Dunzo for dummies.
Hard-core banglorean here. Seen dunzo grow from when it was a WhatsApp group in Indiranagar to when it became a verb. What happened to dunzo? Call it not understanding what I have read or just plain lazy, I am not able to fathom what happened to a company that was the OG of its industry and grew with 0 marketing and solely on the product and how it happened. Anyone care to simplify it and explain?
BingoMadAngles
Stealth
a year ago
@Krypto Reward him/her with some cred coins 💀
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Founders were employees with little to no stakes or incentives.
They got involved with Reliance.
Had a shitty af engineering legacy tech stack which led to their downfall as they were too slow to changing markets and competition outpacing them in every single way.
Not an expert on the tech side of things. But could you please elaborate how engineering might be responsible for the downfall. I'm curious
StingyBulb79
Stealth
a year ago
Pretty harsh to blame on engineering.
chanakya
Stealth
a year ago
When you sell a dollar for 90 cents, you will have a very strong PMF and positive demand but a perpetual negative cash flow/EBITDA/bleeding business.
Only businesses which are able to turn this around are pure play tech first businesses which can scale tech at 0 marginal cost, not logistics businesses like Dunzo where every sale fulfillment has negative contribution margin and operations heavy.
Poor leadership, zero tech upgrade, reckless spending (read over spending), senseless wastage on salary and office parties, shaking hands with reliance amid dark store blitz.
Their unit economics were profitable and growing when they were doing P2P and B2B.
The problem started when dark store model started gaining traction (Zepto, Blinkit etc) and even they switched to it out of FOMO. They turned into a loss making machine who couldn’t raise money as fast as they were burning it.
DietWasabi
Stealth
a year ago
Were they ever able to crack the unit economics for the P2P delivery which was their USP?
The unit economics doesn't suggest profitability. I don't see this becoming profitable for any company. Their B2B is the only biz that can become profitable.
Earmygard
Stealth
a year ago
It's like grapevine is a source for storyideas.
https://inc42.com/features/the-dunzo-breakdown/
SharpOmelet
Stealth
a year ago
It’s easy for us to ask what was the one thing that went wrong?
There was no one thing, it was a series of things while founders kept holding fort.
Dunzo was the first of its kind; other competitors raised in no time and burned money for growth - and got a large customer base.
It’s important to work, but it’s more important to work to outgrow your competition - closing your eyes to competition doesn’t help. Dunzo never paid heed to answer to junk of marketing money being put in by zepto, blinkit. I think Dunzo guys were pessimists.
They realised it untill it was too late, brought Reliance onboard for big name and monies. We know the rest of how the company got too diluted even founders didn’t have any stake.
I think they must have lost the conviction seeing competition rise and eating shit from the investor board while having 0 stake in building.
