Nupur Choudhary started Diztaly at the age of 20 — a global AI-powered
business transformation company, built from Dehradun, bootstrapped, with
clients across India, the UAE, and the United States. The company is less than
a year old and already operating across three continents.
What makes Choudhary worth listening to is not just what she has built —
it is how clearly she sees the process of building it. In a conversation with
News Today 24x7, she shared five things about starting an AI company in India
that founders rarely say out loud.
Truth 1 — Credibility is not given. It is earned, slowly, and sometimes
unfairly.
When Diztaly was new, the work was good. Choudhary is clear about that.
But good work, she discovered, is not always enough on its own. The challenge
was that clients evaluated the company not just on the quality of what was
delivered, but on the weight of the name behind it. Without a portfolio of
well-known brands, trust had to be built from scratch — and that process is
slower and less rational than most founders expect.
"Even though the quality of our work could compete with much bigger
companies, people still undervalued it because of the lack of a known name
behind us," she says. "Sometimes clients expected high-level work but
were hesitant to pay fairly simply because we were newer." The lesson she
draws from this is not bitterness — it is patience. Reputation is accumulated,
not announced. The work eventually speaks. But the early phase requires an
unusual tolerance for being underestimated.
Truth 2 — Nobody prepares you for how many perspectives you have to hold
at once.
Choudhary describes one of the most demanding aspects of founding a company as something that never appears in any business curriculum: the constant cognitive load of thinking from multiple positions simultaneously. As a founder, she says, you are never just yourself. You are the client trying to assess whether this company deserves trust. You are the team member trying to understand what is being asked of you. You are the end user trying to figure out whether the product solves a real problem.
There is no proper guidebook for that. A lot of it you learn only through real experience.
The decisions that matter most — about pricing, about product direction,
about how to handle a difficult client situation — require holding all of those
perspectives at the same time and finding an answer that does not betray any of
them. It is a skill that develops only through the actual work of running
something, and it cannot be taught in advance.
Truth 3 — In India, the hardest sale is not the product — it is the idea
of change.
Selling AI services in the Indian market, Choudhary has found, is rarely
a conversation about technology. It is almost always a conversation about
change — and many businesses are deeply resistant to it. The prevailing
mindset, as she describes it, is: if things are working somehow, why alter
anything? Systems that are inefficient but familiar get preserved long past the
point where they should have been replaced.
The pattern she observes is consistent. A business tolerates its outdated
processes until external pressure — a surge in competition, an operational
breakdown, a sudden scaling challenge — forces the issue. At that point, there
is urgency and chaos in equal measure. "A big part of selling AI
services," she says, "is not just providing technology. It is helping
businesses understand why adapting early matters — before the crisis arrives,
not after." It is a slower sell. But it is the honest one.
Truth 4 — Visibility is not vanity. It is survival.
There was a phase in Diztaly's early life, Choudhary says, where the
focus was almost entirely on delivery. The work was being done well. The
quality was there. But the company was not making itself known — not
communicating publicly, not documenting its results, not building the kind of
presence that allows potential clients to find and trust you before they have
ever had a conversation with you.
The realisation that came from that period is one she now considers fundamental: the quality of your work and the visibility of your work are two separate things, and both are required. "If people don't know what you're building, they can't appreciate it, trust it, or connect with it," she says. "The more visible you are, the more valuable people perceive you to be." It is a lesson that applies to every founder who believes — as most do early on — that the work will simply speak for itself.
Quality is extremely important. But visibility matters too.
Truth 5 — It is hard. It is also not as terrifying as people make it
seem.
The final truth Choudhary offers is perhaps the most important for anyone
standing at the beginning of a similar journey. Building a company is genuinely
difficult. Problems arrive continuously — about clients, about team, about
money, about direction. There are no periods of complete calm.
But Choudhary's experience of the process is that most problems, given
time and consistent attention, find a way forward. The fear that surrounds
entrepreneurship — particularly in India, where the safer path is still
strongly encouraged — is often disproportionate to the actual difficulty of
navigating what comes. "Problems come in every part of life," she
observes. "Business is no different. With time, patience, and consistency,
most problems eventually find a solution. The most important thing is to not panic
too quickly."
It is not an instruction to be fearless. It is something more useful: an
instruction to stay steady.
Nupur Choudhary is the founder and CEO of Diztaly, a global AI business transformation company, and Dharoha, an EdTech platform for competitive exam aspirants across India. Follow her on LinkedIn.
