I wrote about why we chose Rajkot over Bengaluru a while back — lower burn, deeper loyalty, a talent pool nobody else was seriously recruiting from. It's the piece people bring up most when they meet me at conferences, usually with a follow-up question the original essay couldn't answer yet: does it actually hold up once you're not making a one-time decision, but hiring against it, month after month? Eighteen months into treating Rajkot hiring as an actual repeatable practice rather than a founding-story choice, I have a real answer instead of a projection.
Checking our own claim
The original argument had three legs: cheaper to operate, more loyal once hired, and access to talent that wasn't being seriously courted elsewhere. Eighteen months of actually doing the hiring — not just making the decision once — is a fair test of whether those held up under repetition, or whether they were true of our first few hires and got harder from there.
Tenure, revisited
The number I quoted before was 3.2 years average tenure against a Bengaluru industry average of roughly 1.1. That number has ticked up, not down, as our earliest Rajkot hires cross their second and third year with us. I was genuinely unsure it would hold — early loyalty is easy to over-read from a small founding cohort who joined for the adventure of it. It's held up in the hires who came after, which is the more meaningful data point.
Is 18 months even long enough to say this?
I want to hold this claim more loosely than the confident framing above suggests, because the honest challenge is fair: 18 months is one data point on a trend that could still bend the other way, and a small founding team is exactly the population most likely to show artificially high early loyalty regardless of geography — people who join a seven-person startup in its first year are self-selected for a kind of commitment that doesn't generalize cleanly to hire number thirty.
What makes me more confident than a pure "too early to tell" would suggest is that the hires holding up now aren't the founding cohort anymore — they're the people who joined after we already had a real product, a real customer base, and no origin-story romance attached to the offer. That's a meaningfully different test than the one the original essay was making. It's still not a large enough sample to call it proven. It's large enough that I no longer think we're just watching sentimental hold-ons age gracefully.
What we got wrong the first time
The original essay implied hiring gets easier as the company gets more established. It didn't, in the way I expected. I assumed reputation would compound — that as we grew, candidates would find us. Mostly, they still don't, not organically. Referrals and direct outreach to colleges — NIT Surat especially — still account for most of our strongest hires. A job board posting from a Rajkot address still underperforms the same posting from a Bengaluru one, even now, even with a product people have heard of.
The other miscalibration: we hired one senior candidate, early in this eighteen-month stretch, largely on strength of resume and skill match, and underweighted whether they actually wanted to be in Rajkot for reasons beyond the job. The interviews went well technically — strong system-design conversations, a portfolio that matched exactly what we needed. What we didn't press on hard enough was the part underneath the resume: family, roots, whether Rajkot was a place they'd choose or a place they were passing through until something better came along. It didn't work out, and it taught us to ask the roots question directly and early — not as a courtesy, but as a filter as real as the technical interview.
Reputation didn't bring candidates to us. People did — mostly the ones already on the team, vouching for a place they'd chosen to stay.
What the pipeline actually looks like now
Concretely, our best month for hiring doesn't look like a funnel that starts with an inbound application. It starts with an existing engineer texting someone they know from their own college, or a professor at NIT Surat mentioning a final-year student who's been asking about product companies outside Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. Job board listings still run, mostly to make sure we're not invisible to someone actively searching, but they're the long tail, not the source of our best hires. That's a slower, more manual pipeline than a company our size in Bengaluru would need to run, and we've stopped expecting it to get faster on its own. It gets better the way most of what we build gets better — deliberately, one relationship at a time, not through momentum.
The thing that did surprise us
In the last few months specifically, we've started seeing something new: candidates who reference the product itself — the patterns in 4 million conversations a month, the 120-plus customer teams, the fact that we're running support across 14 countries out of this same office — as part of why they're interested, not just the job description. That's a reversal from eighteen months ago, when we were purely the ones doing the convincing, describing a product most candidates had never heard of and asking them to take the opportunity on faith.
It's still a small effect in absolute numbers, nowhere close to the volume of inbound a recognizable Bengaluru startup gets, and I want to be careful not to oversell it — most weeks, we're still the ones reaching out first. But it's the first sign that the loop we hoped for — good hires build a good product, a good product attracts good hires — might actually be starting to close, rather than something we're hoping into existence because it would make a better story eighteen months in.
Where we bent our own rule
I should be honest that "we hire in Rajkot" isn't an absolute. Meera, who runs customer success, is based in Bengaluru — closer to a cluster of our larger customers and the travel connections that role actually needs. We didn't make an exception reluctantly; the job needed it, so we built the role around where it needed to sit rather than forcing geography onto it. It's the same reasoning behind hiring customer success before we hired a dedicated head of sales — we let what the role actually required decide the shape of the hire, not a principle we'd already committed to before the role existed. If a role's requirements point somewhere else, we'll follow that over the principle. We just haven't found many roles where that's true yet.
Still the right call
Eighteen months of actually hiring against the thesis, instead of just stating it, has made me more confident in it, not less — with the caveat that "more confident" doesn't mean "no longer working at it." Every one of these hires took longer than the equivalent Bengaluru hire would have. We'd take that trade again, at the same price, for the same reasons. It's the same trade-off underneath why we've kept the whole team at eight people instead of hiring faster somewhere easier to recruit — slower and closer, over faster and further, as a pattern that shows up in more of how we build this company than just the org chart. If any of this sounds like the kind of place you'd want to be hard to recruit into on purpose, our openings are here.