Meesho raised a series A round in October 2017 with the shift in its business model. Series B and series C rounds followed the next year along with 100x growth. The exponential scaling to serve a massive consumer base, which was in the founders’ sights from the outset, became a reality. The second part of the playbook answers four key questions:

1. How did the founders choose between staying on a path long enough to reap rewards and switching to a potentially higher growth path?

2. What are the drivers that characterize founders who can seize the opportunity to serve a large consumer base?

3. How did the founding team build a company culture that’s in tune with the driving force to scale up?

4. What were the challenges of putting systems and processes in place to support a scale that was many orders of magnitude bigger than at first?

Meesho stayed on this path for about two years, building out the product and ironing out chinks. During this time, the founders recognized that the online shop was an unnecessary intermediate layer and complication for the resellers who were becoming Meesho’s main target audience: housewives mostly selling their curated products on social media channels where they had built a following. This led to the next iteration: Meesho 2.0.

Now the resellers could just scroll through catalogues of products on the app which came with a function to enable sharing selected products on social media channels with the click of a button. This made reselling easy and seamless without the need to bring buyers to a separate online boutique. It also enabled enhanced data analytics to pinpoint consumer needs that vary from one mini-market to another and improve the sourcing of products. Other possibilities emerged down the line, such as enabling consumers to buy products directly on the app, without going through a reseller, which essentially broadens Meesho into an eCommerce platform as well.

Show Notes

[0.00] Great founders analyze problems top down and build solutions bottom up. Top-down analysis identifies the opportunity and ensures the market size is large enough. Bottom-up solution-building helps gain unique insights about consumers and understand nuances about how to solve a problem.

[2.09] An informal contract between the two co-founders was to stick with the first product for two years to see if it yielded the desired results. This ensured striking a balance between rethinking too often and being open-minded to pivot to a new version based on market validation.

[2:58] The motivation to keep going through patches of uncertainty about validation came from the bond in the founding team that gave the startup the vibes of a college project where tackling challenges is fun.

[3:38] The inbuilt DNA across the company, stemming from the founders, is to pursue a high growth path targeting a huge consumer base. This made the focus on Meesho 2.0 razor sharp as soon as the market signaled the path to scaling faster, even if the safer option was to stay on the first path.

[7:59] The founders build culture by what they encourage or discourage. Thus scale is valued and becomes ingrained in the company culture. The other fundamental value comes from a recognition that the homemakers using Meesho have different aspirations and behaviors from those building the product. So user impact guides every proposal, feature, and decision.

[13.15] The only way to stay consistent with a culture as you scale up is to build systems. From setting ambitious goals to breaking them down to individual OKRs, the company’s fundamental values are built into them. Thus the OKR system is contextualized to Meesho, applying its filters of scale and user impact at every level. It’s not a copy-paste from Google.