per month for premium and people laugh.

I'm not trying to be dramatic. I genuinely want to understand the difference because I'm building in this market and I keep hitting this wall.

Here are my current theories.

Theory 1: Disposable income. Americans making $60k a year have $500/month in discretionary spending. Indians making the equivalent ₹50,000/month have ₹5000 in discretionary spending. A $10 subscription is nothing in the first case and a real decision in the second. This is obvious and real but I don't think it's the whole story because Indians happily pay ₹500 for a single dinner out.

Theory 2: Cultural relationship with software. In America, paying for software is normal. In India, software has historically been free, pirated, or bundled with hardware. Paying monthly for a tool feels structurally foreign. The default assumption is "if I wait long enough a free version will appear or someone will crack this."

Theory 3: Tolerance for convenience premium. Americans pay for convenience. Indians pay for necessity. If something saves 20 minutes a day, an American subscribes. An Indian spends the 20 minutes because the time is cheaper than the subscription in their mental math.

Theory 4: Trust in the category. Americans trust that paid tools will work, get updates, have support. Indians assume paid tools will be abandoned in 6 months, have buggy support, and not respect refund requests. So the default is "wait until a free alternative exists."

Theory 5: Alternative availability. India has cheap human labor. Hire a virtual assistant for ₹8000/month and they do what 20 tools do. Why buy 20 subscriptions when you can hire a person? This isn't possible for most Americans because labor is expensive there.

I don't know which theory is strongest. Probably a combination.

What I keep thinking about is this. If I was building the same product for the American market, I could probably price it at $9 and get 100 users. Building the same product for the Indian market, priced at ₹99, gets me closer to 10 users. That's a 10x pricing gap and a 10x conversion gap in the same market size. It's brutal.

Asking fellow Indian founders and anyone who's built for both markets. What's actually going on? Is this a "Indians don't value software" problem? Or a "I'm selling to the wrong Indian audience" problem? Or something else I'm missing entirely?

Every time an Indian founder posts on this sub, the top comment is the same script:

"Indians don't pay for subscriptions bro"

"SaaS is dead in India"

"go build for US market"

heard this for 3 years. never seen proof. just vibes and copium.

so I built VerifiedMRR. Indian founders connect their Razorpay (read-only, OAuth, Razorpay approved me as a tech partner), and it pulls your actual live MRR. no screenshots. no flex tweets. real numbers verified at source.

here's the thing I've noticed talking to Indian founders privately:

people are doing ₹2L, ₹5L, ₹15L MRR quietly. but publicly everyone pretends nothing works in India because admitting success here makes you a target for tax scrutiny, jealous relatives, and Twitter debates.

so the narrative stays "India doesn't pay." and new founders keep believing it. and nobody builds for India. and the cycle continues.

I'm calling the bluff.

if 100 Indian SaaS founders connect their Razorpay, the leaderboard alone becomes undeniable proof. if 1000 connect, the "SaaS is dead in India" take dies publicly.

what you get:

verified MRR badge for your site (Indian buyers are skeptical by default, this helps)

leaderboard spot

a shareable card when someone doubts your numbers on Twitter

free. no upsell. no pricing page gotcha.

what you don't give up:

zero access to transaction data or customer info. it's read-only MRR. Razorpay wouldn't have approved the partnership otherwise.

not selling anything. genuinely trying to build proof that Indian SaaS exists.

if you have even ₹5000 MRR on Razorpay — connect it. let's collectively kill the "Indians don't pay" narrative with actual data.

roast welcome. skepticism welcome. but "SaaS is dead in India" without numbers is just cope at this point.

here's the situation.

i'm a solo founder from south india. about 3 months ago i noticed something stupid about the indian SaaS ecosystem: every founder proves their revenue with a screenshot. to investors. to acquirers. to potential cofounders. to hiring candidates. the entire trust layer of indian startup revenue is a .png file anyone can fake in figma in 30 seconds.

so i built a platform that connects directly to razorpay via official oauth, pulls the actual subscription revenue data (read only, no api keys needed from the founder), and displays a verified MRR number on a public profile with a "razorpay verified" badge.

to make this work i had to become an official razorpay technology partner. that process took 2 months. i got rejected 4 times. i rewrote my application 5 times. i had calls with their compliance team where i had to explain what oauth means to someone who approves oauth partnerships for a living. i almost quit twice.

finally got approved. built the thing. shipped it. launched it.

that was a month ago.

zero users.

not "low traction." not "slow growth." zero. the number between negative one and one. the number that stares back at you from every dashboard you check 47 times a day.

one month ago i launched my product.

the idea is simple: indian SaaS founders connect their razorpay account through official oauth (one click, read only, no api keys), and their MRR gets publicly verified on a leaderboard. no more screenshots. no more "trust me bro." just real revenue, verified at the source.

i'm an official razorpay technology partner. it took me 2 months and 4 rejections to get approved. the tech works. the oauth flow works. the leaderboard works.

nobody uses it.

zero signups in 30 days.

i've been posting on twitter and reddit, getting decent engagement (a few posts hit 200+ views, had real conversations with founders), but nobody has actually connected their razorpay and verified their MRR.

i've been going back and forth between three explanations:

the product solves a problem nobody actually has. founders say screenshots are annoying but they don't care enough to switch to something better. the pain is real but it's a 3/10 not a 9/10.

the positioning is wrong. maybe "MRR leaderboard" sounds like a vanity metric board when it should sound like "credibility infrastructure for fundraising and acquisitions."

the distribution is broken. the founders who would actually benefit from this (doing ₹1L to ₹5L MRR, actively fundraising or selling) don't hang out on twitter or reddit. they're in private whatsapp groups and slack communities i can't access.

or maybe it's a combination of all three. or something i haven't thought of.

i'm not looking for encouragement. i'm looking for the kind of feedback that hurts a little but saves me 6 months of building in the wrong direction.

specific questions i'd love answers to:

what's your first reaction when you land on the site? do you understand what it does within 5 seconds?

would you personally connect your razorpay to this? if not, what's stopping you? is it trust, relevance, or just "i don't see why i'd bother"?

if you were me, would you keep pushing this or build something else?

genuinely open to being told this is a bad idea. i'd rather know now than in 6 months.