The Right Time to Start Is NOW with Kashyap Achar | Bezel (YC W25) Co-Founder Interview

Welcome to the 3rd episode of the Hustling Unicorns with Harshith podcast. We're on a mission to interview founders, VC, investors, operators, and others in the startup space to enable everyone in the world to build their own rocketship!

In this episode, we talk to Kashyap Achar, the co-founder of Bezel. Kashyap graduated with his undergrad in Canada after interning at multiple startups and joined Bilt in New York. The episode talks about his journey of how he met his co-founder, how they got into YC, how they realized what they wanted to build, and the grind behind what it takes to build a company.

Timestamps:
0:00 Coming up next
0:17 Introduction
0:55 What is Bezel?
1:15 Personas
2:35 How Kashyap figured out he wanted to work on a consumer marketing startup
3:25 When Kashyap decided to build
5:40 Sectors Kashyap worked in before his startup
6:37 Bezel's YC journey
8:55 Bezel's pivot
10:07 How Bezel found its first customers
11:27 Bezel's early adopters
13:05 How to find an interesting problem to solve
14:10 How did you get into B2B instead of the flashier B2C
15:00 How Bezel works
16:10 How Kashyap found his co-founder, Palash
17:50 How Kashyap and Palash complement each other
18:55 Cold emailing and when to know it's not working
20:30 What sticks and what does not when you pivot
21:20 Finding new customers
22:17 Building trust and charging customers
23:40 Bezel's first customer segments
24:02 Getting into a company's budget
25:00 Why does Bezel make sense now?
27:03 Lead Summit - The top marketing conference
28:50 Competition and distribution
29:36 Bezel's distribution channels
29:57 Building in NYC instead of SF
31:23 Kashyap's advice for builders


#startup #unicorn #ycombinator #yc #ai #consumermarketing #genai #b2b #podcast #saas