I have seen again and again that you learn mostly from your failures. Somehow we never learn from our successes. So when we started back in 2015, we started with one insight: e-commerce back in 2015 is tier one consumers buying branded electronics and branded fashion online. Everyone in India has to come online and buy everything else, and small businesses like 75-80% of the total economy, so they have to come online. We knew that, we believe in this, that this has to happen. How? We have no idea. And the first two years we just kept failing. We learned a big lesson, then we kept failing, then we learned a big lesson. Eventually things worked out, but those two years really shaped everyone's character and built the culture of the team. The first 10 people change everything. Seven or eight out of the first 10 people were ex-entrepreneurs; they had the same DNA as us. You realize whether you have PMF or not is when consumers start to ask you and you just don't have enough, when the demand starts to become bigger than supply. You know something is clicking, people want more and more of it and you don't have it. PMF is also not like a one-time journey. You have to keep discovering new types of PMF as the world evolves around us. You will never see us doing 100 things. Anything which does not fall under a mission statement, we don't do.
So once again, welcome to Satpa Commons. We've been people who've been exploring, figuring out what's next. One of the things I've often thought through and I've heard often is that we are often products of our own traumas and unexpected events that happen in our lives. I would be very curious to know what were some of those pivotal moments in your life that have shaped you profoundly and have given us the Vidit of today.
I think there are many, but if I talk about what has shaped me as an entrepreneur the most, I would say the first two years of the company. We started the company back in 2015, it was just me and Sanjeev. The first two years we massively starved on capital. We raised some money, we went to YC, a lot of stories happened there. We got some term sheet, the money never came. In the last maybe 8 months, three times I did not know how to pay people's salaries for the next month. This happened again and again, and I think that shaped me a lot. It shaped the company culture a lot, it shaped the character of the team a lot. I have seen that again and again that you learn mostly from your failures. Somehow we never learn from our successes. So I think that was the time when we learned a lot. If I have to take a few examples, what did we learn? So I think this would be February or March of 2017. We just ran out of money, we had no money left, and we knew that the new business that we finally started which got to PMF and scale, the social commerce model, at that point in time we did not have money to grow that business. People did not believe in that model because no one had done this before anywhere else in the world. So we knew this will work but we don't have much money left to make this business grow so people can see its potential and invest in us. So we really needed capital. One of the things that our team did, we said can we do some side business to make some temporary revenue that we can put back here? We started running e-commerce websites for some entrepreneurs. I remember we made some 25 lakhs of revenue serving an entrepreneur somewhere in Haryana. We did a few of these things and every time we did it, we'd get two more months of runway, then three more months of runway. A lot of this was not done just by me, it was done by the team. The team said okay, we will not let this fail, so they'll keep figuring out ways to get some money and say hey, now we will take this, invest in a core business and grow it a bit more. We did this for the next 6-7 months. Finally we got money in the bank from our Series A in September-October. So it's like 8 months of doing something on the side to get some money to run your core business because otherwise you don't have money. I think that built our character. I learned so much. One of the things I learned is after that I've never taken the company that close to not having capital. Once you've seen that, where you sleep every night not knowing if you will be able to run the company next month, you never want to go back to that. So I think that made me very conservative as a founder. It also added a lot of self-belief for the entire company including me. Whenever we are in a tough situation, we know there are ways of getting out of this, we can figure something out. Many times the team brings ideas, hey we can do this and we can get through it. We kept doing this again and again, figuring out like we are funding our business because we can't get investor funding, from some side business that we were running just to get money for the short term even though we don't believe in that business. So I think that's one story, but the first two years lots of things happened like this where we just kept failing, we learned a big lesson, then we kept failing, then we learned a big lesson. Eventually things worked out, but those two years really shaped everyone's character and built the culture of the team. A lot of people who are still from that time in the company, if I ask them the same question, I'm sure they will say the same stories because they're so core and fundamental.
Amazing. Once you've gone to war together, it shapes the team and the scars end up defining who you are. I actually had another question. Since you mentioned the team, I have personally believed that the team is the company, especially in the early days. Paul Graham famously says that the first five people is essentially the company. Steve Jobs said the first 10 people. What is your version of this? More importantly, I know that at times the first five or 10 people just come together by accident, sometimes by deliberation. What has been your approach on getting the first set of believers together?
I think we were lucky, and I agree with this totally. I think the first 10 people change everything. Those 10 people, because you don't have the money, I also feel like the right incentive attracts the right kind of people. Back then, as I said, we couldn't pay people salaries. A lot of those people, because it took us 2 years to get to PMF, they were on very low salaries as compared to their last salary. They never got a hike and they never knew when they would get a hike because we kept discussing we don't have money for the next month and they have to figure it out. So a lot of people who were attracted to the company are people who believed in it. They came either because their friend said you should join this company. One of the things we deliberated ourselves, I think about seven or eight out of the first 10 people we had were ex-entrepreneurs. We were lucky because we started this company in 2015. I remember I used to speak to you running Upwardly. When I called, I still have your number saved as Pratik Upwardly. I remember during this time, 2015, lots of startups suddenly sprang up, a crazy number, and by 2016-17 a lot were shutting down. So 2016-17 had a crazy number of ex-entrepreneurs in the market. Very smart people who just came out of a failure, want to prove to themselves they're not so bad. All of us have seen when you try something and it doesn't work, you start to doubt yourself whether you're as good or not. So these people you will meet in places like this. We'll go somewhere, we'll hang out, and they'll say hey I did this and it didn't work out, and they'll say hey we are doing this, why don't you join us? So seven out of 10 people in our company were ex-entrepreneurs who shut down their company either in 2016 or 2017. I think that was a very good decision because a lot of these people had the same DNA as us, very high ownership, and all of them wanted to prove to themselves that the failure they just had in their last startup is not who they are. It's not so core to their identity. Maybe that was just a bad idea or a bad phase, but they can really make it work. That's why they could do things like running a business on the side to make some revenue and still sustain what we are doing. I'm sure a lot of people just can't even think of that idea. So I feel like being very deliberate about the first 10 people is very important. If you don't get the right people, I have also seen the other way around. I have seen some of my friends who raise a large seed round and then they go hire people at a higher number as compared to the last salary, so people join for very different incentives. I haven't felt the same there. So I think being capital constrained back then used to work. Now I don't know if this happens, now seed rounds are so large, a lot of these problems don't exist, the ones I'm talking about that we used to face in 2015, 2016, 2017. But I definitely feel like it worked out. If our first 10 people were different, maybe the trajectory of the company would have been very different.
Interesting. I think having not only ownership but a real hunger to prove yourself makes a very big difference. Tell me, how have you kept that DNA alive over the years? You've obviously become really large and amazingly successful, and you've done your own set of experiments and changes over the years. As the team has grown, how have you kept that alive and how have you made sure that this becomes, you know, eventually culture is code at the very core level, it replicates and scales. I'm just curious on how did you get your coding right out there?
I think we have definitely tried to retain all of this, but I'll be lying if I say we are exactly the same as we were. It's hard when you have a large team, everyone's hiring the way they want to hire. How do you really retain the same thing that we had in the first 10-15 people? I don't think it's possible, but we still have the pursuit to get there. So we have done a lot in our culture to do that, and I'll give you some examples. We have some of these stories from the first 2-3 years codified, documented everywhere. Whenever someone joins, they see it. The reason we do it is because of the same thing. I'm telling you these stories because they remind you what really works and what doesn't work. Otherwise, you forget. You become part of a company that's working, and you do something and that works. You somehow feel it happened because of you. But a lot of these flywheels and the foundations were laid long ago when some of these times are very different, and for people to have that context is very important. So some of the things we do are part of our culture. I have always believed the reason we have succeeded in this market where a lot of people have tried but not succeeded, there are not many startups that are serving Bharat today. I struggle to find enough successes around us. There are a lot of people serving tier-1 cities, very few people are serving Bharat. I believe one of the big reasons is as a company we've always spent a lot of time very close to this customer base, understanding what are their unique problems which most people don't do. This customer tends to be different from a Bangalore or a Delhi customer. So whenever someone joins the company, it could be from campus, it could be a lateral hire, what we do is in the first month for 3 to 4 days in a week, we send you as an unpaid intern to one of our merchants somewhere in India. You basically will go there in the morning to evening. You'll be in the shop or wherever that merchant is, and in 3 to 4 days your job is to go solve at least one problem for that merchant and come back. We do that for everyone who joins the company. You could be very senior, you could be very junior, doesn't matter. The reason we do this is it does two things. It builds a lot of empathy for exactly who we are solving for. On day one you get that it's not people sitting in this AC room, this is the customer you're solving for. What are the daily problems? You will see that merchants struggle with inventory, struggle with getting access to people to pack their products, struggle with understanding their P&L, how to price the products. When that person comes and joins the company within the first month, I feel they become more mission aligned. First of all, a lot of people really get pumped. Hey, I want to help out millions of businesses like this. So they feel there's more value to their work. I also feel it builds a lot more empathy. So they don't do random things anymore. They know these are the problems I have seen, I sat with that businessman, I knew what their problems are, and we should do ABC because that's what adds value to their life, everything else doesn't matter. We do this because that's what we did in our early days. That's how we figured out our business. We used to spend all our time in the shops of our merchants who we were helping.
Curious, everybody does this you say?
Everyone. HR people, tech people, finance people, everyone does it. It's not function-wise, everyone does the same thing. They go and basically become an unpaid intern to a merchant. And we see, and by the way, they have to come and put a one-pager of what problem did you solve. It's so interesting. These college kids who just graduated from IIT will come and say, hey, I wrote, the thing they solved for them is that person did not know how to read a P&L, so they did not even know how much profit or loss they make. Some of these merchants are so small. So what they do is they basically download Excel, make up some model, and say hey automatically data will be fetched and you can see your P&L, and that person suddenly is able to figure out how to make money in their business. A lot of these businesses, if you go to very small towns, they look at the profit in terms of cash, what's going in, what's going out, in which product you make money, where you have working capital, they have no idea. So I'm saying this is one story. I'll give you another one. To retain the same thing that we had in the early days, we've always wanted to retain the same startup DNA. So the way we've organized our teams is we have even today structured our entire company as part of what we call as pods. No pod can be more than 10 people, and pods have to be autonomous and self-sustainable. So it tends to have three or four engineers, one product manager, and then depending on what skill set you need, you can get some ML folks, some DS folks, some designers, a business person, marketing person, whatever. Today we have 110 teams in the company, and all of them are aligned to a particular impact. Everyone in that team, you could be an engineer, you could be a product manager, your performance management at the end of the year is done the exact same way. Whatever thing that you own, did you make impact to that or not? There is no, because we treat them the same way we were the first 10 people. This 10 people team is exactly the same thing, and they own a problem separately. They are accountable to it at the end, and if they create impact we celebrate the way we celebrated what we did. We've done this so that people retain the same sense of ownership, same sense of hunger to create impact. A lot of times what happens is companies get larger, they get far away from all of this happening. Everything becomes about promotion, becomes about where I am, status starts to matter because they become very far away from impact. In our case, if you go to an engineer, that engineer will be able to say how much cash. The way we estimate impact of each and every team, the finance team enables everyone to map their impact to how much cash will they generate for the company in the next 5 years. So every team, these 110 teams, if you go ask them, every person in that team will be able to tell you what kind of cash will they generate for the company in the next 5 years. So some of that we have done so that people stay aligned to what the problems are as the company gets larger, which is very tough. There are enough external forces to take this away, so it's always a pursuit. But I think these are a few stories. If I go on and on, there are lots of things because this is top of mind for me all the time, preserving the culture and retaining what I would say is the core reason of why we reached here.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. We'll come back to this again because I have a follow-on, but I do want to discuss with you that especially in the early days when you just have an idea, and frankly the market is whatever you want to make it out to be. So talk to us about your own journey of the proverbial product market fit. I know you started Fashioner earlier and that had its own journey, and you did talk about the struggle days. But it would also be good to understand from your perspective, starting from the customer, how has your product market fit journey been? Because now in hindsight everything is very interesting, you can draw a straight arc, but what was that non-sequitur kind of tune that was playing out in the early days?
The early story is this. When we started back in 2015, we started with one insight. E-commerce is still a very tier one thing. E-commerce back in 2015 is tier one consumers buying branded electronics and branded fashion online. There was hardly anything happening outside the statement I just mentioned. So we said everyone in India has to come online and buy everything else from all kinds of businesses including small businesses, and small businesses are like 75-80% of the total economy. So they have to come online. We knew that, we believe in this, that this has to happen. How? We have no idea. Both Sanjeev and I have zero e-commerce experience, zero retail experience, nothing. So we said let's just do it from first principles. I still remember we built the Fashioner app, and I'll tell you how we reached there. We started to go to small businesses on this road, exactly on this road in Koramangala. We used to go to these shopkeepers and ask them, hey, who buys from you? They'll say people around this area buy from me, these are my customers. And then he will say I'm relevant to them because whenever they want to buy something they can easily walk up to my store, it's not far away from them. So he said how can I grow your business online if more people around buy from me? So we said let's just build an app that will market their shop to more people in this area. We built Fashioner, which was fashion nearby, and we onboarded a lot of these merchants in these areas, mostly small businesses, to come list their store, and we will then give an app to consumers where they can discover all the shops in this particular area and whichever they like they can go buy on the app or sometimes walk to the store and buy from there. We did that for six months, we realized it doesn't work. The big reason it doesn't work is because we did not speak to a consumer while building this. We just went and spoke to businesses. Businesses want this, but consumers, if you go to a consumer, they say hey it's a fashion app with much less selection as compared to what's available elsewhere, why will I buy from here? Very less selection because it's only local. In fashion, people want more and more selection. So I think we learned a big lesson: we have to speak to consumers as well if we're building a consumer app. Six months later we shut it down. Then we went to shopkeepers again. This time we went to different shopkeepers to get different insights. Instead of asking them how to solve this problem, we said please don't tell us anything, just give us a seat. We will sit in the shop and observe whatever happens in this shop every day. So we went to different shops, did the exact same thing, just morning to evening sit there and see how does the business happen in these shops. One of the things we realized is a lot of these shopkeepers maintained WhatsApp groups with their customers. When people would buy from these shops, the shopkeeper would take their phone number, add them to the WhatsApp group, and then keep sending whatever the new stuff in their shop later on. So we said these guys are already online, not the same definition, but a WhatsApp group is online. So they are online, they just don't have a website, they have a WhatsApp group. It's not very different. So we said, can we really bring them online with a WhatsApp group instead of a website? So we said what does it take to run this business on WhatsApp? And we said, okay, fine. Can we solve it for you? Collecting payments was hard back then, so can we solve it for you? Showing selection was hard. Knowing how much inventory is available in which place was hard. So we basically built a tool which was Meesho 1.0 that could help a lot of these shopkeepers manage their business on WhatsApp. We built that over a year. It worked okay. A lot of people signed up, used it for some time. But again, we learned something. We learned that we are helping these businesses manage their business on WhatsApp, which basically saves them time. But they are time abundant. Many times, no one's coming to their store. They don't want to save time, and they were not willing to pay for anything that will help them save time or even maybe grow business, but they can't really know how much it is growing their business. So exactly one year later we shut that down. But the beautiful thing, the reason when we shut this down, we did this because at the same time we discovered another behavior. We found that there are some people, mostly women, who are running these WhatsApp groups, and these WhatsApp groups were exactly like the shopkeeper that I mentioned. They were just more active because these women were not doing anything offline unlike that shopkeeper. They would be very active morning to evening answering questions, curating stuff throughout the day. And we said this is amazing. What if we just connect both of them? So we basically created our social commerce model where these small businesses will upload their selection and we'll have these women entrepreneurs take that selection and curate them on these WhatsApp groups, and suddenly that business model worked really well. Again, it was a tweak. Instead of using the shopkeepers who are not so motivated to do this, we basically leveraged these women who wanted access to selection but they didn't have because they don't have an offline shop. We did that, and I think we did this in October 2017 when we raised our Series A and got money in the bank. We raised our Series B in March 2018. We raised our Series C in the middle of the next year, September-October 2018. So in one year, from not having money at all and figuring out how to run a business, we found something that just suddenly picked up. Now to the point of how do you know PMF? How do we know PMF? Because when we moved to this particular model, we started to be short on everything. We don't have enough team members, we don't have enough supply, we don't have enough logistics capacity. Everything, the business was doubling every two weeks without us doing anything in our social commerce model because we didn't have money for marketing. We had zero money. People run Facebook ads etc., we had no money to run an ad, and we used to double every month without doing anything because the pull was so strong. There were so many people, so many of these small businesses want to sell their products, and so many of these women who wanted to make money selling products on WhatsApp. So it was going viral, it was going crazy. That's how we knew PMF, and because we had seen what PMF is not with our first two businesses, you can contrast it. We were struggling to get people to retain on the app, asking them why you not using it. This time none of that was happening. Suddenly whatever we had was clicking with everyone. So sometimes I think it's very hard to quantify. People say tell me what retention number is PMF. I think it's very hard because every business has a very different retention profile depending on customer frequency. You can't put a single number, you can't do a survey. The way you realize whether you have PMF or not is when consumers start to ask you and you just don't have enough, when the demand starts to become bigger than supply. You know something is clicking, people want more and more of it and you don't have it. Then we suddenly had to hire so many people who can support this business, and that's why we kept raising money because we were just short. We would raise money and by the time the business had grown again we need to do even more, and then we'll go out and raise money. So I think that was the journey. The first two years very slow, nothing working until this model worked out, and then suddenly things start to work and you can see a lot of organic pull. Hard to put into numbers, but I think when you have PMF you know you have PMF. I have never met someone who didn't know they had PMF but they had PMF. I have seen a lot of other cases where they don't have PMF but they think they have PMF. That happens a lot more often. The other way doesn't happen as much, and I think that's true. So most people will realize when they have PMF.
Amazing. And then during COVID you again did a few very interesting things. Talk to us about that. One is of course near death, seeing this mad growth and then having a complete black swan hit you. How did the team and you cope with it? And there are a couple of very interesting things that came out of that. If I look at the app now, it's fundamentally very different from the women selling on WhatsApp. So talk to us about that journey as well.
If I zoom out, just to tell people what was happening in our business. As I said, when we started we started with e-commerce should be democratic, everyone should come online, all businesses, all consumers. Then after doing a few things, we landed up in this WhatsApp model. When you zoom out and say why was this working, the big reason was when we spent time with consumers, pre-Jio happened. I think in 2017-18, pre-Jio, cost of data was very high. Shopping apps used to have a lot of images. If you download a shopping app and you browse, a lot of data will be consumed, you'll keep getting messages, 50 paise deducted, one rupee deducted. Back then, a lot of people in India didn't want to download shopping apps directly. But when you push this on WhatsApp, where a lot of this is text, it does not consume a lot of data. Images only when I download they get downloaded. If I don't like the text, I will not download that image. I have a lot more control. A lot of these consumers are willing to buy. So that's why this particular WhatsApp model was working so well, and we scaled on that. We went very deep into the country because of that model. But then two things happened. First, data cost went to zero, no one cares about data anymore. Then when the pandemic happened, the pandemic forced everyone to learn how to buy on apps, how to come and place an order. These two things happened, and the relevance of what we had done before on WhatsApp was not needed anymore. We started to see it, post-Jio we started to see slightly, and after pandemic we started to see very fast. A lot of people who were coming to the Meesho app, which was built for these WhatsApp entrepreneurs, was being now used by consumers directly. They were buying for themselves. So we said okay, this change is happening. If we don't align ourselves to this change, we'll become irrelevant. We never wanted to be a WhatsApp commerce app forever. When we started, this is the only thing that worked and we stuck to it. So in 2021, we basically shut that down. If you had to buy from Meesho, you can't buy from a Meesho entrepreneur anymore, you had to come to the Meesho app. I still remember the date, 5th of July 2021. We shut down our WhatsApp model and made Meesho a consumer app. I think since 7th July 2021 until today, we have been the most downloaded shopping app every single day in India. If you go to the Play Store, you go to the shopping section, you'll not find anyone else. The pull again, I'm just saying the same thing, you open it up and we went crazy. I still remember we did this, our MAU would be like 5 million or 10 million maybe when we did this, and 5 months later our MAU was 100 million. My team, no one in the tech team was ready that this will happen. How will you get logistics capacity to serve so much? All of that. So I'm saying it's the same thing. Now you know this is working, more and more people want this. I think that was the second crazy phase in our journey. Of course, we made this big change, there were a lot of question marks. If we do this and it doesn't work, can we go back to the old one? But I think we realized India had changed. Now everyone was okay to download apps, willing to buy themselves. So I think that's basically the story of making that big change. I think great that we did that. Since then, we now see that a lot of consumers coming to our app are able to fulfill aspirations across categories. WhatsApp never allowed us to have a lot of data on these consumers. Now obviously we have a lot more, so we've been able to improve that consumer experience. But this was another, I would say, the second PMF in our journey. Even though it's the same business, you realize PMF is also not like a one-time journey. You have to keep discovering newer types of PMF as the world evolves around us. Maybe AI is a new thing and all of us have to find a new PMF in our own business, otherwise someone else will find it. So I think that's been a big learning for us as well. You have to stay relevant by continuing to disrupt yourself, otherwise someone else will do it.
This is amazing. Clayton Christensen wrote about the innovator's dilemma. You kind of nailed it on its head that if you aren't paranoid and if you aren't watching on a day-to-day basis, somebody will disrupt you. So it's better that you disrupt yourself. That brings me to a fundamental question. What has been your routine or your go-to set of workflows which has kept you close to the customers? Because the way you're talking, clearly you haven't lost sight. It hasn't become like that big a company where the CEO or founder has lost the proximity or the intimacy with the customers. How have you kept it alive? Of course, that itself becomes a big signal to the rest of the organization. So I want to know what are those rituals and deliberate actions that you take to make that happen, and how has that changed over the years?
I think a lot of this is plain simple: just spending a lot of time with different stakeholders in my ecosystem. I regularly, we internally call it LODs, which is Listen or Die. All of us, the reason we have this, it's a constant reminder. If you don't do it, you'll again become very disconnected with the customer that you're serving. So all of us including me, we have a ritual of people going on the ground. Whatever problem you're spending time on, you go on the ground, spend a few days with people in their shops or in their warehouse, or you go and meet consumers in their house. I always meet a consumer in their house, no focus group, don't bring them to your office, no on call. You have to go into their house, sit in their drawing room, see the context of the household they live in. You see so much when you see their house. What people put in their drawing room matters to them, it tells a lot about them. Then when they tell you how they are using the app in a particular way, you connect those stories. That matters a lot. So I'm saying all of us spend a lot of time being on the ground, asking very open-ended questions to understand how their behaviors are changing, how their preferences are changing. Then we have a ritual of coming back and all of us publish a document and share it with all the teams. So people can see I went on the ground, I spoke to consumers, this is what I learned, and I share with them. Then everyone else in the company also does the same thing. Other leaders will go on the ground. Someone will go and speak to delivery boys. Someone will go and speak to merchants. That keeps happening as part of every single project. People are expected to go on the ground, spend time with the customer, really understand the problem in detail. As I said, I have always believed this is a very core part of the secret sauce that we've just stayed very close to the customer. So I'm very paranoid about this. If I ask a team, hey what did the customer say, and they don't have an answer, I feel like this project will definitely fail. Because somehow people maybe just went to ChatGPT and figured out the answer to this problem and are implementing it. Maybe that will not work. You have to be on the ground, understand context. So I think everyone in the company still continues to do it. As I said, anything about culture is if you don't do it with intent, people find other things that take up their time and they forget about it and it becomes less important. So we have certain rituals that keep making it part of the core thing. I think it starts from us, both founders doing it, leaders doing it, and hence everyone else doing it.
Interesting. You have an interesting layer between you and your customers, which are your sellers and people who are bringing all the selection onto the platform. Talk to us a little bit about that. Because it's eventually at some level a long tail of sellers in the country, or maybe this is outside opinion, in a country where quality, value, and low trust kind of go hand in hand, how have you built trust in the platform and the sellers in the ecosystem for yourself and hence by extension for your customers?
You mean trust with consumers or trust with merchants?
Both sides, because eventually trust happens.
Trust is always built with consistency over time. The longer you do something consistently, the easier it becomes. Which also means now the problem is much easier for us as compared to what it was 5 years ago. 5 years ago it's a new app. Hey, it's available at such a good price, must not be right. That's what a lot of consumers used to tell me when I go on the ground. But the thing is, one person will try, and then two people will try, and they realize hey it's great for the price, and they start to buy more, and then the word of mouth goes. Even today, majority of our new customers come by word of mouth. When they come by word of mouth, they're not coming because of an ad and then mistrusting. Someone else told them there's something good here. So when they come to the app, they generally come with some level of trust. They're still not trusting as much because they're buying for the first time, but they trust us a bit. So I think that's how it starts. There's no shortcut to trust. It's about consistently doing it right over time. What we've done is a few things that we have straight, always true. Any product that you buy on the app, you always get a 7 days return in many categories. A lot of platforms don't allow returns, we always allow it because we have a lot of merchants who may not be very consistent all the time. If your profile in terms of quality is not great, we will delist you irrespective of what happens. A few of the things we have done from the beginning, and we just stay true to it consistently. More time goes, people know hey this is what's happening, and they keep giving you more tries. They buy once, they buy thrice, they buy five times, and then they cross a threshold where they trust you. After that, if you do something wrong, it's on you, but they trust you. Even if once in a while they get a product which is not ideal, they say huh, this looks like an abnormality, but otherwise everything is good. That's how a typical customer journey is. But it has to be earned over time, and it has to be done consistently. We tried shortcuts, we realized there are none. You can put a celebrity in an ad, it doesn't work. People will have trust issues until they believe that you consistently deliver.
Interesting. And in the seller ecosystem, there have been a lot of accidents in the Indian commerce space, especially because I was in commerce between 2010 and 2015, when it was very interesting to onboard sellers, distributors, and supply in general. Talk to us about some of the interesting challenges that might have come to you during these years.
I think the problems pre-pandemic and post-pandemic are very different. Pre-pandemic, it was very tough convincing merchants in India to come online. A lot of merchants, like consumers, all of you have been part of a commerce platform. Most consumers who came online were younger people, early adopters of technology, more comfortable. But all businesses were run by older people. You go to supply hubs in Delhi, they're all 45-plus year olds making decisions. Even if there's a younger person in the shop, the decision is made by the father who doesn't understand technology. So they don't want to sell. It used to be very hard to convince these businesses to come online. We had people on the ground convincing them, giving them some benefit for the first few orders, but it was tough. Then the pandemic came.
For a year, there was no business offline. Now you're a 60-year-old merchant or a 30-year-old merchant. All of you know that if you're not online, you're dead. You're not viable because that person also saw someone in the neighborhood who has a business online and is still making money, actually more money, because everyone's buying online. And I only had a business offline and suddenly I have no revenue. So our biggest onboarding was done by the pandemic. We didn't have to do it because during the lockdowns, all the merchants then... I haven't heard this again where someone tells you, 'I don't want to sell online.' I think it's now insurance. Everyone believes if a lockdown happened once in my lifetime, it can happen again, and if I don't have online as a revenue channel, my business will always be at risk. So the problems we faced back in 2015 don't exist anymore. The world is much easier to operate.
Maybe I should be doing another commerce startup instead of building soft commerce here. But no, thanks for sharing that. We'll switch tracks and get a little personal, because that's what we like doing here. Talk to us about what personal projects you are pursuing at the moment and why.
Actually, I have no personal project. Every project I have, I'm doing within Meesho. So no personal project, apart from becoming a dad last year, which takes up all my time. But no personal project. To me, that's the beautiful thing about being a founder. If I really feel passionate about any idea, I can do it. Over the last four years, I've started lots of new businesses. Many failures, like in the early days. We start something, realize six months later it's not working, shut it down, and start something else. I continue to try lots of new things, and that's the source of excitement.
What is one trend that you are personally very excited about?
I think the trend I'm excited about is the one everyone's excited about: AI. I'm always fascinated by the demos the team brings to me. There are so many things you can improve, like the quality of cataloging. Our merchants are often not very tech-savvy; they put wrong spellings, can't describe their product. A lot of our systems are built on metadata. With LLMs, a lot of that is solved. We see crazy amounts of value across the board. I'm very excited about how to use AI to make big strides in affordability and accessibility. For accessibility, a lot of India is still not coming online because they struggle with the form factor of apps. They don't speak their language. They have to learn words they've never seen before. Many consumers even ask, 'What does cart mean?' They've never been to a supermarket. But that's how commerce has been built. Everyone shows the same things and they are made to transact the same way. I'm excited about how AI assistants can abstract all that out and make it very easy. You can just tell them the job and they'll figure out how to interface with all these form factors. We are tinkering with a lot of that. For affordability, a lot of cost in the value chain, like customer support, logistics, trust and safety, we are using generative LLM models that are doing a great job. I think everything can be reimagined. Wherever we are trying to reimagine problems with generative AI, we are seeing lots of interesting things happen. That's something I'm very excited about, and where I'm spending a lot of my time.
Amazing.
What do you think is the superpower of Vidit, and talk to us about how that superpower often holds you back?
I don't know if there's a superpower. People attribute a lot to a few people as if they do the right things. You've been an entrepreneur, you know it's about being lucky with the right mission, the right co-founder, the first 10 people you work with, the right investors, and hoping the right things happen. I've seen this again and again with the same people whose first two ideas failed, and even now lots of new things we try fail. So it's not just a superpower. The cultural values we believe in as a company are true for me, for Sanjiv, for most of our team. We all believe in our mission. You'll never see us doing 100 things. Many companies start a lot of honey, but we don't. Anything that doesn't fall under our mission statement, we don't do, because we don't feel excited about it. Irrespective of how cool it is, if it's a flavor of the season, it doesn't matter. All of us share the same values, which are part of the culture code. Everyone believes in them, and that's why they stick around. It's just about that. People passionate about something and aligned in value system, tinkering and trying new things, some succeed, some don't. There's so much luck involved to say it's a superpower.
