Subscription Products by Indian Startups

Spotify being one of the most loved brands has come down to this, and no wonder! We've seen popular brands being poorly rated en masse as part of agenda driven boycott campaigns, but what we see here is more of a genuine disappointment with the product by its users with its recent update. Assuming someone on the Product side decided to rip off all the features of a basic music player to drive growth in the form of paid subscriptions, Growth additionally will also have to handle the poor Playstore ratings as the outcome. What do you think should Spotify start doing from here? Not asking from a user's perspective (I know we all want free music without their annoying ads) but from a business perspective.

Was asking for some advice on fundraising. Got to know if you are building something with no revenue, literally impossible to raise. He explained how hard it is even for the current founders and expecting 100s of startups to fail next year with talent going cheap due to all the layoffs. Very hard to think how to monetise B2C if people don’t even link their credit or debit cards with Apple Pay and Android for in-app purchases. Also for B2B Saas, it’s better to build for US from India than building for India. Just “profit” over growth now. Nothing else matters 💭

Lately, I've started finding myself managing multiple subscription, which feel like they are spread all over the place because of all the different benefits on different cards. Some memberships/sunscriptions I use are Amazon Prime, Netflix, Swiggy one, Country Delight, Urbanclap Premium, YouTube premium, Spotify premium, country delight, nykka/myntra, airtel, jio, etc Some of them are purchased on an annual basis, some are autopay on a credit card, and some are purchased when needed. With all the news media and different content writers starting to charge for articles, I feel like this number is going to explode further. How do you keep track of these subscriptions ? Maintaining an excel seems like a hassle, but it is probably the most easiest to manage.

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.

VC here. Doing this for fun. Don't take all views seriously.

Can you name companies that have cracked their retention game?