Episode 4 of the Deep Down Show is built around a single question host Barun puts to his guest across two long conversations: does a startup actually need funding to succeed? The guest, Ayon Das, co-founder of Izifiso Backpackers' Camp, answers with his own company as the case study — a business that started as two tents pitched on Mousuni Island in November 2017 and has since spread into the hills, the coast and a scatter of offbeat villages across Bengal, without, he says, taking outside money to get there.
The two parts together tell one continuous story: how Ayon Das's first venture failed, how he ended up building Izifiso with two co-founders instead, how the company found and grew its early camps one location at a time, and why, when funding was eventually on the table, he chose to turn it down. Barun and Ayon Das move between the practical (team structure, ticket pricing, how leads come in) and the philosophical (what a startup owes the people around it), and the episode holds together because Ayon Das keeps returning to the same idea in different forms — that Izifiso grew out of people's mismatched dreams finding one place to meet.
A note on this piece: the source audio for this episode is heavily degraded in transcription, with long stretches that are difficult to follow with confidence. This article sticks to the names, numbers and claims that come through clearly, and leaves out anything the transcript only gestures at.
From a failed startup to eBIZ.com
Before Izifiso, Ayon Das had already tried entrepreneurship once. He co-founded darlings.in with college friends, and it did not survive. He does not dwell on the specifics of why in the parts of the conversation that come through clearly, beyond acknowledging that the venture failed and that he moved on from it. What he does describe is the period afterward, when he joined eBIZ.com Pvt. Ltd., a network-marketing company. Ayon Das describes eBIZ.com's internal culture as one built around branding and, in his words, taught him how to dream — a period he treats as formative rather than a detour, since it's where the idea that became Izifiso started to take shape.
It was during this period that Gopal Paul, whom Ayon Das already knew, approached him directly to ask what he was working on and where he saw himself going. That conversation is what eventually pulled the three co-founders together: Ayon Das, Gopal Paul and Mehboob. None of them had a product yet, only a concept — building a tourism business — and a Facebook page to start putting it in front of people before anything else existed.
The first camp on Mousuni Island
The idea got its first real test on 25 November 2017, when the team pitched two large tents on Mousuni Island, an island in the Sundarbans delta south of Kolkata. Ayon Das says around 35 to 36 people showed up for that first camp, with roughly 8 to 10 of them foreign travellers — a striking ratio for a debut event with no established brand behind it. Guests were spread across whatever the team could put together: some in the tents, some staying on boats, others in a more informal dhaba-style shelter nearby.
Underlying the choice of Mousuni was a specific local problem the founders kept coming back to: most young men on the island were leaving for Kerala to find work, because there wasn't enough earning opportunity at home. Ayon Das frames Izifiso's approach as trying to give locals a source of income where they already lived, rather than asking them to migrate for it — hiring and training people from Mousuni itself to run and staff the camp instead of importing outside labour. Two brothers from the island, in particular, come up in the conversation as early locals who got involved and grew into the operation alongside the founders.
Turning a location from a first trial camp into a functioning stop took time. Ayon Das says validating any new product, in his view, is simply something every startup has to sit through — you cannot compress it. By his account, the Mousuni operation took roughly six to eight months from the 2017 launch to feel properly established on the hospitality side.
Beyond Mousuni: dams, hills and a virgin beach
Once Mousuni was running, the team began scouting other offbeat locations rather than only scaling the one site. In Purulia, they set up a camp near the Doladanga dam — an area Ayon Das describes as rich in birdlife. In the hills, the team found two dilapidated structures in a village called Gurudum, about four kilometres off the main road, and rebuilt them into a camp roughly two hundred feet up the hillside — a location styled, per the episode's own chapter marker, after "Into the Wild."
Along the coast, Izifiso built a forest camp roughly seven kilometres from Mandarmani, and separately explored a stretch between Chandipur and Digha that the episode describes as a virgin beach — an untouched run of coastline backed by casuarina forest, the kind of terrain that draws students and researchers studying marine life rather than typical tourist traffic. A camp in Bagda followed the same pattern: start small, put it in front of people on social media, and let demand tell them whether the location works. Ayon Das also mentions government-allotted land factoring into some of these expansions, giving the team official standing to operate certain sites.
The common thread across all of these, in Ayon Das's telling, is a deliberate pivot toward village tourism — surfacing offbeat villages that would otherwise see no visitors at all, rather than competing for footfall in already-popular hill stations. He names villages like Turturikunta, near the Bhutan border, as examples of the kind of place Izifiso tries to put on the map. In one case, he describes partnering with another operator who already ran a high-altitude camp in North Bengal, where temperatures drop to around minus seven or eight degrees Celsius, bringing that operator's existing platform into Izifiso's own rather than building a competing one from scratch.
A team built on guidance, not sales
Asked what actually holds Izifiso together, Ayon Das keeps coming back to team culture rather than any single location. He describes the founders and early team as people who each came in with a different personal dream, and frames the company itself as the place those different dreams happened to converge:
"প্রত্যেকের নিজের আলাদা স্বপ্ন, কিন্তু প্রত্যেকের স্বপ্নটা কোথাও একটা জায়গায় মিলছে, সেটাই ইজিফিসো।"
Ayon Das
Each person has their own separate dream, he says, but everyone's dream is meeting somewhere at one place — and that place is Izifiso.
That culture shows up directly in how the team deals with guests. Ayon Das is explicit that Izifiso does not run on a sales pitch: staff ask a prospective guest what kind of experience they're after — hills, beach, a campfire, live music — and then suggest a matching camp rather than pushing them toward a booking. The camp catalogue is built around that same idea of matching moods to places: musical camps with baul singers around a fire, beach-side camps, and mountain-facing sites from which guests can see peaks including Everest, Makalu and Lhotse. Leads mostly come in organically, through Instagram and Facebook rather than a dedicated sales push.
Internally, the team is split into small functional groups — an IT team, a sales team, an operations team and a marketing team — rather than one large undifferentiated staff. And rather than fixed daily shifts, Ayon Das describes an unusual system: employees work to an annual hour budget of roughly 2,000 hours, tracked through an internal app, and they can distribute those hours however suits them — ten hours on one day, four on another — instead of a rigid nine-to-five structure.
Why they said no to funding
The second half of the conversation turns to the episode's central question directly. Ayon Das says Izifiso's package pricing runs to roughly ₹1,200 per head, covering stay, food and the full camp experience — check-in, a welcome drink, lunch, evening snacks, dinner, a trek the next day, and checkout. He estimates the business now moves somewhere in the range of twenty to twenty-two thousand travellers over the course of a year across its various camps.
On the funding question itself, Ayon Das is candid that he went into it without much prior knowledge — he says he picked up what he knows about funding procedures from YouTube videos and books rather than any formal background. When an actual funding offer did materialise, the founders decided against taking it and chose to stay bootstrapped instead, funding new camps, salaries and office space entirely out of the business's own cash flow. Part of his reasoning, as he lays it out, is wanting to build a working structure across many more villages first — reaching a stage where a guest can book directly with Izifiso rather than through a third party — before bringing in outside money on top of that foundation.
Reading the competition
Ayon Das describes most of the competition in the backpacker-camp space as funded companies, with relatively few bootstrapped operators entering the market the way Izifiso did. Rather than framing this as a straightforward rivalry, he talks about wanting to build out a broader ecosystem around offbeat, community-based tourism — something the market, in his view, hasn't fully organised yet. As one concrete gap, he points out that pet-friendly camps and homestays barely exist in the space, despite clear demand from travellers who want to bring pets along. On the marketing side, he describes organising a community of fashion and travel content creators to work with local boutique brands, generating visibility for both the camps and the small businesses involved, rather than relying only on paid promotion.
Who is Ayon Das
Ayon Das is the co-founder of Izifiso Backpackers' Camp. Before Izifiso, he co-founded darlings.in with college friends, a venture that did not succeed, and afterward worked at eBIZ.com Pvt. Ltd., a network-marketing company. Alongside Gopal Paul and Mehboob, he built Izifiso starting with a first camp on Mousuni Island on 25 November 2017, and has since expanded the business into the hills, the coast and a set of offbeat villages across Bengal, choosing to keep the company bootstrapped rather than take on outside funding.
Why this conversation matters
Most startup conversations about funding happen in the abstract — should you raise, how much, from whom. Ayon Das's version is grounded in two tents on an island, a team split by function rather than hierarchy, and an hour-tracking app instead of a punch clock. His answer to Barun's central question isn't a flat no to funding as a concept; it's an argument that a startup should know its own structure well enough — village by village, camp by camp — before it hands part of that structure to someone else's money. That question of what bootstrapping actually costs and buys a founder runs through other Deep Down Show conversations too, including Avelo Roy's on Kolkata Ventures and Suman Kar's account of building Adda Khana without a bank loan — and Ayon Das's own closing note, that a startup's brand grows in proportion to how much it actually helps the people around it, gives Izifiso's story its throughline.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Ayon Das?
Ayon Das is the co-founder of Izifiso Backpackers' Camp, a Bengal-based startup that runs offbeat camping and backpacking sites starting from Mousuni Island. Before Izifiso, he ran a startup called darlings.in that failed, and worked at eBIZ.com Pvt. Ltd., a network-marketing company he credits with teaching him to think big.
What is Izifiso Backpackers' Camp?
Izifiso is a startup co-founded by Ayon Das, Gopal Paul and Mehboob that builds backpacker camps in offbeat parts of Bengal, starting with Mousuni Island in the Sundarbans delta. It has since expanded to sites including Purulia, the hills near Kalimpong, and stretches of coast near Mandarmani and Digha.
When did Izifiso build its first camp on Mousuni Island?
Ayon Das says the first camp went up on 25 November 2017, with two large tents pitched for a trial batch of guests. Around 35 to 36 people attended that first camp, including roughly 8 to 10 foreign travellers.
Did Izifiso take outside funding?
No. Ayon Das says Izifiso was offered funding at one point and turned it down, choosing to stay bootstrapped. He says the company funds new camps, salaries and office space entirely out of its own cash flow rather than outside investment.
What happened to Ayon Das's first startup, darlings.in?
Darlings.in was Ayon Das's first venture, started with college friends before Izifiso. It did not survive, and he went on to work at eBIZ.com Pvt. Ltd. before Gopal Paul approached him with the idea that became Izifiso.
How does Izifiso's team work?
Ayon Das describes a 'no sale, only guidance' approach, where staff ask guests what kind of experience they want and suggest a matching camp instead of pushing a sale. Staff also work to a flexible annual hour budget of roughly 2,000 hours, tracked through an app, rather than fixed daily shifts.
Where are Izifiso's camps located?
Beyond Mousuni Island, Ayon Das mentions camps and locations including Purulia's Doladanga dam, a hut rebuilt in the hills near Gurudum village, a forest site around seven kilometres from Mandarmani, a stretch near Chandipur and Digha, and a location in Bagda, alongside offbeat village-tourism spots.
