Meet: Shruti Taneja
Founder of: Nivaala
Tell us about your business:
Nivaala is a brand rooted in food and culture, uniting people who are passionate about their familial food and preserving their culinary legacy.
The inception of this brand came about from a personal loss that I faced a few years back when I lost my mother, and realised that I hadn't written down or learnt any of our family recipes. With a mission to inspire people to treasure family recipes as heirlooms, which are just as significant as the saris and jewellery that we inherit, I created Nivaala, an heirloom recipe journal.
With the journal being our flagship product, we recently expanded our offerings to recipe cards and services such as a recipe exchange via postal mail.
What was the best piece of business advice you were given when you were starting out?
We live in a world built on promises; and the people who keep them are the ones who win in every sense of the word.
My brother made me realise to importance of setting realistic expectations, and not over promising just to please someone, be it a customer or an investor. Sometimes, we make promises we know in our hearts won’t be easy to keep. There will inevitably be times when we have to balance good intentions with business imperatives - but saying one thing and then doing another is the surest way to erode, not only the trust of others but also our sense of integrity.
Therefore, the best piece of advise that has helped me so far is to make honest promises and focus on how exactly I'm going to fulfil them, rather than over promising in eagerness and under delivering later.
Name the biggest overall lesson you've learned in running a business?
On a spectrum of optimism and pessimism, it is best to be in the middle and be a reasonable optimist.
Optimism fuels us to generate new possibilities and helps sustain the energy during the journey. However, entrepreneurship also requires dealing with repeated failures - it happens multiple times in a week, sometimes in a day too! Optimism is extremely beneficial in these situations and must be paired with rational thinking - objectively checking on the results of our efforts to make sure that overly optimistic expectations are not leading us astray.
As an entrepreneur, we need a plentiful supply of optimism; but sprinkling a bit of pessimism to ensure that our expectations match our reality insulates us from crushing disappointment when things don’t go our way.
In moments of self-doubt or adversity, how do you build your resolve?
When you face a setback, it is easy to get consumed in negativity and view it as something that will simply be your new normal.
However, if you see a setback as something temporary and focus on the things that are in your control, they will become a passing circumstance. You’ll be able to face that challenge and even move beyond it. You won’t define yourself by your current setback.
It helps to focus on something you can do or fix, no matter how small. Break it down into manageable tasks, and complete them one by one. Slowly, you’ll make it through and come out on the other side. It’s also important to find meaning in your challenges, and take action to make things go your way.
Discover more:
https://www.nivaala.co
@nivaala.co
