The night we almost stopped.

We haven't written this part until now — we wanted to be honest about it, not dramatic.

Building the product has been the good part. Building the company around it nearly ended the whole thing. What was supposed to take a week took months — registrations, approvals, a bank setup that kept bouncing on paperwork that works everywhere else. Every step leaned on someone else's desk, someone else's portal, someone else's system, and something broke at almost every one. None of it had anything to do with sunscreen. All of it landed at odd hours, on top of everything else life was already asking of us.

One night, worn down by a week of it, one of us finally said the thing we'd both been circling: maybe this just isn't meant to be. We looked at what it would take to quietly close it and walk away.

So we did something different. We sat down together and talked it through properly — rested, in daylight, on purpose. And a few things got clear.

The paperwork is a one-time toll, not the road. Registering a company in India is genuinely hard, and it's also done — it says nothing about whether the sunscreen is good or whether anyone will want it. We'd built this on purpose to be walk-away-able: small steps, each one cheap enough to stop after. And the real thing we were spending was never money — it was attention, at a full moment in our lives. So we asked the honest question: is this worth some of it? Once we were rested enough to hear the answer, it was yes.

So we're not stopping. We're building it the way we always said we would: small, deliberate, one honest product, no theatrics, timed to a stretch when we can give it the hours it deserves. A few days after that conversation, the revised samples arrived — but that's the next post.

If you're reading this, you're part of why we didn't fold. Watch the rest happen, and if you want in early, the waitlist is open.

— Aashish & Rishitha, 78 Labs