Here is the inspiring story of Dhruv Dewan, one of the masterminds behind Thrive, Hashtag
Loyalty and the ‘Save Local’ campaign.
Early Education and Career
Dhruv Dewan was born and brought up in Mumbai. He graduated from D.J. Sanghvi College
of Engineering in Information Technology. Like most graduates in India, Dhruv landed a job
in the IT consulting domain of the financial sector at Ernst and Young (EY) and worked there
for around 2.5 years. After a couple of years, Dhruv realized that he wanted to take on bigger
challenges and risks in his career and be more successful. Thus, he extended his circle and started meeting new people. Among those, a couple of friends ended up becoming his co-
founders at hashtag Loyalty, which was founded in 2015. In 2020, they founded a new
company, Thrive, a revolutionary concept in the world of food e-commerce, where Swiggy
and Zomato are dominating the space. Then, they merged the old product of hashtag loyalty
into Thrive.
Dhruv Dewan, since his childhood, has always tried to solve problems using technology. That
has led him to choose the same in his career.
A Brief on Thrive
Dhruv Dewan says that no one in the food e-commerce space seems to be profitable as they
do not work with positive unit economics despite a large number of online orders through
Swiggy, Zomato and other food aggregators. So, Dhruv, along with his Co-founders, decided
to solve the problem and help the restaurants have profitable transactions. They do not want
to reinvent the wheel but evolve the current ecosystem by setting up their own online
ordering platforms for restaurants. They charge commissions from those orders.
Uniqueness and Future Plans of Thrive
Their startup is unique not in the product but in the way how the entire team executes and
achieves their targets. They receive lower commissions from the restaurants, unlike the food
aggregators, and have a dedicated team to support the restaurants in terms of hiccups in their
operations. Thrive is transparent and focuses on offering comfort to all the stakeholders
involved. Thrive has a cohort of restaurants and has multiple integrations with point-of-sale
systems and others. In the future, they will be focusing not only on the restaurants but also on launching a direct consumer platform.
Overcoming Challenges and Failures
As they were a highly intense tech product, a lot of actions were required operationally.
Ensuring that the team meets the expectations without compromising on quality was the
biggest challenge to Dhruv Dewan and other co-founders. It was easier to do when the
company was small but the challenges grew exponentially as the company scaled up fast.
Dhruv has been an entrepreneur for more than seven years. He does not make large
commitments as he focuses on making small improvements consistently. Thus, he does not
want to look at his journey as a success or failure competition but as a constant learning path.
Dhruv leverages OKR (Objectives and Key Results) at his startup to get better structure and
results. They track their journey towards achieving the key results with the objective in their
minds.
Source of Inspiration
Dhruv’s family members and ancestors have always been a part of the Government or service
sector. But he was surrounded by people, who were not family, making bold moves and
taking risks as entrepreneurs. His experience with two groups of people with different career
choices has encouraged him to choose his path i.e., entrepreneurship.
Advice to Young Entrepreneurs
Dhruv insists that young entrepreneurs should solve large problems for an ecosystem, be it
small or big. Your service or product should be in the top three priorities of your target
audience. Also, if you are a young entrepreneur, you should be open to criticism, ready to
learn from your mistakes and rapid in your decision-making.
Individual and Organizational Achievements
Thrive has become the third largest contributor in the food e-commerce industry in a span
of two years. Thrive has been featured in “GQ’s top 25 startups to watch out for”. It serves
15000 restaurants in over 80 cities and includes Jubilant FoodWorks, WhiteBoard Capital and Ahimsa Capital as its marquee investors. Thrive is one of the most ethical and structured organisations. Dhruv Dewan, one of the founders behind this problem-solving start-up, considers it his proud achievement.
During the pandemic, Dhruv and his team initiated the campaign, ‘Save Local’ with the
motto ‘Let us survive now and thrive later’ through Hashtag Loyalty. The customers could buy
gift cards from their favourite businesses and support them during the stringent lockdown
measures. This helped the businesses to get some revenue to sustain themselves until the hard
times are over.