A business plan I wrote for Swish Club in 2025, for a Device-as-a-Subscription vertical aimed at Indian startups. Published with permission.
Most Indian startups buy laptops. A company of seventy people blocks somewhere between ₹10 and ₹50 lakh in hardware that loses 30 to 40 percent of its value in the first year, and then spends staff time on resale, buyback and tracking that nobody enjoys and nobody is measured on.
The alternative is renting. Swish Club wanted to build that vertical, so I wrote the plan for it. What follows is the actual arithmetic, including the part where the arithmetic gets shaky.
Sizing it, and why you should distrust the number
The chain runs like this. India had roughly 159,000 DPIIT-recognised startups in January 2025, employing about 1.7 million white-collar staff. At an average device cost of ₹50,000, that's an ₹8,500 crore annual capital expenditure market. Narrow to the roughly 10,000 venture-backed companies and you get ₹3,500 crore. Assume 30 percent are willing to switch models in the next two years and the addressable market lands at ₹1,050 crore.
That last assumption is doing enormous work, and it is the one nobody can source. The first two steps are census data. The third is a guess wearing a percentage sign. Multiply four numbers together and the result depends mostly on the shakiest one. Here that is whether a founder who has always bought laptops will rent them instead.
I wrote the number down anyway, because a plan without one is useless. But the pilot exists to test that 30 percent, not the ₹1,050 crore.
The unit economics
A device leased at ₹50,000 goes out at ₹1,800 a month on a 36-month subscription. That's ₹64,800 of gross revenue against a ₹50,000 asset, plus roughly ₹500 a month of add-on potential for insurance, warranty, remote wipe and telemetry, taking total revenue per device to about ₹82,800.
Gross margin lands at 30 to 40 percent after support costs. CAC payback comes in around nine to eleven months.
Those are workable numbers and they are also fragile in a specific way: they assume the device survives three years and comes back in resaleable condition. Device lifecycle at 27 percent annual churn is an industry figure, not a Swish figure, and the gap between those two is where the margin actually lives.
What the money buys in year one
Annual burn came to ₹63.6 lakh, roughly ₹5.3 lakh a month at full ramp. Sales carried the largest share at ₹30 lakh across SDRs, an account manager and a ramped consultant. Performance marketing took ₹12 lakh including content and buffer, customer success and operations another ₹12 lakh for onboarding, support and logistics, with ₹3.6 lakh for tooling and ₹6 lakh for legal, insurance and buffer.
Against that, year one projects ₹1 to ₹1.1 crore of revenue, 500 to 600 devices live, ₹10 to ₹12 lakh MRR by the fourth quarter, and breakeven somewhere in month eleven or twelve.
Breakeven inside a year on a hardware-backed subscription business is aggressive. It works only if the pilot converts at the assumed rate and if devices come back clean.
Going to market in three phases
The first three months are a pilot with ten to fifteen startups, run with a contract sales consultant, shared operations support, and the founder selling. Deliberately minimal, because the point is to find out whether the pitch lands before hiring against it.
Months three to nine ramp through VC introductions, outbound and paid, with two SDRs, an account manager and an operations executive. Months nine to eighteen add bundles and expand into more metro hubs, bringing in a performance marketer, a customer success lead and sales operations.
Quarterly milestones: ₹3 lakh MRR and 100 to 150 devices by Q1, ₹8 lakh and 300-plus devices by Q2, ₹12 lakh and breakeven by Q3.
The channel mix leaned on LinkedIn and Google for intent capture and retargeting, but the channel I had most confidence in was the least scalable one: warm introductions through VCs, and invite-only finance roundtables for founders. In a market where the product is essentially a balance sheet decision, the person you need in the room is the one who signs off on the balance sheet, and they do not click ads.
What could go wrong
Six risks made the plan. Delivery and operations failures, since a delayed or damaged laptop is a very visible way to lose a customer. Data security, which is the one that kills the business rather than dents it, mitigated with certified wipe partners, lockout tooling and audit logs. High CAC against a long payback. Customer churn, including the specific Indian flavour of it, which is startups shutting down rather than switching.
Then two that get underrated. Perception risk: being read as a rental service rather than an operations decision, which caps pricing permanently. And macro exposure, since laptop inflation and supply chain delays hit a business that pre-buys inventory harder than they hit one that doesn't.
The argument underneath
The pitch is not really about laptops. It is that hardware on the balance sheet is capital doing nothing, and moving it to an operating expense frees up money without giving away equity.
Whether founders see it that way is the whole business. Everything above is downstream of that one question, which is exactly why the plan starts with fifteen customers and not with a hiring round.