In the first episode of our playbook series, where we glean insights for entrepreneurial success from leaders in diverse domains, we have a freewheeling chat with Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of Meesho.

In this playbook, the Meesho founder goes into the challenges of innovation and intricacies of execution in this space, the strategic moves made from its earliest days, and ultimately winning the confidence of big  investors. The first part of the playbook provides answers to five key questions:

1. How did the founders zero in on a problem to solve that would have a large impact?

2. What triggered the startup’s quick pivot to a new product in its very first year?

3. How did Meesho empathize with a new category of consumers, many of whom were first-timers in online buying, and understand their needs?

4. What were the most vital product features at the outset to enable an emerging consumer behavior?

5. How did housewives become central characters in Meesho’s playbook and what’s the game-changing value they brought?

The backstory

In just six years since its founding in July 2015, the startup is halfway to becoming a decacorn, valued at nearly $5 billion in its $570 million funding round in September 2021. After a hiatus in 2020 following the outbreak of Covid, marquee investors bought into the massive scope of the Meesho marketplace connecting resellers in tier-2 and tier-3 towns of India and Indonesia with a long tail supply of unbranded products, providing the value for money and choice that large swathes of consumers want.

Social commerce became a buzz after Meesho validated the need for such a platform taking online retail to consumers and sellers not being reached or served adequately by ecommerce giants in a large and diversified market like India. Many in the hinterland rely on word-of-mouth to choose what to buy, trusting the recommendations of people they know more than brands and advertisements. This is where Messho’s resellers, most of whom are women, bridge the gap through their social media networks. At the same time, consumers who prefer to buy directly, without going through a reseller, can do so on the app, as Meesho responded to this demand. It shows that the attraction of Meesho is not just in the reselling proposition, but also the products being sourced from small and medium businesses that find it hard to gain visibility on ecommerce sites featuring big brands.

But social commerce is a hard nut to crack, and Meesho has hacked through a plethora of challenges in its pioneering effort to establish the viability of this category of ecommerce in Asian markets. Several me-too platforms have struggled to emulate this and some have bitten the dust.

Show Notes

[1:03] Why the earlier avatar of Meesho, Fashnear, meant to be the “best of both worlds”, online and offline, turned out to be “none of those worlds”

[4:00] Market validation trumping VC validation: Why talking to customers is more important than listening to investors, and learning that lesson the hard way after trials and errors

[6:03] Stumbling on WhatsApp commerce in action in the course of first-hand observation of users, showing that proprietary insights can only be found at ground level

[9:10] Meesho’s first attempt to supercharge an emerging consumer behavior that it caught in its infancy

[11:05] The serendipity of discovering a whole different target audience, housewives, and understanding their unique requirements

[14:20] Pivoting to serve the new target audience better, by developing a more efficient asset-light model for them than the women could do themselves

[16.40] The recipe for success is being closer to the customer than anyone else, and figuring out how to make that happen across the company