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Diligence

Open questions

Ranked by impact on the investment thesis. This list is deliberately long — a short one would mean we hadn't looked.

1 · Advertiser ARPU and trial-to-paid conversion

Decides whether the business exists. No Glow evidence at all — zero businesses contacted. The required upside values sit above the only hard comparable (Justdial's ₹1,708). Resolved by E1.

2 · Consumer contributor ratio

Decides whether Glow is a community or a directory. Never observed even once. Resolved by E2.

3 · Legality of outbound business contact

Already reshaped the plan — the base case was rebuilt onto compliant channels. The underlying position rests on secondary sources because the primary TRAI documents are scanned images. Resolved by E0. No outreach programme should run before it.

4 · Whether the SEO channel exists at all

Organic search is the largest non-paid acquisition line in the model and has never been tested. No keyword volume data was obtained, so the traffic ceiling is an assumption band. E4 gives a directional signal; a new domain's ranking curve takes longer than 90 days.

5 · Consumer CAC and retention

₹120 per registered user and 72% monthly retention are derived from generic benchmarks, not from Glow. Resolved by E3.

6 · Audience credibility threshold

The mechanism is real — a salon will ask how many people will see the listing. The specific number (4,000 area MAU) is a judgement with no external benchmark.

7 · Area density beyond Whitefield

Every other area uses an assumed 600 businesses against Whitefield's verified 821. Cheapest open item in the plan. Resolved by E5.

8 · Founder compensation benchmark

Case B is held at ₹5 lakh/month. Comparable VP Product roles at funded Series B/C companies run ₹1.2–2.2 crore — so Case B understates the true market cost of the role. The ₹1 crore replacement sensitivity is published for exactly this reason.

9 · Advertiser churn

Base 5%/month with no Glow data. Requires roughly six months of paying advertisers — cannot be resolved in 90 days.

Questions needing a founder decision

  • Which compensation case is real — is ~₹42 lakh/year of founder-financed runway sustainable for 31+ months?
  • Does a field-sales-led motion break the lean thesis the plan set out to test?
  • Is a directory-without-community outcome worth pursuing if E2 fails?
  • Should fashion be dropped from near-term positioning, given 7 fashion and 1 jewellery listing?