It's hard to kill your existing business and start a new one. We did it. I remember it was mid-2021. So July 5th, 2021, we launched our app.
We went number one in the shopping section of Android Play Store in India.
Today is 2026. Every day since then we've been the number one shopping app on Android Play Store.
We just heard Varun's story from Giga. One thing I was thinking about is that his story feels like the 10-year forwarded version of your story in various ways. So I'm curious to hear all the different ways that ends up being true or not true. Maybe to begin, why don't you tell us a little bit about what Meesho is? I'm sure a lot of people here have used it. Tell us a little bit about what it looks like now and then we'll talk through the arc of how it got there.
Sure. First of all, good to be here. Whenever I think about YC, it takes me back 10 years ago. We were part of the Summer 16 batch. Now it's Summer of 2026. It's a very core part of the origin story of the company, so it's close to me. Good to see a lot of people who want to be entrepreneurs here, and I hope they learn something. Today, Meesho is an e-commerce platform where people can come and buy across lots of categories. Our value proposition is very clear: it is very focused on giving the best value for money to consumers across categories. We built it for mass India from day one. We started with a very simple mission of how do we democratize internet commerce for a billion consumers and every business in India. That's what we've been at. Last 12 months, we had about 250 million consumers buying from us, close to a million sellers.
That's 250 million unique people who bought a product?
Unique people who bought a product. And all of them bought about 10 times a year, so 2.5 billion orders per year. These numbers are by far the highest for any platform. This 250 million is still growing at 30% plus year on year.
Oh yeah. Because you live in a population of a billion and a half people, and you still have only somewhere between 350 to 400 million people buying anything online per year. So there are so many people who are still not part of that ecosystem, and you're very focused on making that happen.
So of the people that are buying anything online, something like half of them or more than half potentially are buying on Meesho. Wow, that's incredible.
I would love to hear a little bit about how you even got started with this. You started this in 2016. What was the first version of this idea, or maybe even before you had an idea, where you decided you wanted to do something? How did you even arrive at the thought that let's do a startup?
We started in 2015. Both Sanjeev and I come from small towns. I was born in Meerut. Most of my family comes from western UP, mostly a farmer family. Sanjeev was born and brought up in Hazaribagh in Jharkhand. Back in 2015, when we were trying to figure out, first of all, we were very excited about this mobile internet wave. Both of us were two years out of college. We were like, this is the time to build something. One thing we felt very passionate about was that back in 2015, if you were in Bangalore, you would see everyone around you buying stuff online. Then both of us would go back to our families in Meerut and Jharkhand, and you would find no one buying online, no one selling online. Both of us would always talk about this all the time. There's something off, right? When you come to Bangalore, people feel that e-commerce has happened. Flipkart got sold to Walmart, Amazon was there, lots of companies were there, and people think it's done, there's no new player who is going to come. But both of us believed there's definitely something needed because none of our families were buying online. So I think that was the simple reason why we started up. We said we have to bring everyone in India online. The beautiful thing is, 11 years forward, our business has evolved in many ways. I would say we are like version five of what we have been, but the core mission of the company is actually still the same.
So why don't we talk about what version one was then, because I think it's actually quite different from version five. What was the first idea where you said, screw it, we're going to leave our jobs? What was that process like for you guys to decide to leave your perfectly fine jobs in Bangalore and start working on something else? How did you and your co-founder agree to do that?
I was in Bangalore working in a company called InMobi, one of the first tech companies in Bangalore. I called Sanjeev. Sanjeev used to work with Sony in Tokyo. I called him up and said, hey, I think we should start up now. There's so much happening. I was part of an ad tech company, so I could see all startups in the Indian ecosystem spending budgets on this ad tech platform and growing really fast. I just felt that we have to do something, the time is now. So I called him up.
You saw that from working at that company, you saw that these budgets were going up really fast.
I saw mobile internet taking off as part of that company. You could see everything change every month. So I called him up. He said, 'Yeah, fine. Makes sense.' He resigned the next day, and one week later he came back from Tokyo. He was there for three years. By the way, going back to our origin story even into college, the reason he did that is both of us have been close friends for a very long time. We were in the same department, same hostel, same wing, next to each other for all four years of college. We did a lot of things together. The day I called him up, he said, 'Yeah, I have been thinking things are quite slow here and I want to do something more dynamic and fast. I've been here for three years now. It looks great, I will come back and we'll try something.' So that was the story. We landed on the idea that we really want to bring everyone in India, be it consumers or businesses, to the digital ecosystem. But how to get started with your first product? We said let's go and speak to a few people. We asked who are not selling online, mostly small businesses. Brands were selling online, but small businesses were the largest part of the economy in India, 85% of GDP back then. So we started to go and speak to a lot of these small businesses in Bangalore, in HSR, in Koramangala. We would just go into these shops and ask them, 'Hey, why aren't you selling online?' Everyone would give you a reason. These were regular shops across categories. We realized all these shops said, 'Hey, I want to sell online, but I don't know how to find my customers online. The people who buy from me are within a certain radius of the store. I don't have a unique differentiation beyond that, but these people really like my service and curation, so I really want to sell to them.' So Sanjeev and I thought, if we help this person sell to customers in this area, it'll be a great business. We called our first version 'Fashion Nearby'. Fashion shops could list their shop here and sell to customers locally. We started that version. Three months later, we shut it down.
Yes. We had a very stupid learning. We started this product and we never spoke to consumers. We only spoke to sellers. We thought the problem to solve was what the small businesses told us, but we never spoke to consumers.
You only understood one side of the market really well.
Basically, it's the most obvious mistake you can make. When we started to push our app and ask consumers to buy, they said, 'This is the worst of both worlds. When I go to a mall, I can touch and feel the product. When I go online, I get all the selection. You're giving me a limited selection of people in my locality and I can't even touch and feel the product.' It's worse than a mall, worse than e-commerce. We said, 'Yeah, it makes sense. It's a horrible thing to do. We should have done this before.' But the journey has been this. Sometimes you have a cool learning and sometimes you have stupid learnings, but you keep evolving your product. I feel good about one thing: we did not spend a year or two on that idea. We shut it down in three months. We built our app, got hundreds of customers to try the product, and very quickly realized it doesn't work. We shut it down and moved to the next version.
At this point, had you already gotten into YC or did that happen later?
YC happened a year after we started up. With the second product, the first product was called Fashion Nearby. The second product was called Meesho, but it was different than what we eventually got product-market fit with. The product we started then was like, 'Hey, this whole local thing doesn't work. Let's start a different problem.' We went back to these small businesses and said, 'This time we won't ask them. We will just sit in these shops and see what the problems are. We want to observe a lot more than speaking to them, because most of them articulate problems based on their understanding, which may not be the right thing to do.' So we would just go sit in these shops from morning to evening. Many of these people were really nice to us. We discovered one behavior. We discovered that a lot of these shops, even though they said they were not online, they were online. They used to have a WhatsApp group. Whenever someone came and bought from a shop, at the end they would take a phone number and say, 'I will add you to a WhatsApp group and I'll keep adding all the new products I have in my shop here.' So they were basically selling. They had this very simplified version of an e-commerce flow, just a WhatsApp group they would send stuff on.
