Very true, same for delivery companies directly copied from US

Product Manager

Like I get it in tech but literally all D2C beauty, supplement companies have the exact same products (ingredients and even names) . . . Or else they will just copy from US. . . Then we will preten...

Welcome to Indian Startups's Private Community

Like I get it in tech but literally all D2C beauty, supplement companies have the exact same products (ingredients and even names) . . . Or else they will just copy from US. . . Then we will pretend that a lot of innovative stuff is going on in India. Only innovation I've seen is partly in fintech and that's because the market or RBI is forcing something.

Is market research nothing more than copying competitors?

Senior Product Manager

Is market research nothing more than copying competitors?- Grapevine

Why India lags behind in AI

We’ll be able to move mountains once we stop obsessing with IITians. They work their asses off to get into IITs to get high paying jobs, it’s as simple as that. Train tier-2,3 college students who have nothing to lose. You’ll achieve 100x more optimal results with 100x less investment.

Product Designer

Product Owner

Welcome to Gadgets & Apps's Private Community

Commercial, off the shelf drones continue to evolve in complexity and threaten military and civilian safety & disrupt operations. Anduril's counter drone sys...

Anduril Lattice Counter Drone System

Do we’ve Indian companies building something similar?

Software Developer

Have been an entrepreneur since college days. Went full time on same idea and worked on it for a good 4 years full time before starting something new, raising some money, later pivoting (fucked up here) and eventually shutting shop last year. 

Life has been tough since then since there is no clarity on what to spend next 2-5 years on - acquisition offer falling apart, tried looking for jobs but didn't finalise and later did a bit of consulting (good pay but didn't really work out).

I now have a few good conversations going on right now - leading product & EIR/Founders Office. What do you suggest would be an ideal thing to do? 

Profile - Solid Generalist. Non tech. Money ain't really an issue right now but can't stay dependent on savings for so long - its stupid.

PS - If you or someone you know is hiring, please reach out. Happy exploring ideas as well.

2 time ex-founder / 6+ years of entrepreneurial experience

Founder

I might sound stupid here but please hear me out. 
The market is crowded with so many startups in every domain. Older startups are much more stable, on track to become profitable or are already profitable with a huge market share. Not to forget the legacy companies with deep pockets and years of R&D and experience. Along with the competition, funding is another major pain point now because of various reasons we all know of. 
Also, somewhere I feel we don't face a lot of burning problems we faced a few years back which gave birth to a lot of startups who were actually solving some problem. Most of the new age startups out there are not really solving any problem but just offering premium products or services targeting just the high earning individuals. Most of the new ideas are repetitive with no major differentiation or value add. 
Because of all these reasons, I feel we might see very few new startups in future let alone successful ones. 

Share your thoughts please!

What's the future of start-ups and start-up ideas?

Analyst

Welcome to News Discussion's Private Community

https://m.economictimes.com/tech/technology/non-chinese-lending-apps-including-payus-lazypay-kissht-blocked-on-meitys-order/articleshow/97656552.cms

How safe is it to work in a fintech when RBI/govt goes on banning spree

Software Engineer

For me - Mokobara, Chaayos, Chumbak
Looking to understand Indian brands that have done really well, and understand if it's the product being superior or brand/marketing being an outlier

What's a D2C brand from India that you really like?

The whole truth. absolutely amazing protein bars

Does not make sense to me. Reliance is backing educational institutes for building something that has already been well commercialised.

India Business News: A consortium backed by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd and India’s top engineering schools aim to launch its first ChatGPT-style service next month, a big step in the country’s ambitions to become a player in the field of artificial intelligence.

BharatGPT: AI Model Backed by Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s Richest Person, to Launch in March | India Business News - Times of India

IITs and reliance are building GPT?

Welcome to Product Managers's Private Community

Is this true or is it just me? 

I feel at this point there are no moats in consumer fintech.

The framework seems to be in a rut, everybody is doing the same thing.

Account aggregator, spend insights, personal loans, credit card, mutual funds, indian stocks, us stocks, etc etc.

If 5 different apps have literally the same features, with no meaningful edge over the other, what would you go for? How do they stand out?

Customer support? Onboarding? Branding? Picking a niche TG?

Wanna hear what other product folks think about this.

Where is fintech headed?

Would you rather be an Engineer learning how to Product or a Product Manager learning how to Engineer?

Answer is obvious mate. And it's already in motion. 
 Everyone knows current product management breed is a messed up fraudulent bunch. They will run into poverty if they don't change ways🙂

Founding Engineer

The breadth of things, and the speed at which Jio rolls out successful ventures is crazy!

Last month, Krutrim AI had attained unicorn status for being the first indigenous LLM AI model of India. There was some hue and cry when it had distorted some historical concept of India. 

Today, the beta version was launched and upon pondering, it stated that it’s based of OpenAI’s LLM model…so they spent all this money & resources just a build a wrapper service. 

Frankly, this is just another scam & would lose credibility in a blink of an eye. Why do Indians lack innovation & just believe in simple copy pasting. 

Views are welcome.

Krutrim AI’s Beta launched, it’s a wrapper service of OpenAI

9/10 companies in the same space have the same feature set. Bigger companies are legit morphing into the exact same super app.

More and more, it feels like it's all about execution with fintech. 

Do cool things only come out of iSPIRT?

Are there any cool B2C fintech products around anymore?

Been wondering how this startup is gonna become profitable at any point. Going to be the same Cheq or CRED story at best. 

For the uninitiated, they have their own flash.co email IDs that you can use for shopping, bookings, etc. that you can use to get discounts and stuff. They also have a nice order tracking UI.

Flash.co

- 42% of this will be Grocery, followed by Fashion at 24%
- 65% of D2C brand sales expected to be driven by Marketplaces (as they are today) 
- Today, 92% of retail is offline. By 2027, 89% of retail will be still offline (fair)

India D2C market expected to go from $16.9Bn in '23 to $61Bn in '27

Welcome to Personal Finance's Private Community

I am starting a D2C fashion brand. Haven't been able to arrange funds from any sources. 

In a way, it's a chicken and egg problem in market conditions like this. Funding ke liye traction chahiye and traction ke liye funding chahiye. 

Need 15 lacs to get things off the ground. Considering the minimum order requirements and marketing expense. 

Do you think it would be a good idea to do crowdfunding for my startup? Any help / insights would be highly appreciated 🙏

Crowdfunding for D2C Startup

Product Marketing Manager

Welcome to Business Roles's Private Community

Any industry, any product or service. Something that you've seen happening in India.

I'll start with one : Fogg appealing to the mass market by marketing their value for money products (x number of sprays), literally beating axe out of market share in 3 years.

What's an innovative growth/marketing strategy you've come across?

Seems like Ultrahuman had started focusing on the US market (because India is saturated after a point). Oura must've sued them to limit competition, and because a lot of things were too similar. Anyone knows more here?

Oura sues Ultrahuman for copying it's technology!

Welcome to Office Gossip's Private Community

Lately, I have been thinking very deeply about my college days when the Flipkart story had inspired the entire lot of my batch at IIT-D. We were starry eyed college kids who wanted to do something innovative in India and break away from the "three" most popular moves after IIT:

1. UPSC
2. MBA
3. MS/PhD abroad

I proceeded to then work in various Indian startups and noticed an alarming thing. I began to realise a pattern across all my stints:

The initial founding team does exceptional work innovating, they excel at what Thiel calls "Zero to One", the act of creation. I will concede that although most founders fail to innovate by often copying what worked in the west but the initial founding team usually excels in execution. It allows for initial traction as it breathes a fresh breath in the\ space that they are operating in.

Almost always, when Product Market Fit is "achieved"(whatever that means), the founders begin to deploy insane amounts of funds into growth. 

By definition, Growth is not a bad thing. But, I have been noticing that across all startups I have worked at( all raised funds from the largest global funds) that it comes at the expense of product building. And during this era of hypergrowth, the product starts to stagnate while focus becomes marketing and sales. 

I often felt that this was temporary. That once we reach enough scale, we would start to innovate again. 
But time and time again, the ability to innovate atrophies over time.
Rather than building something that has enduring value by executing faster than anyone, the focus becomes achieving growth at all costs. 

This ultimately leads to two outcomes:
1. The startup cannot sustain this growth and retention begins to look dire. The churn becomes unbearable and the startup goes out of business.

2. The startup gets acquired by someone bigger, allowing founders and investors to believe that they created value where none existed in the first place.

I am completely dejected at this.

The Death of Indian Innovation: Why Indian Start Ups are failing to Innovate?

Growth Manager

I believe men are becoming increasingly conscious of their appearance and it’s quite evident on GV as well. Working out, getting in shape is only L1 problem, personal care goes beyond working out. But there are two problems when men want to start personal care (skin,hair, body)

1. Lack of knowledge. Where to start? How to start? Which products to use? What is Vitamin C? WTF is a hyaluronic acid?

2. If #1 is sorted, then the second problem is laziness. I spoke to 220+ men and 70% spend only spend or want to spend 10-20 mins/day on personal care.

I plan to solve this by,

1. Content. Becoming an education first brand. Best example is Ditto Insurance, they’re more of an advisor than a Insurance selling company. A good example in D2C space is The Whole Truth. I want to educate men about personal care. I want to build a brand that men turn to when starting their personal care journey. 

2. Innovative products & Functionality. Men would benefit a lot from serum but they don’t use it primarily because the hassle of using a dropper, rubbing it on your face is too much. We’ll innovate how these products are made. Easy to use. 


I’ve dropped a full-time job offer to build this right out of college. Borrowed 10L from F&F. Registered the company and on-boarded a few kickass people to create content. Hope all goes well. I’ll keep sharing the progress here :)

Starting a Men’s focused D2C Brand

Best of luck. I don't care about the market or the product you might sell, but love the energy. People buy from people who are 'realistic' and passionate about what they sell.

Is market research nothing more than copying competitors?

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