Unileaf is registered in Baleshwar, Odisha, where two engineers incorporated it in 2021. Baleshwar is a district town, not a metro. It has no startup district, no co-working scene, no founder meetups. It has a railway station, a market, a coastline, and a lot of people who use the internet every day on a phone.
People sometimes ask why we did not move to Bengaluru or Hyderabad or Pune, where most Indian software companies are. The honest answer is that we started here because we live here, and then noticed that the reasons to leave were weaker than we had assumed. Not absent. Weaker.
This post lays out both sides: what has been cheaper, what has been harder, and what has surprised us.
The cost side is real, and it matters more than it sounds
Living and working here costs noticeably less than in a metro. Rent is lower, food is lower, and commuting is barely a cost at all. A small team can operate on far less than it would need in a large city, and the founders can pay themselves less without living badly.
For a company that has not raised outside money, this is the whole story. Low burn means time. Time means we can build a product, put it in front of people, and wait to see whether anyone wants it, without a countdown running in the background. Several of our products take a while to find their footing. BartO, our used-goods exchange, depends on enough people in one place listing things. StoryMet and Poetriz depend on people writing reviews and poems for their own reasons. None of those can be rushed by spending more, and a metro cost base would have pushed us to rush them anyway.
There is a less flattering side too. Low cost lets you keep going on something that is not working. We try to be honest with ourselves about that, and do not always succeed.
The talent pool is real, but thinner
Baleshwar and the districts around it produce engineers. There are colleges, there are graduates, and there are people who left for a metro job and would come back if there were something to come back to. That pool is real.
But it is thin. If we need someone with experience in a specific area, say a payments integration we have not done before, the chance that such a person lives within an hour of our office is low. In a metro you post the role and get applicants who have done exactly that work. Here we grow the skill ourselves, hire remote, or go slowly.
Senior people are rarer still. Someone who has shipped and maintained products for a decade usually has a reason to be in a city, and they are hard to pull back.
What we do about it
We hire for people who can learn, rather than for people who already know our stack. We write things down more than a metro company probably needs to, because we cannot assume the next hire has seen the same patterns before. And we accept that some hires take longer.
The internet is fine now
A few years ago this section would have been a complaint. It is not any more. Fibre reaches ordinary buildings, mobile data is cheap and generally reliable, and cloud infrastructure does not care which town you are in. We deploy from Baleshwar the same way anyone deploys from anywhere.
The remaining practical difference is power. Outages are more frequent than in a metro office tower, and anyone working from a smaller town should plan for them rather than be surprised by them. An inconvenience, not a blocker, but worth naming.
Distance from the networks is the real cost
If cost of living is the clearest advantage, this is the clearest disadvantage, and we do not want to soften it.
The people who fund early software companies in India are mostly in a handful of cities. So are the people who write about them, the people who run the accelerators, and the people who might become large customers for a service like WPfolk, our WordPress development arm. Those networks run on chance meetings, introductions over coffee, and being in the room. We are not in the room.
Video calls close some of that gap, not all of it. Trust between strangers is built faster in person, and when a metro founder and a Baleshwar founder both email an investor cold, the metro founder can add "happy to drop by this week". We cannot.
It affects customers too. A service like WPfolk has to find clients online, which means competing on the open internet rather than through referrals from a local agency scene that does not exist here. We travel when it matters, do most of our business online, and accept that some doors are harder to open from here.
The quiet advantage: users who look like our neighbours
This is the part that surprised us, and the reason we now think staying was not just cheaper but sensible.
Most consumer software in India is designed in a metro, by people in a metro, tested on people in a metro. The product manager in Bengaluru is capable, but their sense of a "normal user" is shaped by the people around them: English-comfortable, on a recent phone, with fast data.
Our neighbours are not that user. The people who might list a second-hand cycle on BartO, or spend an evening on Poetriz, are on mid-range phones, on data plans they think about, often more comfortable in Odia than in English, and not patient with an app that asks for five permissions before showing anything. We do not have to imagine this user. We meet them at the shop, we are related to some of them, and we hear when something is confusing.
That closeness changes small decisions in ways that add up. Whether a screen must work on a slow connection. Whether a form is too long. Whether a feature that looks obvious in a design review is obvious to anyone else. A metro team can learn this through research, and good teams do. We get some of it for free by walking outside.
It cuts the other way for some products. Gofeh, which turns spare baggage allowance on a flight into income for the traveller, is naturally for people who fly often, and fewer of our neighbours do. Being here does not help us understand that user. Qtron, our group-buying product, has not launched yet, so we do not know which way it will go.
What we would tell someone weighing the same choice
We are one small company with one set of circumstances, so treat this as a report, not advice.
- Stay if you are building something you can fund from your own pocket or from early revenue. Low burn is the biggest thing a small town gives you, and it only helps if you actually use it.
- Expect hiring to be slow and plan for it. Hire people who learn quickly, write things down, and be comfortable with remote colleagues.
- Do not underestimate the distance from investors and large customers. If your plan depends on raising money quickly or landing big accounts early, a metro will serve you better.
- Build for the people around you, if there is any way to. Knowing your user by sight is easy to overlook because it does not show up on a spreadsheet.
Where that leaves us
Unileaf is still in Baleshwar. Six products, two founders, a small team, in a town most people outside Odisha have not heard of. Some of the trade-offs above have cost us, and we would be lying if we said otherwise. Some have been quietly good for us, in ways we did not plan. We will keep writing about it as it changes.
