Boss Kudi Energy: Riya Gupta on Turning Conviction Into a Global Consumer Brand

The most radical act in today’s startup economy is not raising capital. It is choosing not to until it is absolutely necessary.

Riya Gupta, known across her network as Boss Kudi, made that choice early. No godfather. No co-founder. No investor at the start. A notebook, her own savings, and a product she believed in were enough to begin.

Upsnac did not start in a boardroom. It began with a small ritual before the gym. Riya would take a spoon of peanut butter with black coffee, then head out for her workout. One morning she asked a simple question. If the combination works so well, why has no one bottled it in India? She skipped the gym, walked into her mother’s kitchen, and blended roasted peanuts with coffee. Her mother scolded her for the mess. The jar that came out of the blender tasted right. It later became a bestseller.

“People say building a startup is difficult. That is true,” she says. “But I am building what I believe in, what I align with, what I eat daily. That makes life easier because you enjoy doing what you already believe in.”

That line captures her operating stance. Act, learn, iterate. Build close to your own life so your decisions are grounded. Treat constraints as levers rather than limits. In a climate that worships valuation milestones, she has chosen a different race. That is why her work deserves attention beyond India.

Foundations, not shortcuts

Riya never planned a straight line to entrepreneurship. She moved from Ludhiana to Delhi University because she wanted to test herself in a bigger arena. Classroom theory did not hold her attention. Real work did. She stacked internships in content, marketing, and sales because she wanted to understand what she was genuinely good at.

“People often complete post-graduation and then discover it was not for them,” she says. “For me, internships gave practical clarity. They showed me what I liked, what I did not, and what I should pursue.”

Her first full-time role came at The Derma Co., a venture built by the Mamaearth founders. Startups rarely respect job descriptions, and that was the point. One day she was running influencer campaigns. A week later she was on a bus to a printing press in Himachal Pradesh to sort packaging for a product launch. She had never set foot inside a factory.

The air inside the plant was heavy with ink and heat. The machines hummed. She started asking questions. A technician smirked. Another rolled his eyes. One finally said, “Madam, aapko kuch nahi pata.” She did not argue. “He was right,” she recalls. “I did not. So I kept asking.” Hours later the labels were ready. More important, she walked out with enough knowledge to manage packaging and logistics the next time. “That day changed something for me. You do not need to know everything before you start. You need to stay long enough in the room to figure it out.”

She carried that habit to Sirona, where she learned to steward a women’s hygiene brand through sensitive conversations and complex regulations. The lesson was simple. Versatility compounds. The more fundamentals you learn, the more confident you become in the unknown.

The nutrition reset

Riya’s company was born from a personal reset. She went from size XL to size XS through patient routines, experiments, and an honest conversation with her own body. “Everyone becomes your nutritionist,” she laughs. “People told me never to eat bananas because they have fat, carbs, and sugar. I lost inches while eating them. Your body tells you what works if you listen.”

That mindset shaped Upsnac. From day one she refused the fitness-supplement frame. She defined Upsnac as a lifestyle wellness brand. The distinction matters. Supplements speak to a sliver of gym-focused consumers. Lifestyle wellness can sit on the breakfast table.

“A father once told me his kids ask for our nutty almond peanut butter every morning at breakfast,” she says. “Their mother started using it because it felt simple and wholesome. That small change made mornings healthier and happier for them.”

The names signal intent. Silky White Chocolate promises familiar comfort. Refreshing Coffee hints at ritual and alertness. Nutty Almond frames a blend that families recognize. She adds a question that undercuts the usual marketing clichés. “Peanuts, almonds, and dates have been eaten for generations. Why should they be positioned only for gym-goers?”

Her hero product today is Proffee. Protein coffee for busy professionals who need nutrition without skipping time. “We upgraded coffee into smart coffee,” she explains. “Now a corporate worker can get protein and caffeine in one shot, without missing breakfast.” Every product is built with real ingredients and real flavours. No shortcuts that look good on a label but do little for everyday health.

Three tensions she chooses to manage

Every founder lives with trade-offs. Riya names the three that govern her decisions and treats them as commitments rather than problems to avoid.

Scale versus intimacy. Most teams design for exponential reach. Riya designs for intimacy. She calls ten to fifteen customers every day. It is not scalable in the way dashboards are, but it creates a trust loop that dashboards cannot. People say what they really think. Small frictions surface early. Loyalty grows because someone is listening. “Those calls tell me what to fix and what to leave alone,” she says. “They also remind me why I started.”

Speed versus sustainability. She has no interest in breakneck growth that breaks the company. “Growing is important,” she says, “but surviving is more important. If you survive two years, you will grow for sure.” That is not caution. It is a strategy. Survival buys time. Time lets you learn the category and build systems that do not collapse under weight.

Capital versus creativity. When you do not have a cushion, you think differently. She calls it jugaad with a smile, but she treats it as method rather than magic. “When you do not have money, you use your brain differently,” she says. “That pressure forces creative solutions.” She bundled warehousing and packaging at one facility to save cost and time. She uses sampling and direct feedback to de-risk launches. She keeps experiments small, then scales what works.

These choices build resilience. Systems that gain from stress tend to last. The point is not to romanticize constraint. The point is to design so that constraint sharpens judgment rather than dulling it.

Operating discipline you can see

Bootstrapping exposes weak habits quickly. Riya talks about the lessons that stuck because they were expensive the first time.

Finance before flair. “I did not have a balance sheet or a P and L at first,” she says. “That was my mistake. Now I never start without knowing my numbers.” She tracks inventory velocity, cash conversion, and payback windows because those three metrics tell her whether a new idea deserves sunlight.

Delegation after basics. She does not try to be the best at everything, but she insists on baseline competence before she hands things off. “You do not have to be an expert,” she says. “You should know enough to step in.” When a campaign needed to go live on a Sunday and the team was offline, she launched it herself because she had learned the backend earlier. Baseline competence is a solo founder’s insurance policy.

Strategic subtraction. Saying no creates clarity. She avoided an early retail push because she wanted direct contact with customers and better data before building an offline engine. She keeps the product line tight so the team can focus on quality and service. “Knowing what not to do is as important as knowing what to do,” she says.

Founder energy is a resource, not a myth

Riya rejects the romance of burnout. “My sleep is very important to me. My gym is very important to me. And then comes my work.” She calls it founder-energy fit. Product-market fit brings growth. Founder-energy fit brings longevity. If the business model requires you to discard your health, your identity, or your relationships, the model needs revision.

Her routine is not an indulgence. It is a system that protects consistency. She gets new ideas while she trains. She makes better decisions when she has slept. Her team follows her cadence. “I want a company that can grow without breaking people,” she says. That is a generational stance. It also turns out to be good management.

The voice behind Boss Kudi

“Kudi ae Boss” began as the title of a song Riya was writing. She used the phrase in a social post. The response surprised her. Women wrote to say it captured how they wanted to show up at work. Men used it as a playful salute when she shipped new products. It turned into a shorthand for conviction without apology.

“Kudi ae Boss is not only about women,” she says. “It is about anyone who chooses to lead their own path without waiting for permission.” The phrase has energy in Punjabi. It also travels. It speaks to first-generation founders in Lagos, to creators in Manila, to small business owners in São Paulo who are building on belief and craft rather than hype.

What the daily calls are teaching her

Because she spends real time with customers, Riya has a live pulse on adoption and friction. The calls surface patterns that she turns into decisions.

A customer told her that the Nutty Almond jar solved breakfast arguments. The children liked the taste. The parents liked the ingredient list. That conversation reinforced her focus on family-ready blends rather than gym-only flavours.

Another buyer complained about texture in an early batch. The feedback hurt. It also sent her straight to the plant to adjust roasting and grind. “We fixed it fast,” she says. “Those conversations make you better if you do not get defensive.”

The calls also remind her to keep the promise of real ingredients. Additives can make manufacturing easier. They also make labels dishonest. She wants the jars to taste like the home kitchen that created them.

Global relevance without the megaphone

There is a familiar pattern across emerging markets. Founders with limited capital build better systems because they must. Southeast Asian coffee brands mastered unit economics before money poured in. Latin American food innovators found a path to scale by treating operations as a first product. African fintech builders learned to work through infrastructure gaps rather than around them. Riya fits that lineage. She is not avoiding capital. She is sequencing it. Raise when the model is ready. Not because everyone else is raising.

Her approach prompts a question that matters for Indian entrepreneurship. What changes if more founders treat survival as a milestone and not an embarrassment? The answer would reshape the incentives that drive early-stage decisions. It would also reward operational craft as much as storytelling craft.

Founder’s lessons

● Survival is strategy. Growth matters. Runway matters more.
● Choose intimacy when it teaches you faster than scale can.
● Learn the basics so you can delegate with judgment and step in when needed.
● Protect your energy. Sleep and training are part of the business plan.
● Practice strategic subtraction. The right no creates focus and cash flow.
● Build what you eat. Alignment reduces decision fatigue and builds trust.
● Use constraint to sharpen thinking. Treat jugaad as a method, not a myth.
● Keep ingredients real and the promise honest. It shows up in repeat purchase.

Closing note

Upsnac began in a kitchen. The idea was simple. Blend what already works in daily life and make it easier to adopt. The company now sits in more kitchens than the one where it started. The method has not changed. Move with conviction. Listen hard. Fix what needs fixing. Keep the promise.

“I want a brand that feels like it was built with care,” Riya says. “If I can do that, the rest follows.” That is a useful sentence for founders anywhere. Build from belief. Let the work earn the right to scale. And remember that the most powerful engines in business are often the quiet ones.