The pitch deck is ready. The website looks professional. Friends say the idea is brilliant. But who is actually going to pay? Three Indian entrepreneurs’ experiences in the Netherlands and Germany reveal what happens when an idea meets an unfamiliar market.
Customer No. 1: Two strangers, some pakodas and €7
Illustrative image, Courtesy witbran.com
In 2018, Manasi, an Indian newcomer to Amsterdam, had an idea that did not require venture capital, sophisticated software or an elaborate business plan. She wanted to recreate something she missed from India: eating freshly prepared pakodas while talking with other people.
But there was a commercial question hiding inside this perfectly ordinary craving. Would strangers in the Netherlands actually pay for that experience?
She created a Facebook event inviting people to experience authentic Indian cuisine at her home.
Two people signed up.
The price was €7.
It was a small transaction, but an important one. People outside her immediate circle had agreed to exchange money for something she was offering.
According to a 2020 interview with Expat.com, that first event marked the beginning of Tasty Talks, a social dining platform that connects people through home-cooked food, culinary experiences, and cultural encounters.
The early business was far from effortless. Manasi attended networking events, joined Facebook and Meetup groups, and spent considerable time meeting people around Amsterdam. Some meetings were useful for customer acquisition; others helped her understand the city and its potential audience.
She also discovered that certain experiences attracted more interest than others. Momo workshops, for instance, proved especially popular.
By 2020, Tasty Talks reported more than 30 hosts, nearly 200 culinary experiences, and over 5,000 followers. Those are historical figures reported at the time, not verified current totals. The most interesting part of the story is not the eventual size of the community. It is the simplicity of the first commercial test. Manasi did not begin by proving that thousands of people wanted cultural dining experiences. She found two people willing to pay €7.
From two paying guests to a dining community
The early Tasty Talks journey in Amsterdam
- 2018
The first experiment
A Facebook event attracts two paying guests for a €7 Indian food experience.
- 2018
Building an audience
Monthly dining experiences and local networking introduce the idea to more people.
- 2019
Growing through hosts
Other cooks begin offering culinary experiences through the platform.
- October 2020
A growing community
Tasty Talks reports more than 30 hosts and nearly 200 culinary experiences.
The Enschede founder trying to change a Dutch shopping habit
Image courtesy, indebuurt.nl
A reusable shopping bag seems like a fairly straightforward product. You buy it, use it repeatedly, and eventually replace it. For Udaya Vasepalli, an Indian entrepreneur in Enschede, that familiar object presented a business opportunity.
His company, LoopTas, developed a system combining software, hardware and loyalty incentives to encourage the reuse of shopping bags. Instead of simply selling another supposedly sustainable product, the idea was to influence what shoppers actually did after receiving a bag.
Vasepalli had arrived in the Netherlands in 2018 to pursue a master’s degree. He subsequently chose to build his business there. In an interview published by Welcome to NL, he discusses developing the venture within the Dutch sustainability ecosystem and the experience of establishing a company as an international entrepreneur.
LoopTas illustrates a different kind of commercial challenge from Tasty Talks. For a social dining event, a customer can make a relatively small decision: spend a few euros to see whether the experience is enjoyable. A reusable-bag system involving businesses, consumers, and loyalty incentives has more moving parts. Its value depends not only on whether a business likes the environmental idea, but also on whether shoppers participate and whether the arrangement makes commercial sense.
That raises a question every sustainability founder eventually confronts: who is willing to pay for a better outcome, and what evidence do they need before agreeing?
Berlin: When technical expertise meets the German customer
Santhosh Jayaprakash moved to Berlin with substantial experience in IT and cloud technology. He had already built businesses in India, and Germany offered a different commercial environment. In an October 2025 interview with Deutschland.de, Jayaprakash discussed the opportunities he saw in Germany, particularly among the country’s small and medium-sized businesses, often described as the Mittelstand.
He identified demand for secure, scalable digital systems that matched his technical background. But identifying demand and winning a contract are different achievements.
A business customer evaluating a cloud service is not buying a demonstration of programming ability. It must decide whether the proposed solution fits its existing systems, security requirements, budget and operational needs.
For an entrepreneur arriving from another market, that means discovering which aspects of the offer matter most to the buyer. The founder may be proudest of the technology, while the customer is more concerned with reliability, implementation and the consequences of something going wrong.
Jayaprakash’s story provides a useful contrast with the Amsterdam dining experiment. In one case, a stranger can spend €7 on an evening’s experience. In the other, a company may be making a decision with longer-term operational consequences.
His public interview does not establish exactly how he acquired his first German contracts or what he charged. Those details would make the story considerably more valuable than a conventional account of an Indian entrepreneur succeeding abroad.
What happens when your original pitch doesn’t work?
One of the most instructive accounts of selling in the Netherlands comes from two Sri Lankan entrepreneurs rather than Indian founders. Jaikishen Jayesingha and Bhagya Goonewardhane developed Urbandine, a technology platform for ordering and payments in hospitality businesses.
Their initial proposition focused on reducing costs through automation. But when they spoke with Dutch restaurant owners, they discovered something unexpected: the owners did not necessarily want technology to replace waiters. Waiters were part of the hospitality experience. The founders changed the proposition. Instead of concentrating on removing staff from the ordering process, they began emphasizing additional revenue from drinks and snacks, including orders from beach beds.
In an interview with Immigrant Founders, Jayesingha also described another problem: although English is widely spoken in the Netherlands, many of the people they wanted to sell to preferred communicating in Dutch.
Their facilitator helped introduce them to restaurant owners and assisted with market validation. The founders subsequently used hospitality trade shows to demonstrate their product, including a launch at Horecava in January 2020.
This is a useful reminder that entering a European market is not simply a matter of translating a website or adjusting prices. Sometimes the product remains broadly similar, but the reason a customer should buy it changes completely.
Is selling in Europe really different from selling in India?
It is tempting to turn these stories into a neat cultural formula: Indian business runs on relationships, while European business runs on processes and contracts.
That would be an oversimplification.
Relationships matter in Europe, too. Manasi’s early growth involved networking and personal connections. Urbandine relied on introductions from a local facilitator. Enterprise software customers, wherever they are located, need confidence in the supplier.
The more useful distinction is between being trusted personally and being trusted commercially.
A friendly conversation might secure a meeting. A recommendation might get a founder through the door. But the prospective customer still needs to understand the offer, the price, the risk and the expected benefit.
The cases suggest several practical differences in how founders approached their markets:
| Commercial question | What the cases illustrate |
|---|---|
| Where do customers come from? | Facebook events, networking, local introductions and business networks |
| What makes someone interested? | A desirable experience, a practical operational improvement, or a relevant technical solution |
| What creates trust? | Personal interaction, local access, demonstrations, and a clear proposition |
| What can go wrong? | Assuming customers value the same benefits the founder values |
| What may need adapting? | Language, product positioning, distribution, and the way value is explained |
These are lessons from particular businesses, not universal rules about Indian or European customers. The differences between selling food experiences, sustainability systems and enterprise technology may be at least as important as national culture.
The customer who changes your business
The first ten customers are often discussed as though they were a miniature version of the next ten thousand. But the early stage of a business can be something quite different. The founder may still be discovering what the customer wants, what to charge, which features matter and even who the real buyer is.
For Manasi, the first two customers provided a small but concrete sign that strangers would pay for her idea. For a founder like Vasepalli, the challenge involves showing businesses and consumers why a new system is worth adopting. For a technical entrepreneur like Jayaprakash, the commercial task includes translating expertise into a proposition a German business can evaluate.
The most revealing questions are not necessarily how large these businesses eventually became. They are what the founders believed before they started selling, what their customers actually told them and which assumptions they had to abandon. After all, a hundred people saying your idea is interesting can feel encouraging. One person agreeing to pay tells you something different.
