People ask us about the Rajkot choice at every conference we go to. Usually the question is framed as a challenge — "isn't it harder to recruit there?" or "don't you miss being in the startup ecosystem?" The honest answer to both is yes, and we'd make the same choice again without hesitation.
The burn rate difference
Office space in Rajkot costs roughly one-fifth of equivalent space in Bengaluru's tech corridors. Engineering salaries are 35–40% lower for the same skill level — not because Rajkot engineers are less skilled, but because the market isn't distorted by competition with Google, Swiggy, and Zepto all hiring simultaneously in the same zip code.
For a bootstrapped company, this difference is existential. The runway we had from our initial revenue was enough to sustain us in Rajkot for 18 months. The same revenue in Bengaluru would have bought us six months, maybe eight. The difference between six months and eighteen months of runway is the difference between a company that survives its early stumbles and one that doesn't.
We weren't being clever. We were being honest about what we could afford to build, and building there.
The loyalty difference
This one surprised us. Our average engineer tenure is 3.2 years, against an industry average — in Bengaluru — of 1.1 years. The engineers who join us are mostly from Gujarat and Rajasthan. They have family here, roots here, plans to buy a flat and settle here. They're not building a resume for a Bengaluru salary negotiation. They're building something in the city they've chosen.
The result is a team that operates with institutional memory and accumulated context that's genuinely rare in a company our age. Engineers who've been with us for two years know every corner of the codebase, every past mistake, every reason we made each architectural choice. That knowledge doesn't show up in any metric, but it makes the team dramatically more effective than the headcount suggests.
In Bengaluru, you hire ten engineers knowing three will leave in a year. In Rajkot, you hire seven and expect most of them to still be here in three.
The talent difference (the one nobody talks about)
The objection we hear most: "but the best engineers are in Bengaluru." This is true in aggregate and false in the way that matters.
The best engineers are in Bengaluru because that's where they can get the highest salaries and the most prestigious logos on their resume. The engineers who'd be equally good but haven't made that move — because they're building roots somewhere, or because the Bengaluru lifestyle isn't what they want, or because nobody's offered them something compelling in a Tier-2 city — those engineers exist in large numbers and are almost entirely untapped.
We've hired engineers from NIT Surat who turned down Bengaluru offers to join us. Not because we paid more, but because we gave them a technical problem worth solving, the autonomy to solve it, and the prospect of staying in the city they grew up in. The combination is more compelling than the Bengaluru salary bump, for more people than you'd expect.
What we gave up
I want to be honest about the trade-offs, because the romanticisation of Tier-2 tech sometimes glosses over them.
Recruiting takes longer. Our pipeline is thinner. There are skill sets — specific machine learning specialisations, some infrastructure experience — that are genuinely harder to find here. We've had a few hires not work out because the person wanted the cultural energy of a Bengaluru startup and Rajkot genuinely isn't that.
And we're less connected to the startup ecosystem. We hear about trends later. We meet fewer investors organically. Conference networking that happens automatically in Bengaluru requires a flight and a hotel for us.
These are real costs. They're smaller than the costs of the alternative.