Dohful Cookies: eggless soft-baked cookies sold online in India at $15K a month

Dohful Cookies sells handcrafted, eggless soft-baked cookies online to young customers across India, at $15K a month in founder-reported revenue from a July 2023 interview.

How it started

Arushi and her husband Chaman are both engineering and management graduates who met in business school. Before cookies, they ran a sandwich and burger quick-service restaurant with around six outlets, and that business taught them something that shaped everything after it: a food business tied to one neighbourhood has to start from zero every time it opens in a new one.

The idea came on their honeymoon in Europe, where they ate soft-baked cookies for the first time. India, as Arushi puts it, is a biscuit-eating nation — small, dry, crunchy-throughout cookies — and the soft, gooey, buttery version they tasted abroad did not exist in the market back home. They had four to five years in food and beverage behind them and a conviction that Indians would accept real soft-baked cookies too. Dohful started in October 2018, about a year after that trip, and the couple has run it bootstrapped since.

Two constraints defined the product from the beginning. The cookies had to be eggless, because India has the world's largest vegetarian population and much of it does not eat eggs. They also had to survive shipping to every corner of the country without breaking, which ruled out the local-delivery model they had just left behind. So they rented a small space, built their first kitchen, and Arushi spent more than 70 days baking cookies for breakfast, lunch and dinner before a single recipe was good enough to keep. The first one they cracked was the Choco Chunk Cookie.

What it sells and how it charges

The official website, fetched on 2026-09-30, describes the product as eggless handcrafted cookies, beautifully packed and shipped across India, and says all cookies are baked on order — meaning a pack is baked after it is purchased rather than sitting in inventory. Flavours listed on the site include Choco Brownie, Choco Chunk, Nutella Lava, Assorted and Macadamia Nuts.

Pricing and review counts as shown on the homepage:

Cookie	Listed price	Site rating
Choco Chunk Cookies	From Rs. 419.00	4.51 / 5.0 (531 reviews)
Choco Brownie Cookies	From Rs. 439.00	4.69 / 5.0 (1212 reviews)
Nutella Lava Cookies	From Rs. 529.00	4.57 / 5.0 (615 reviews)
Assorted Cookies	From Rs. 549.00	4.73 / 5.0 (2841 reviews)

Prices on the site show tax included, with shipping calculated at checkout, and there is an option to add a gift message to an order. The site states cookies have been shipped to 2000+ locations in India and reach a customer within a maximum of three to five days. It also runs a monthly giveaway: four winners a month receive a free assorted cookies box.

Corporate gifting is a second route to the same product. According to the founder interview, Dohful had partnered with 50+ large-scale corporate clients in India for employee servicing and gifting, and about 90% of orders still came through the website itself, with no sales team.

How it got its first customers, and what kept growth going

Soft-baked cookies were barely a category in India in 2018, so there was no existing demand to plug into. The first cohort of customers came from two small YouTube channels the founders were already fans of, contacted through Instagram DMs, who agreed to work with an up-and-coming brand for little to no money. One channel was run by an English couple who happened to be in India at the time and mentioned Dohful in a vlog; the other was Ronnie & Barty, an Indian couple whose audience turned out to be similarly loyal. "The first cohort of customers we acquired was by partnering with 2 Youtube channels we were absolute fans of."

Two things about that approach generalised. Long-form video worked better than shorter formats, because people tried the cookies on camera and reacted in real time. And fit mattered more than reach: whenever the founders signed someone they were not genuinely fans of purely because of follower count, it backfired.

Retention came from writing, not ads. Arushi writes Sunday Letters to subscribers and customers every week, and describes a following of 50,000 "fam members" with an average open rate of 30%, which she says rises further during the festive season. Social media, YouTube partnerships and that weekly email are the three channels she credits for growth.

The numbers

Revenue is the founder's own figure, reported in the Starter Story interview published 2023-07-30: $15K a month. It is a statement about that moment and not current revenue.

Revenue: $15K a month, founder-reported in the July 2023 interview
Started: October 2018
Based in: Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
Team: 2 founders, 10 employees at the time of the interview; bootstrapped to date
Orders served: 60,000+, as stated at the time of the interview
Corporate clients: 50+ large-scale clients in India
Channel mix: about 90% of orders through the website, which the founder says brings the other 10% inbound
Peak growth moment: "we ended up growing over 13X in one month" during Covid, after the founders learned digital marketing on the job

The interview does not state a start-up cost, so none is quoted here.

How it compares

The benchmarks below come from 1M.chat's analysis of 1,997 businesses with founder-reported revenue in Starter Story interviews (2015–2026) — a self-selected sample of founders who chose to be interviewed, not a random sample of all businesses. Within it, 75 Food & beverage businesses report revenue.

Measure	Food & beverage (1M.chat analysis)	Dohful
Median monthly revenue	$56K	$15K (founder-reported, July 2023)
Share at $1M a year or more	40%	—
Median employees	4	10 at the interview
Started by one founder	44%	2 founders

On 1M.chat's analysis, Dohful sits below its category median. Its channel mix lines up with what is most common in the category: among the 57 Food & beverage businesses with channel information, organic social media appears in 61%, email and newsletters in 40%, partnerships and affiliates in 32%, and word of mouth and referrals in 30%. Dohful's three named channels — social media, YouTube influencer partnerships and weekly email — fall inside that pattern, which is a reminder that the channels are ordinary; the compounding came from running them weekly for years.

What a founder can take from it

Test the product constraint before the marketing plan. Eggless and shippable were not branding decisions; they decided what the recipe had to be and how long development would take. If you skip that step, every channel you add later will be selling something that does not survive delivery.

Pick partners you would watch anyway. The two channels that produced Dohful's first customers were chosen because the founders were fans, and the deals cost little to nothing. If you are paying for reach alone, you are buying the one variable the founder says worked against her.

Own the return path early. Sunday Letters were running while the business was still small, and the list became an asset that does not depend on an algorithm. Start the email habit before you think you have an audience worth writing to.

Sell where your own channel brings the rest inbound. About 90% of orders came through Dohful's website, and the founder credits that visibility with generating corporate orders without a sales team. A public storefront can do outbound work for you.

Expect the marketing skill to be the gap. Both founders came from an offline business where customers walked in, and learning digital marketing on the job was, in her account, what unlocked their biggest month. Budget time for that learning rather than assuming the product carries itself.

Sources

Revenue, team and start-cost figures are what the founder reported at the interview date, not current figures and not a prediction of what you will earn. Product and pricing facts come from the business's own website as checked on 30 September 2026. Method & sources · Disclosure