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?
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.
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.
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.
