'Skip India Movement': Bengaluru AI founders ban team from talking to Indian customers over fear of 'exploitation'

A recent post on X about AI founders "skipping selling to Indian customers" is gaining attention for its insights into the workplace logics.

The post shared by Vaibhav Domkundwar, CEO at Better Capital wrote about "Skip India Movement" and mentioned that Indian customers are "exploiting their startups for free trials".

"AI founders finally skipping selling to Indian customers after doing PoCs (Proof of Concepts) after PoCs and then being requested for even more "free" PoCs," the post read.

"There is a limit to this and founders are saying screw it and skipping selling to Indian customers. Enough is enough. Even unicorns are using these startup founders (who are 10x better than their internal teams) for freebies. I guess somethings never change! " he further wrote.

The post garnered over 252K views and a flurry of comments, some also from big names like Paras Chopra, Founder of Lossfunk.

Chopra wrote that he has "banned" his team from talking to Indian customers.

"I have banned builders at @lossfunk to talking to Indian customers. It's a tiny tech market, but a comfort zone. Many times, founders end up optimizing for the Indian market and realize they can't scale further," he commented.

Another user commented, "This is correct. We've conducted over 3-4 free pilots (for months) with many customers, only for them to request more pilots with other offices. It's insane. We've stopped free pilots unless they're strictly time-boxed with limited consumption."

Entrepreneur Harshdeep Rapal, drawing comparisons between India and US markets, noted that they are very different and "maybe the products does not fit here yet".

"India and the US are fundamentally very different markets. We ourselves chose to focus on the US - for now. That doesn’t make India a bad market. Maybe our product doesn’t fit here yet, or maybe we're not ready to sell it here. Truth be told, every enterprise customer requires a PoC - may be two. But, then your product pricing has to price-in the 'Free PoC' efforts you spend. Nothing comes 'free' - especially when you are boot-strapped," he wrote.