A former product manager in New York turned career setbacks into success and making money ₹1.3 billion a month selling Bihar-style tacos and Pakistani-American street food.
According to CNBC, 34-year-old Pakistani-American Zeeshan Bakhrani was fired twice from product management roles before deciding to follow his passion for food. In August 2025, he launched his venture Nishaan in Manhattan, investing $70,000 (about ₹65 lakh) from own savings.
From side hustle to full-time business
Bakhrani spent nearly a decade working in technology and running pop-up food stalls on weekends. After losing his job, he decided to fully focus on building his food business.
Its menu features a mix of flavors and ideas, including Pakistani chopped cheese, Bihari barbacoa tacos and buffalo chicken tandoori sandwiches. These dishes are inspired by the food he grew up with in Chicago, where his mother often added South Asian spices to everyday American meals.
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Strong earnings growth
The business quickly gained traction. Monthly sales rose from $57,000 (approx ₹53 lakhs) up to $140,000 (approx ₹1.3 million).
Bakhrani describes Nishaan as “Pakistani-American street food” that combines familiar American formats with spices like cumin, coriander and chili powder. “I’m Pakistani, I’m American. I’ll take parts of both,” he said.
Mixing cultures through food
He recalled experimenting back home in Chicago, trying creative twists like using paratha instead of tortillas in quesadillas and adding chutney-based sauces to burgers. These ideas later shaped his menu and helped him build a loyal following on social media.
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More control, more creativity
Comparing his current work to previous technology roles, Bakhrani said the difference is clear. While his earlier jobs involved long meetings and shifting priorities, he now has full creative control.
“I come up with an idea here, I can knock it out in a week,” he said.
Although he now works up to 14 hours a day, he says the freedom and sense of ownership makes it worth it.
In a similar incident, Saket Saurabh, co-founder and CEO of The Momos Mafia, quit his lucrative job to start a momo business that now generates ₹5 crores in revenue.
After graduating from NIFT Delhi in 2014, Saket co-founded Wowflux, which was later acquired by FlixStock. He then worked at FlixStock as a product manager and earned around ₹52 million annually.
Apart from his corporate work, Saket also explored the food business by helping his sister and brother-in-law run Bamboo Cafe in Gurgaon. While the cafe offered dishes like parathas and biryani, it was the momos that soon became the most popular among customers.
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“It was a regular cafe. We sold everything. As an experiment, we opened a small canopy that sold only momos right in front of the cafe. After this small canopy, we set up a cart at a place called Infotech in Gurgaon. That cart did great business. We did ₹10,000 up to ₹12,000 in sales every day. We met many administrative staff at that stall who wanted to open their own momo carts. That’s how the franchising business started.”
“In the first year, we opened a few carts. That was a good side, but the cart business was also volatile. We ran into various problems. Some days the authorities removed the carts; we ran into staffing problems and sometimes the weather didn’t cooperate. There were a lot of problems operationally,” the entrepreneur told Hindustan Times.
