A great day for the Indian startup ecosystem! If we keep the unit economics aside, and zoom out from a perspective of scale, the founders have dared to build a high operation-driven consumer internet business in Indian price-sensitive market, one of the most difficult business to build. Customers are very happy with it, let me know if anyone prefers BigBasket over Zepto. There are many advantages that you have when you're building at such tremendous scale, investors know about it very well. Here are few fronts they could be planning to monetize on, given their scale
- Ads (obviously)
- Data to third party services like ONDC enablers of cataloguing
- Plug their under-utilized logistic arm of fleets to ONDC (which they might have already done probably, and can potentially leverage high margins here, similar to Dunzo)
- Leveraging their data for inventory intelligence, that's gonna be huge in the future with digitization of local sellers and distributors
Hyper-local businesses are tough, but come with plenty of overlooked advantages, when we're evaluating it as a customer. Highly optimistic about the Indian startup ecosystem and the unimaginable strategy pull-offs by hardcore execution of Indian founders! 🇮🇳
We're building a lot of sustainable profitable businesses anyway and that's not talked about, let's not discourage the founders going down the difficult paths of risky and seemingly difficult large scale businesses. Everyone said we don't need 10 min delivery of groceries, we can wait. Now, after Zepto, tell me if you'd wait for an hour to get your fruits and munchies delivered?