Darpan Sanghvi’s rise, fall, and reinvention: From Good Glamm Group’s collapse to hitting restart with CoFounder Circle

On a flight earlier this year, somewhere between takeoff and cruising altitude, Darpan Sanghvi found himself seated beside a young man. The latter, recognising Sanghvi, had animatedly begun describing a business idea. Sanghvi listened politely at first, his mind still fogged from months of exhaustion.

The Good Glamm Group, the content-to-commerce behemoth he had built, expanded, and briefly vaulted into unicorn status, had recently been dissolved. Sanghvi, as a result, had been adrift, grieving not only a professional failure but something more intimate: the collapse of an identity he had carried for two decades as a relentless builder.

But as the young man spoke, sketching the outlines of a fledgling plan, Sanghvi’s posture shifted. As his mind pondered over questions such as those on product reach, channels, and margins, he stopped being just a listener. He had begun mapping possibilities, offering tactical nudges, drawing connections to suppliers and investors he knew for the young man.

By the time the plane touched down, he felt something stirring that had been absent for months: excitement. “The more he spoke, the more excited I was,” Sanghvi says. “Every time I spoke with an entrepreneur—whether someone running a thousand-crore ARR company or someone doing one crore—it made me feel alive.”

Thus, the modest encounter became Sanghvi’s pivot, the moment he realised what still animated him. “I realised I’d discovered my purpose,” he says. “To help people build.”

Out of the ruins of Good Glamm, Sanghvi began sketching a new idea—not another consumer brand, not another chase for scale, but something closer to vocation: a platform he would call CoFounder Circle, an “operating system for entrepreneurs.”

If his earlier ventures had been about excitement and opportunity, this one felt different. “This is the first time in my life I am building something with a personal purpose,” he says. 

The rise and the fall

To understand the magnitude of Sanghvi’s reinvention, one must return to the moment of ascent, when the Good Glamm Group seemed destined to redefine India’s digital economy.

The year was 2021. The pandemic had accelerated e-commerce adoption, interest rates were at historic lows, and venture capital sloshed across borders in search of fast-growing stories. MyGlamm, Sanghvi’s beauty startup founded in 2017, had found exactly the formula investors were chasing: the marriage of content and commerce. By building a constellation of media platforms and influencers, the company could funnel readers and viewers directly into the MyGlamm purchase loop, creating an ecosystem where attention could be instantly monetised.

Between FY21 and FY23, the company had become one of India’s fastest consumer growth stories. In just two years, the venture—by then rebranded as The Good Glamm Group—expanded at a CAGR of 251%, adding nearly six million new customers annually. Unlike most direct-to-consumer beauty brands that had emerged over the last decade, Good Glamm stood apart: beginning with MyGlamm, one of the first to experiment with the proprietary “content-to-commerce” playbook, which then evolved into a diversified house of brands spanning colour cosmetics, skincare, mom-and-baby, organic personal care, intimate hygiene, and sexual wellness.

With 150 million monthly active users across owned content, social, and influencer platforms, the company built one of the largest top-of-the-funnel audiences in the industry. Roughly 30% of this activity was tied directly back to its products. Each month, 30 million users transitioned from content to commerce pages, and 1.5 million converted into paying customers, translating to an enviable 5% conversion rate. Repeat purchases, meanwhile, surged from 35% to 65%. By FY23, the group counted 16 million customers transacting on its platform and ran a loyalty programme with 25 million members.

No doubt, its valuation climbed steeply. Good Glamm closed big-ticket rounds from the likes of L’Occitane, Tano Capital, Brand Capital, Amazon, Ascent Capital, Chiratae Ventures, Kalaari Capital, Stride Ventures, Prosus, Warburg Pincus, Alteria Capital, and Accel.

In 2024, infused with cash, Sanghvi embarked on an acquisition spree. It didn’t just stitch together a set of beauty brands; it built an ecosystem designed to feed on itself. At the heart of it lay The Good Brands Co., with consumer-facing names like MyGlamm, Organic Harvest, St. Botanica, Sirona, The Moms Co., and BabyChakra, covering everything from colour cosmetics to baby care and wellness. Surrounding this core is The Good Media Co., which owned high-traffic content platforms such as POPxo, ScoopWhoop, BabyChakra, and MissMalini that generated conversations, trends, and audiences.

To amplify the reach, the company created The Good Creator Co., combining platforms like Vidooly, MissMalini, and its own creator network to tap into India’s vast influencer economy. Finally, the loop closed in with The Good Community Co., through which engagement hubs such as MomStar, Organic Squad, Sirona Circle, and GlammFam fostered loyalty and repeat connections.

Talking to Fortune India, Sanghvi muses: “Entrepreneurship is a series of pivots. What you start with is rarely what you end up building. The real challenge is perseverance—keeping at it until the tipping point arrives. You can’t predict when that moment will come, but when it does, momentum has a compounding effect.”

But momentum, Sanghvi adds, carries its own trap. With each acquisition, the organisation grew more complex. Cultures clashed. Integration lagged. Systems groaned under the weight of scale. “I brought on a thousand people,” Sanghvi recalls, “and my output actually went down.”

The seeds of Good Glamm’s decline were sown in its unrelenting chase for scale. Rather than consolidating its rapid string of acquisitions and brand launches, the company doubled down on growth at any cost—pursuing ever-higher valuations even as the weaknesses in its house-of-brands model began to surface.

The core problem for any direct-to-consumer (DTC) company is customer acquisition cost (CAC), and Good Glamm was no exception. By late 2019, it was spending nearly $15 (over ₹1,000) to bring in a single customer on its website.

The problems—massive expansion spree, and rising overhead costs because the expansion propelled more hirings—came to a head this year when Sanghvi, in a LinkedIn post, declared that the company’s lenders have moved to enforce their charge on individual brands, effectively dismantling the umbrella structure and signalling the end of attempts to hold the group together as a single entity. “There will no longer be a group-wide solution which will allow all the brands to continue under a single umbrella,” he wrote.

On his learnings from the events, Sanghvi says, “I believe 20% of my success was my contribution; 80% came from factors outside my control. With failure, it’s the opposite—80% is on you, 20% on externalities. That mindset forces you to keep trying despite setbacks, while also taking full responsibility for mistakes.” 

Much like momentum, capital can also be a trap. The abundance that once seemed like fuel became, in his words, a “capital trap.” Easy money encouraged overreach, dulled discipline, and fed the illusion that problems could be solved by simply throwing more resources at them. By 2023, the tide had turned. Interest rates rose globally, investors grew cautious, and the startup winter descended. The Good Glamm Group, with its high burn and sprawling structure, faltered.

Talking about what went wrong with The Good Glamm Group, Ankur Bisen, a veteran management consultant who has observed the D2C ecosystem for many years, says that on paper, Good Glamm's business model looked neat. "But both content and commerce in the digital space are highly democratised—very low entry barriers—so anyone can play. That means unless you have real stickiness, real brand equity, the model may look good on slides but not translate into lasting consumer value," he says.

A brand, by definition, needs to be sticky—something that creates lasting value and a specific perception or imagery in the consumer’s mind. If consumers don’t perceive it that way, they’ll move on to the next thing. In online spaces, you often get misleading signals: early traction or hype doesn’t equal a durable brand, he explains further.

A point Sanghvi makes is that while the company aggressively went in for acquisitions, one factor he overlooked was that the different brands Good Glamm acquired over the years came in with their own culture, and, most importantly, their own set of problems and liabilities. So, integrating them seamlessly into one coherent whole was always a challenge from the beginning. "So most of my time went into putting out fires that were burning on the integration side, leaving me less focussed on the company at large," Sanghvi says.

He compounded the problem by over-hiring. “We added a thousand people too quickly, thinking it would speed things up. Instead, output dropped. Costs ballooned. Execution slowed. Today, at CoFounder Circle, we’ve made a rule: we won’t rush past 50 people unless it’s necessary. In AI, for example, we believe billion-dollar companies can be built with lean teams. The discipline is in resisting the urge to spend too fast, hire too fast, or chase growth at all costs,” says Sanghvi.

The reinvention

CoFounder Circle, Sanghvi’s latest venture, was born not in the fever of opportunity but in the quietude of reflection. The idea was simple, almost obvious: entrepreneurs need an ecosystem, and technology—particularly AI—can now provide it at scale.

Sanghvi envisions it as an “operating system for entrepreneurs,” a platform offering five essentials: talent, partners, tools, mentorship, and capital. At its heart was a proprietary AI stack, christened Race. “The idea is simple,” he explains. “Gyan can only take you so far; outcomes matter.”

Race would not merely dispense advice—it would connect founders to co-founders, suppliers, mentors, investors, and even interns willing to code an MVP. It would democratise access to the infrastructure, once available only to well-networked insiders. “I alone could help maybe twenty or thirty companies,” Sanghvi said. “But if I can build a platform, maybe tens of thousands of companies can be impacted.”

In a sense, CoFounder Circle represents both a continuation and a reversal of Sanghvi’s earlier trajectory. Like Good Glamm, it is ambitious, ecosystem-driven, and fuelled by technology. Unlike Good Glamm, it is not about ownership or control. The platform belongs to everyone; Sanghvi is merely the facilitator. “It’s for everyone in this,” he says, “We are providing the ecosystem.”