Episode 1 · 4 March 2026 · 42 min
Why Indian MSMEs Struggle to Scale
Shakti
Founder & Host, RSK India Private Limited
Shakti hosts Founders' Knock and is also the founder of RSK India Private Limited. In this episode he turns the mic on his own industry, drawing on RSK India's experience to talk through why scaling an MSME in India is harder than the growth narratives make it sound.
In this episode
- How payment delays from larger buyers choke MSME cash flow
- The contract terms that quietly favour whoever has more leverage
- Why price wars between MSMEs make the whole segment weaker, not stronger
Founders' Knock usually turns the mic toward a guest. In this episode, host Shakti turns it on himself and on RSK India, the business he founded, to talk through a question that shapes almost every MSME in the country: why is scaling here so much harder than the playbooks suggest?
The full conversation
The conversation stays close to the everyday mechanics that decide whether a small manufacturer grows or stalls - payment cycles that stretch far beyond agreed terms, contracts written to protect the buyer rather than the vendor, and price competition between MSMEs that erodes margins across the board rather than building any one company's advantage.
None of this is presented as a solved problem. It's framed the way it actually shows up on the ground: as a set of structural pressures that MSME founders have to plan around, not complaints to be resolved by better attitude or hustle.
Why it matters
This is the closest thing Founders' Knock has to a mission-statement episode - the show exists because these are the conversations that don't happen enough in public.
