Rahul Arethiya
Founding Partner & Product Manager
6 years today! Yes it has been 6 long years at karkhana.io. A journey full of learnings. A journey full of building. A journey which has been a crucial part of my life so far. It started with a small office on the slopes of vikhroli. 2 tables, 1 fan, few chairs, 3 people, a common inbox and a lots of ambition was what it took to set it rolling. Days used to be long with a lot of time just being at the suppliers end. Sometimes driving away in the streets of mumbai late night to dispatch shipments via the next available flight. There even was a time when used to just refresh the inbox to see if we are getting any new enquiries to a time when trying to open the inbox to respond to the existing orders being on field. Manufacturing is difficult they say it. Truly it is. We experienced it and made all of our efforts to make it fast and pleasant for everyone involved. And it feels immense proud to say that we are halfway there, being achieved the difficult and trying to achieve more.
Throughout my journey i have wore multiple hats here at karkhana.io. It has always been more of responsibilities and ownership and less of titles and designations. From being running around suppliers alone back in 2018 to leading a small team manage the manufacturing operations in 2019. Working around key operations in 2020, when the world took hit with COVID. It was time to focus on some key aspects of the business and zoom out a bit of daily run around. It was time to focus on some numbers, try to make sense of some and most importantly build some which didn’t existed. In middle of 2021 with three years passed by, it was time to look at all the different things we did and now try to build some systems around it. Slowly and steadily i was drifting towards the role where it was more of google sheets and tech softwares on screen and less of solidworks. We got ERPNext for for business operations in 2021 and i was very happy to lead it all the way. Something not very much my area of expertise but surely a need of the hour for the company and like many other challengs i enjoyed doing it.
There is always this freedom aroud here at karkhana.io where you have the visibility of what’s going on in and out, figure out the bottlenects on the way of growth, own it, drive it and deliver it. Not all days are sunny and when the failure hits around, it is always supported with positive criticism.
With the growing team and raising the bar it was time to focus on digital tech products. Digitizing manufacturing was an uphill task too. Soaking the product literature with some great guideance and mentorship from the team paved my way into yet another challenging journey. It was now time for working with completely different set of teams, more scrreen time and less of watching metal chips fly away! Understanding and mapping the complex buyer and supplier ecosystem that too with an inital bias towards suppliers since coming from a supplier heavy ops role was one hell of a journey. It was a lot of unlearing too which i think is much more difficult then learning something new. With this we build around a complete suite of digital products for buyers, suppliers and our internal team. Not only this, it helped us set a solid base for something pretty exciting coming soon!
Throughout this journey it has been great working with some astonishing minds here at karkhana.io. It never feels like a 9-6 workplace. There’s a good mix of young and experienced folks around. There are people always tinkering with some new projects and discussing the possibilities of its manufacturing and sales around.
