What happens when you have a great product or business idea, but no one is willing to fund it? Do you give up after getting a “no” from your first investor, or do you go ahead and speak to ninety-nine more investors? It’s easy to give up after the first rejection, but it takes a different level of tenacity to keep trying after that. Jeff Bezos had this tenacity since he had to sit through about 60 meetings to raise $1 million for Amazon. Jash Shah also exemplifies that same tenacity when trying to raise funds for Get-A-Whey, even though he almost gave up after getting 100 “No’s.”

Jash Shah is a millennial entrepreneur and the founder of Get-A-Whey, a business he started with his mother and sister out of his mother’s kitchen. The business is a healthy ice cream brand that started as a “kitchen experiment.” Neither Jash Shah nor his mom was thinking of starting the first healthiest ice cream brand in India when he asked her to make him a healthier ice cream option to satisfy his post-workout craving. That request led to the birth of the tastiest guilt-free ice cream he had ever tasted, and he decided it would be unfair not to share it with the world. 

Jash Shah didn’t start as an entrepreneur, though. He graduated with a BTech and MBA from NMIMS in 2018 and began his career with Future Group working with their FMCG and retail practices. Jash Shah later moved to IDfy, a fast-growing SaaS company where he worked for three years as the head of business development. Little did he know that all the training, skills and experience he got from those companies would be instrumental to running a successful business, earning him a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2022.  

Get-A-Whey’s success is impressive. The company achieved $0.5m in revenue in FY21-22 and is well on track to hit $1.5m annually. The company’s focus is on building not just a healthy food brand but one that isn’t tasteless. Thus, what sets Get-A-Whey ice cream apart from other ice creams is packed with whey protein and no added sugar. The Get-A-Whey brand has been widely accepted in over 25 cities in just over three years. 

Success Has No Universal Definition 

Ask ten people what success means, and you’ll likely get ten different responses. There’s no right or wrong answer to success because it is relative. To Jash Shah, success is about helping others become successful and helping them fulfil their dreams. To achieve success, he believes the key elements of being successful are being passionate about what you do, being humble and listening more than you speak. 

Success Has a Process—Trust It

Jash Shah’s path to success hasn’t been rosy, but success has a process, and he trusts it. He has faced many challenges on his entrepreneurial journey, the biggest of which is the number of no’s he received when trying to raise funds for Get-A-Whey. 

As of 2021, Jash Shah had been rejected by over 100 VCs. He was almost giving up on the idea of raising funds from equity before everything changed. In January 2022, his business aired on Shark Tank and successfully raised $150,000 from 3 sharks. 

The journey to success was filled with so many no’s, but he didn’t give up till he got the first Yes. For Jash Shah, anyone on the path to success should be ready to try and fail but never fail to try.