"Roti, Kapda aur Makaan."
And if you're in the remaining 1%, well... you have now.
What began as a political slogan eventually became part of everyday conversation - a simple way to describe life's three basic necessities: food, clothing, and shelter.
But looking at today's startup ecosystem, I couldn't help but think that businesses have their own version of these essentials.
Mine goes like this:
- Roti is Cash Flow.
- Kapda is a brand.
- Makaan? I'd replace it with Marketing.
At first, it sounds like a strange swap. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense.
- Here's why.
Roti = Cash Flow (The Thing That Keeps You Alive)
A company can have:
- The best product roadmap in the room
- A founder everyone believes in
- Investors lined up for the next round
...and still shut down in eight months, simply because the money coming in didn't arrive fast enough to cover the money going out.
Here's the distinction most founders learn the hard way: profitability is a spreadsheet exercise. Cash flow is a survival instinct. Plenty of Indian D2C brands that looked "profitable on paper" in 2022–24 still had to cut teams, because receivables piled up faster than collections came in.
The takeaway repeats every business cycle: you don't die from a bad quarter — you die from running out of cash mid-quarter.
Kapda = Brand (The First Impression Before You Say a Word)
It's rarely the fine print. It's:
- The visual language
- The tone
- The promise the brand quietly made and kept
Brand is the shortcut people use when they don't have time to evaluate everything. And here's the uncomfortable truth: most people never have time to evaluate everything. Your brand does the deciding before your product even gets a chance to.
Makaan, Replaced: Why Marketing Is the Third Necessity
This is the part that made the original three-word phrase feel incomplete to me.
You can build a genuinely good product. You can invest in a brand that looks and feels premium. And still nobody buys, nobody signs up, nobody even knows you exist.
A shelter with no address doesn't shelter anyone. A product nobody's heard of doesn't solve anything for anyone.
Marketing isn't the department that sells things. It's the function that gives everything else a chance to be discovered.
- Cash flow keeps you alive.
- Brand earns trust.
- Marketing puts you in front of the person who needed you in the first place.
This is the mistake a lot of founders make, especially technical ones: they treat marketing as the thing you do after the product is ready, a final coat of paint. But a great product nobody discovers and a mediocre product everybody discovers often land in the exact same place in the market. One team simply spent years building. The other spent months getting seen.
Why the Order Actually Matters
These three aren't competing priorities fighting for the same budget line. They're sequential dependencies:
| Skip This... | ...and This Happens |
|---|---|
| 🍞 Roti (Cash Flow) | There's no business left to market. |
| 👕 Kapda (Brand) | Marketing has nothing credible to amplify. You're just promoting something people don't trust yet. |
| 📣 Marketing | You've built a strong offering nobody can find. |
Cash flow buys you time. Brand buys you trust. Marketing buys you visibility. Miss any one of the three, and the other two stop mattering.
The Takeaway
Roti. Kapda. Aur Marketing.
If your business only has two of these three in place right now, you likely already know which one is missing. That's the one to fix first.
