Reddit Goldmine Framework | Everything You Need to Build a ₹100 Crore Company

There's a new show that we are starting, Undercover Billionaires.

Okay. If I tell you in 3 months, you have to build a 100 crore business, and you only have 10,000 rupees to begin with, what would you do?

Every Diwala knows, key, you make me 20,000. There is no other framework. I'm telling you, boss.

The kind of scale that you've achieved in a country like India, doing a business as unglamorous as shipping and and warehousing, etc.

We used to be called Cart Rocket back then. We identified a gap that Indian merchants don't have a way to go online.

When did you realize just being a Shopify-like platform is not enough?

See, Shopify worked in the US because they solved the problem of, "I can't hire a developer." So that limits your TAM. Correct? What Shopify solved was, they made it super simple. It was like a consumer-like interface on a B2B SaaS product. I like, "Oh, now 10 times more people can actually do this." Right? So we took that insight and we took it back to India without realizing that in India, people can pay a developer. So they don't actually care about the fact that it became super simple. Only we cared about it.

If you were building Shiprocket 2.0 today for all of these students who want to build for India, build for Bharat, where can they play a role?

Fewer online brands, we are seeing micro-niches coming up. Cash on delivery was invented by Flipkart, right? Rightly so. They ushered in e-commerce into India with cash on delivery, but it's actually a product that was built for instilling trust. It is not a supply chain product at all. Right? So, the D2C brand is now effectively trying to compete with the infrastructure that of Amazon. This is not the way India should get built.

[applause]

It's, uh, it's mostly for Sah, not for me. Um, but Sah, thank you so much for your time today. I'm very, very excited for this conversation. Um, just before this, I was just asking the students, uh, you know, what context they have of Shiprocket, and they all said, all the, the messages that they get, the SMSs that they get with the Shiprocket on it. But, you know, honestly, um, you know, the kind of scale that you've achieved in a country like India, doing a business as unglamorous as, as shipping and and warehousing, etc. Uh, it's truly incredible. So today, I want to ask you lots of questions, but I want to focus more on the zero to one of Shiprocket. I think a lot of people have heard your scale-up story and 1500 crores in revenue and all of that, and that's great, but I want to focus on the zero to one because a lot of the students here are in that exact zero point.

Right? They're just getting started. So, can you take me back? What, 15 years ago now?

14. Yeah.

14 years ago, what was day zero like? What is the first memory you have of Shiprocket?

See, I think the first memory, it was not called Shiprocket. We've been through two pivots, right? Uh, both times almost died. Uh, resolved to never die, and we didn't after that.

We used to be called Cart Rocket back then.

Cart?

Because we identified a gap that Indian merchants don't have a way to go online. Shopify, 14, 15, 16 years ago, were super early. No integrations, just a web store builder. So we said, "India doesn't have one." You know, literally, I had a mama call me saying that, "I want to sell my shoes online." Like I said, "Well, why is there no Shopify kind of equivalent in India?" And that thought just stuck. Uh, and that's how we, that's how the idea kind of came. And I used to be a coder. I, I built websites when I was, uh, like 12 in school, super early, and monetized my first website in grade 11. So I was like one of those internet guys, early. So I, I stayed in touch with the whole online website universe. And then when Shopify happened in the US, I just thought, like, this was the moment to do it. Of course, we were very wrong, right? Because, uh, the Indian market was super different. Like, people didn't want to pay. And, uh, this was a time people said, "Why should I go online?" And the courier guys would laugh at us, like, "Nobody will do cash on delivery stuff like that, right?" So that was 2011, 12. Um, but zero to one was hard, man. I mean, I think it's not easy to commit. And, uh, that is what I think at least I got right, that I waited till I could commit, because it requires that, like, that's the only thing it really needs, to be honest, right? The rest, then you just figure out. Like, everything else is a lie.

You know, you, you made it sound so simple, but let me double-click. The biggest problem that a lot of students face is, how do you validate the idea?

Right? And, and you spoke a little bit about validating your idea. So, you were obviously inspired by Shopify in the beginning.

Uh, but you also said that you were so wrong. What was that?

Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I, so I'll go deeper into that. I think, uh, so by the way, before Cart Rocket, or, you know, today's Shiprocket came about, Gotham and I spent a couple of years just thinking through a bunch of other stuff, right? We first wanted to do e-waste recycling. To validate, we went to sort of, uh, you know, parts of Delhi that I didn't know existed, where people would burn CD-ROMs with hand to take out the precious metals in them, which now, by the way, after the government passed a regulation a few years ago, has become a booming industry, right? So 16, 18 years ago, go, uh, we were trying to validate on the ground first of all. And two, I think one thing is very clear that I learned later, I wish I had known earlier. Look for the complaints. You know, you've got to look for what customers are complaining about, not what you like, right? I mean, at least not entirely what you want to do, because it's not really the best way to launch a product. Uh, you can do it in a domain that you like, and personally, in fact, I would encourage that you do it in a domain that you are passionate about. I'll give an example, like if I wanted to launch a D2C like startup today, uh, for myself, right? I would do it in music, for example, because I'm a guitarist and I know from living abroad that there just isn't enough accessories. You cannot buy enough straps or picks, and, you know, capos, and this is not enough stuff in India. You have like 10, right? Just because there isn't, like, it's not something solving it.

Even guitars, and every guitarist I speak to says the same thing.

So I know it's a problem, and I know people are complaining. I know it's, it's a, it's a wide gap, right? Um, so I think, I think validation is extremely important, uh, before you go off on, you know, your journey to build something, because, you know, what's happened is over the years, and especially now, right, the cost of building has become nothing, because the barrier has become, the, the floor has become lower. You know, anybody can start now. It's the easiest time to start, which actually creates a lot of noise on the top of the funnel, right?

You're seeing almost an intersection set of what you're passionate about and where the complaints lie.

Yes. Yes. And that, that's how you find. If you look at every D2C brand that's doing well in India or anywhere, it's always been about that personal problem or something that the founders were passionate about, at least the ones that lasted, right? Simply flipping products with ad arbitrage is okay. I mean, it's good to kind of test out the market, but it won't sustain because ultimately, you know, it's like, you need consumers who are willing, who are willing to pay high margins for the value you've added, in emotional connects or in actual physical value, right? Uh, and are willing to repeat with you. It's very simple. As long as you've got those two things going, like, it'll work. And for that, you need to be able to innovate on the product.

So, how did you do your early validation?

For, for, for Cart Rocket or Shiprocket? We didn't. And that's why I'm, I'm sharing that, like, it's, and, and maybe like, we did, it took us a long time. We did it by just doing it. Like, we went and started selling from day one. So that's.

What was the first version?

Um, it was actually nothing. It was, uh, Magento, which was open source, and we just called it Cart Rocket, and we told customers we had it, and we just, uh, sold.

So, for people who don't know what Magento is.

But it's an open-source e-commerce website builder. So you kind of upload your products, you put your catalog, you attach your payment gateway, and you set up your website, kind of like Shopify, but you host, you could host it. So we didn't have any product on day one. So we built a website, and we put Magento, which Indian customers had, like, had no idea what what it was, and we basically went to big enterprise customers who we could, like, I, I would go with Gotham, and Gotham would sell, and I would just pretend like we had a team, and then I would just do the work, right? Uh, and we got the revenues like that, doing like agency work, right? And that told us that, hey, this guy wants this, he's asking about these features, they all care about marketing, but they have no traffic. But who cares? They're willing to pay for it. So we got that understanding, and that's when we hired our first engineer, who we funded from doing this, like, like weird agency work for a year, and then that got us to two engineers, and so on, 'cause we didn't know we could raise capital. Like, we didn't.

Who was, who was your first customer, you remember?

Uh, it was, so two, three customers in the same patch, right? One was my mama, right, which was Global Light Sport. They were starting a D2C brand, and whatever. So, they, they were like, they were also super early, right? They now run Firebolt, by the way, the, the, the watch brand, or whatever, right? So, it became pretty big later. But, um, the second one was a very unique one called Thaiart. Uh, you know, who again, they were doing this sort of ties for men, right? Like a niche. And then we had Damilano, right? Because super progressive, like he wanted, like tablets in his stores, like super, super progressive. Like, "I want everything." So, like, classic, you know, like, for me, like a dream, like, "Oh great, I got a customer who's willing to pay for, like, my research." Uh, and that's how, that's how we went, like, one by one. And, you know, over time, we started understanding the use cases. And, um, as we kind of scaled to the thousand merchant mark, we realized that we had built a bunch of beautiful websites, and great UX, and amazing conversion, and zero traffic. Right.

So, how do you bring traffic? We tried to integrate to Jungli at that time. You guys won't know this, but Jungli used to be the earliest version of Amazon in India. And Jungli was an aggregator, price comparison, right? And Amazon bought them and became Amazon India. They were a partner. We could throw traffic to these guys through there. We tried doing affiliate partnerships with the V Commissions of the world. So we were really trying to solve this kind of merchant-first problem until we realized that, you know, we were fighting the wrong battle by trying to convince customers to buy subscriptions or pay monthly. And, you know, that whole Shopify business model just collapsed.

Like, you're going too fast.

No, no.

Right? Didn't work.

Slow. [laughter]

Um, all of these things that you mentioned are questions in themselves, right? And we can double-click on all of them.

So, initially, you started essentially as a layer on top of Magento.

That's right.

Selling an open-source software as if it were your own.

I mean, for, for 6 months, 8 months, we did that. But we built our own in the meantime, and then migrated the first 8, 9 customers. Right.

But then, when did you realize that just being a Shopify-like platform is not enough, and you have to do more?

So, actually, it was not, it came in waves, right? There was no one, like, "Oh, one day we woke up and said, 'NRA.'" It was not like that, right? Uh, there were two, three problems. One, we realized that, see, Shopify worked in the US because they solved the problem of, "I can't hire a developer to use Magento," or open-source, whatever products, right? Um, and I, I, I don't know how to design, like, I don't know how to do this. So it's very difficult. So that limits your TAM, correct? What Shopify solved was, they made it super simple. It was like a consumer-like interface on a B2B SaaS product. I like, "Oh, now 10 times more people can actually do this." Right? So we took that insight and we took it back to India without realizing that in India, people can pay a developer. So they don't actually care about the fact that it became super simple. Only we cared about it.

Because, because you had the US.

Well, we were building the websites for them because they didn't want to do it. So the DIY helped us have high gross margins. Right? So it was a service, like a software, not the other way around, which continues to be the case. So that was the first learning. Second learning was, Shopify went on to connect the FedEx, DHLs of the world, the credit payments of the world, and, and that became another big TAM because now, you know, the next set of people could easily, they didn't have to go looking for anything, they could go tap, tap, tap, and they could go online. Then they built the POS system, so that the restaurant owner down the line, and that's how Shopify went, right? They kept making it simpler and simpler, layer by layer, to get more and more customers. But when we tried to do the same thing in India, we realized that there was nothing to plug on.

Right? I couldn't wire on demand. I couldn't wire on logistics. There was nothing there, right? And I couldn't wire on payments either. Payment gateways used to charge a lakh as a one-time setup fee.

In India?

In India. One lakh rupees to set up.

The build desk?

And that time.

Yeah. I mean, all of the guys, right? It was just the market. It was like the enterprise market, or whatever. They were super audits, or whatever. So I think, I think from there, like, to, to say, "Okay, well, we want to do this, but nothing's really working." So I think we, we somewhere started realizing that, you know, we're fighting this battle on too many fronts, right? We've got the early adopters, but the business stopped scaling. Like, we were losing as many customers as we were adding, right? Largely because customers were churning, not because of us. They, we're not getting any demand, right? So we said, "Okay, demand seems to be the biggest thing to solve." And that got us to kind of saying, "Okay, let's try to build this on mobile. Let's remove the SaaS. Let's try to make it more self-service." So that became Cart Rocket Studio, which ultimately became Craftly, right? Which was our two-year kind of pivot, where we said, "We'll get everybody online, right? And create this shop, kind of Etsy-style model, right? And really get the sellers to go and connect with the consumers." We built an ad layer on top of that, correct? Connecting Facebook.

But ultimately, you know, the merchants didn't want to pay for the demand either.

Right? That was the learning.

That is that is surprising.

Well, they wanted to pay when they got it. Uh, they don't want to pay upfront. So, it became like, "We want to pay commissions." I said, "Well, if you're going to pay commissions, and I can't run ads for you, right? Then, then it's just a marketplace." Uh, and that's not what we really wanted to build. Like, we wanted to build the components of commerce, which is what we have constantly kind of stuck to, because we believe that that is the future in the next 10 years, right? Um, so, so I think that, but what happened was, when we did that, and we took control of the demand, our thought process, our team, etc., our mindset completely changed, because, you know, now every RTO would pay us. It was not like we were a service provider to the brand, and we were getting beaten on the head because of doing a bad job. Now it was my P&L, right? Every time I don't deliver, I don't get paid. Correct. So RTO became a huge, like, problem for us. "Oh, this doesn't work. You know, everything's coming back. What's happening, right?" So, pin code intelligence, the address, and all of that stuff started with Craftly, because we had to optimize the funnel, as well as the logistics side, right? So we tried working with tons of logistics partners, newer ones, we working with super early ones. Picker used to be one of them, right? They used to do pickups for us, right?

Um, and then we, then we started realizing that this is broken too, right? And this is why no one's able to do commerce in India, because now this works. So we had to build and fix a lot of the plumbing there for ourselves with Craftly, till the point we realized that, you know, I think the plumbing itself has value, because customers are asking for it, right? And that's obviously what got us to the next, next, and the next.

Uh, yeah, and now we'll see.

No, but, you know, I, I feel like Shiprocket and a bunch of companies from that your era, they've actually built India's entire e-commerce stack.

Yeah. Right? India exists, the e-commerce in India exists because of, because of all the work that you guys have. And my question is, has all the work been done? And do you think e-commerce in India, at least as a rails, already exists now, as good as it did, probably in the US, or does in the US?

Yeah. So, two, two parts to, to answer, like, two lenses to that question, right? One is, I don't think the work is near done at all, right? Uh, we are what, 8, 9% digital penetration into retail? US is 20%.

So, 8, 9%?

So, total, one trillion, one trillion is India retail broadly. Out of that, about 80, 90 billion is online.

Yeah, 70 to 100 billion.

Including quick commerce, etc., everything.

Yeah, round up, 80, 90 billion. I'm saying 8, 9% is e-commerce. China is is 40, 45%.

E-commerce.

Yeah. Why is that? And US is 24%, 25%. Right? Because one, we are soon going to hit our 4,000, 5,000, you know, famed per capita GDP mark, which is like when discretionary spending is supposed to like inflect, and digital consumption, digital commerce is supposed to inflect. So that's going to happen like in two, three, four years, right? Four, five years, depending on what you follow, right? So that is one big one to kind of watch out. And then secondly, so when, when the income.

So right now we're at 3,000.

Right? So we're at $3,000 per capita. As you get to 5,000, what starts to happen as a country?

So, basically, a bunch of trends, at least from China, and again, I, I'm not the expert on this, but from reading and whatever we are also observing somewhat. I think we are, so here's a simple way to think about it, right? When there's more money per capita, a few things change. One, your priorities change in terms of what you're going to spend on. Two, if you today buy a 2,000 shirt, you're not going to buy four of them, right? If you have four times the money, you're going to buy a 4,000 shirt. And then you kind of, so premiumization happens. And three, the discretionary spend starts to, in, in a, I think in a country like India, it will happen in categories that don't exist anywhere, because our reg, so India is actually not one India, right? We have CAT A, CAT B, CAT C, CAT D consumers. Then you've got tier 1, tier 2, tier three clusters. Then you've got regionals, you've got languages. So there are so many micro-Indias.

Let's break this down a little bit more.

Sure.

So, how many Indias are there?

Yeah, I think there are 10,000 Indias, if you ask, right? And that is the reality of what I believe, uh, firmly. It's not something that serves my, yes, it serves my, uh, democratization, uh, kind of mission. But, but I believe that because I think that, like, if you think of the next 10 years, right? And we go deeper into this, what happens when e-commerce wants to kind of grow from this 9% to whatever, let's say it becomes a trillion dollars, 25% share of our total retail of 4 trillion in 15 years? Now, for this trillion dollars to happen, where is it? Where is the 900 billion going to come from? Like, the marketplaces offer you one way of doing this, but really, if you think about it, India is 10,000 micro-markets. You cannot make them into one chain, and then, like, I don't think you can consolidate them because they are all heterogeneous. They are not, you know, there's all kind.

Unlike the US or China?

Unlike the US or China.

Which is very homogeneous.

But China also, I think, to some extent, their supply chain got built because of world consumption, right? And that supply chain gave them such an advantage that, you know, you, it's very dense, right? With very, very good supply chain that they didn't have to pay for, to some extent, right? India has, India has its own thing, right? India's India first. We've got our WhatsApp kind of channel as a huge way to, uh, communicate, engage, and so on. We've got sort of vernacular things happening. We've got voice as a huge one that's coming with AI, right? And we've got small businesses who are literally a third of our GDP, largest employer in India, right? And half of our exports. So the small business is the backbone of the economy. And we believe that giving the tools to them to participate, right? Like the big guys, is the way that the next thing happens, right? And if you look at Tao in China, or or WeChat and Kuda in China, to some extent, they've done that, right? Where they've kind of built a platform and said, "Look, this is a demand, social platform, or a demand platform, but you are buying the escrow, and the payments, and the shipping, and the ads, right? You buy it from us, and then you run your business the way you want it."

Because ingenuity, the ingenuity in the story and the authenticity in what you're building is is with the builder, with the business owner.

Right? I, I don't think that's going to go away.

So, if you were building Shiprocket 2.0 today, which I'm sure you are, in some way or the other, um, but let's say for all of these students who want to build for India, build for Bharat, from that 90 billion to that 1 trillion journey, where can they play a role? What are some of the ideas that they can work on today?

So, I think, look, like, we already had some conversation on the future, right? The future looks like people with buying premium goods. I think premiumization is a trend. In our platform, we're seeing already like AOVs of 4,000, 5,000, very, very common. Right? Pure online brands, we are seeing micro-niches coming up. Regional snacks, right? Artal, uh, uh, uh, home things, right? So, like tech bags, which is your, you know, when you're traveling, you want to put your chargers and all that tech. I don't know what it's called, like tech accessories for travel. So, there are so many niches that you can pick up as a, as a, you know, everyday user that you're personally experiencing, or you kind of scrape Reddit using Claude, and you see that people are complaining. There's a subreddit there. Uh, you look at the comments on LinkedIn, or, and by the way, you can use tools now, right? I literally have a couple of prompts I use, uh, that kind of go and scrape out everything from the internet, and they'll give you a very structured analysis on what the gap is, exactly what the customer is saying. So you can really start to think, is this a problem, you know, worth going after? And, and, and I think all of those micro-niches that exist as problems will get solved, right? So, like, I think that there is the, like, I think regional snacks with the authenticity of that region to come out is a huge market, if you ask me, because I just feel that with the right branding, right packaging, right, when you, when you take a, like, a Chaki from, I don't know, I'm just saying it's not there yet. Like, why is it not there? I'll tell you one small story. My brother, in fact, my grandfather used to run this mithai dukan in Jalandhar. We're just talking about mithai. Uh, I think you also have a mithai business.

From one store, one store, maybe 20,000 square foot store. Uh, Mithai Dugan. Guess how much revenue he does from one store? And this is in Jalandhar, which is maybe tier 2.5.

Sure. Sure. Sure.

We do have an airport now. So maybe tier 2 business.

Almost 100 crores.

Crazy.

Selling 120 SKUs of different kinds of majorly Punjabi and Bengali mithai.

That's still true today. That's.

It is today. I'm telling you. FYI, 26 number got. [laughter]

From one store. And, you know, there's always a line outside. And it's because that authenticity, authenticity. And what percentage of that 100 cr is Motur Laddu?

50%. Well, not that much, but like, one-third. One-third.

One-third.

But that's what I'm saying. Now, there's a brand, right? Like, in, in Chani Chowk, there is this, I forget the name, Kari, right?

Correct.

Now, they've got a following, right? People who kind of want to buy there, buy that. You can buy it on Blinkit or on Amazon. But I'm saying, ultimately, when the tools for fulfillment and trust for online transactions become akin or better to everything else, I see no reason why a brand will not want to have a direct relationship. Because see, the realization is simple, right? The closer you are to your customer, the better it is.

It's very simple, correct? And DTC or other forms of kind of reaching your customers more directly are possible now. And that's the real transformation happening on the brand mindset side, right? While of course, platforms like us do our jobs, right? And one of the problems that my brother is facing is that he'd love to ship his products across the country, but that cold chain and, and the specific shipping that his products require, it just doesn't exist.

Correct. And, and like, I think, so cold, for example, right, is a, is a great one to, to digitize over a period of time, right? If you think about logistics, uh, not maybe not like the biggest priority for us, but I'm saying for, like, for example, jewelry, for relax, right? We, we recently integrated with somebody who does it. So over time, as demand from different pockets starts to emerge, right? From tier 2, from businessmen, from traders, from manufacturers, who are going to want to use the tools of the future to be able to reach the consumers of the future, they will want to be able to do it in this way, right? Is, is our belief. So I think everybody sitting in this room, my, like, simple, like, two, three-pointer suggestion is to go look for, like, you can literally use data. There is no need to guess today.

Search.

And search, man. You can, you can go into, like, I hope everyone here is using at least some LLM as a co-pilot, if not for life, if not more. Uh, if not as, like, you know, I use Open Claw, I use agents, I use a bunch of. I don't know about you guys, but hopefully at least as a co-pilot, right? And if you are within that, you can be like, you can really get, uh, a lot of insight on, on, you know, like, trust me, it's an unfair advantage almost, because you're literally able to go into social media scraping, into Reddit, into Google search, and, and get a clear answer on, say, "Okay, this category, this Shiprocket, by the way, has something called Shiprocket Trends. You can use that too. That gives you data on our billions of data points on what's actually shipping where, what are the trends, you know, pet categories, which cities, what is the RTO rate, what are the return rates, like, you can really do a good job of first planning, right? Then test your product by going into looking at complaints, because if you don't have complaints, like India or any market, I think you can't sell vitamins, right? It's just impossible. You have to sell a painkiller, which is a pull, "I want this," "I see the ad," "This is my problem." And the more niche you go, the better it is, I find for people who are just starting.

Does everybody know the concept of vitamins and painkillers?

Explain quickly.

So, basically, it's simple, right? Like, if you have a toothache, right? And, uh, I'm the only chemist open, right? Depending on the intensity of your toothache, I can charge you whatever I want, because you, because it's like, it's messing with your head. You can't think straight, right? It's a pain, and you will pay anything for it, right? If there's more two chemists, then okay, some game theory, whatever, right? Whatever is the right price. Five chemists, but I will pay immediately to the nearest one because I have a pain. Vitamins on the other hand, you have to sell me, right? You got to tell me, "It's good for you," "It will do this to you," "It'll make your hair better," whatever it is, right? And that's a push product. So whenever you're trying to think of a new product, the deeper the pain, the the better it is. Even if it's only 10 customers, it's okay. At least you will understand that, you know, what customers are willing to pay for. Because finding that problem, just because you have it, is not good enough. You need to find at least a small community of people who are facing the same problem, and the depth of the problem, right? Cuz, you know, you talk to your friends, "G, if I do this, would you take it?" "I'll take it." But that's not the research, right? The research is that what are they complaining about? That's why I keep telling people, "What are customers complaining about?" Right? Pick the big FMCG brands, look at their pages. There are tons of complaints. We love to complain as Indians on, on social media. That's all we do, right? In the complaints, there's rich data sitting out there to scrape from Twitter, Instagram. Just go and, like, you know.

Build a tool around this, actually. Just to share. And I was just thinking, it's a good idea for your drop shipping class too, right?

Absolutely.

Just to build a tool. There's this company called Moxy.

Yeah, yeah. Right, right across the street from here.

And, uh, they are making shampoo for curly hair. Like, and when I met her for the first time, the couple, actually, and like, "Market, like, you know, is this really that deep?" etc., etc. I was not sure. But today, it's one of the fastest-growing D2C brands, reached 100 crores in less than a year.

Yeah.

In less than a year of launch, right? It's just very specific micro-niche, as you pointed out.

And I'm saying, you're calling that micro. I would tell you that you split that into 100 more. Like, for example, there's hair types are different in India for eastern men versus southern men, right? And like, there's so much you can do. We can just go regional and say, "You know, this is for you."

Yeah. There are 20 kinds of curly hair.

Yes.

Men, women.

And then there's Indian climates, right? Some places humid, some places. Some, I think the whole, like, like beauty BPC is the biggest category, right? In, in D2C already, and it's became, it grew in front of my eyes, right? In, like, 6, 7, 8 years. But within that, I still don't see the, like, there is a next level cut of the regional, right? Then for certain Indian specific skin types, then you can do age. Like, there's so much you can go into. All you have to keep in mind is, right now, it all seems small because of the 3,000 mark, right? The 3,000 becomes 15,000, 13,000, one day. Like, we cannot think of that today. So we have to be patient, right? We got to find our little grid, sit in that, innovate there, be authentic, and then just spend the time. Like, it's not a lot. Three, four years, maybe, right? You'll start to see decent revenue. And they stuck there because you have to believe that, you know, see, you have to bet on India growing, right? You, you have to bet that India is going to like, just do amazingly well, right? And then when you think of that, and you think of a future like that, everything starts to seem not small, right? It starts to seem very big.

You know, but you would have solved so many problems as Shiprocket to make that future possible. Like, I remember, uh, I was, I was hearing that, you know, in India, you don't have definitive physical addresses, right? And I'm sure you would have solved that problem somehow. So, what are some of these structural, systemic problems in India that you have solved, or that are yet to be solved for that one trillion dream to be achieved?

See, e-commerce is largely made up of three pillars. There is the demand generation, traffic, discovery. How do, how do I tell customers about my brand? There is the, uh, trust and checkout layer, which is the payments. I think I'm calling it trust for a reason because.

Middle of the funnel.

Yeah. It's like that's kind of where you decide that you trust the product, you trust the brand, and you trust the delivery that it'll come to me, right? It's very important. Have you think about that? And then there is the post-order fulfillment experience, which is different from offline. A lot of people forget that, right? Because in offline, you're at the counter. It's done, right? You give the goods, you're done. Here, you paid the money, right? And now you're like in this half an hour to four-day kind of window where, you know, how do you make it seamless? If there's delays, how do you apologize? And, you know, a lot of people underestimate the post-order experience because, see, in e-commerce, that is the experience to your customer. That's how they're going to feel, right? And it's very important to get that. It's not some printing press style logistics where, like, you know, like in B2B, anybody who's from, like, family business, once you've sold it, this is a cost item. Logistics is a cost item to say, yeah, cheapest though. Correct? Because there is no experience involved.

This is not the case in e-commerce, right? Spend that extra 10 rupees for the right carrier to get a better experience, because you're building your business, right? And you want the customer to come back, hopefully, right? That's how you're building. So, so on those three pillars, I think if you start, like, breaking them up, like, let's talk about the first pillar. We talked about discovery, demand. Today, there are two large platforms who dominate pretty much the entire, uh, digital marketing.

So, out of the 90 billion, how much is Amazon and Flipkart?

Uh, so direct commerce today is about 15 billion. 15 to 20 billion. So about 20%, 15%. Right? The rest is the marketplaces. Right? And what I'm saying is, in the demand generation side, social media platforms are a are a great way to, uh, kind of reach your audience, because they allow you to target them in a certain way. But then again, the data or the insight or the commerce graph around who to target is not there, right? Amazon and marketplaces have it because they're a closed-loop ecosystem. They track everything from the visitor to the funnel to the last mile.

But in open-loop commerce, which is what we are playing in, how do you do it? Right? Some of the data will be locked in the payment gateway. Some of it will be with Shopify. Some of it is in Facebook and Google ad panel. Some of it is with Shiprocket, and some of it is with maybe something else, right? So how do you, how do you do the end-to-end? Right? That infrastructure is not there, right? So the, so the D2C brand is now effectively trying to compete with the infrastructure, the digital and, and the physical infrastructure of that of Amazon. And that is what, at least we are trying to bridge to say, you know, no, this is not, like, the way India should get built. You know, India should get built on their own legs, where there is infrastructure which is for everyone, right? And everyone should be able to use it for the way they want to use it, essentially. And it, I think that the way the Indian business sort of community runs, this is the right way to build, because I just don't think that you'll be able to, like, lift and shift them into. I don't think behavior change happens in India easily, simple, right? And I, and I just don't think that our motivations are. I'll give an example, right? We built a fulfillment center network, after building Shiprocket. Like, we got to kind of building quick deliveries. Like, I mean, two-day deliveries. Four, five years ago, now it seems like slow, but two-day delivery. And, you know, we said, "Every, every merchant will want to give their stuff to us because we can do it cheaper per unit, we have better tie-ups, we more aggregation, and we can do a better job with technology, right?" Most merchants said no. Why? Because they are sitting on the space they own.

Yeah.

They own the space, right? So, like, "Look, I pay zero for this, and it's my staff." Like, "How do you beat zero?" Are you getting my point?

That's my.

Exactly, right? There is a lot of, there's a lot of this stuff that I feel that the businesses know how to deal with best, rather than trying to change their business model. You're better off trying to get them into this fray of now AI or commerce and intelligence. I think intelligence for India, available at scale, so people can use it to do their things, is is not there. Right? The integrations that need to be there for this to seamlessly work are still three, four on 10, right? Which is kind of what we've been working on for a decade, and we will take one more decade, uh, to, to, to finish this off. That's how much work is pending.

We spoke about Shiprocket Trends as a potential product or, you know.

What are some of those trends?

Um, that you're seeing that you're excited about?

Yeah, lots of. I think first, tier two is exploding. Like, it's just, like, every year I'm seeing.

Tier two is defined.

Non-top eight cities.

Non-top eight cities.

So, non-top eight metro cities, what do you call them? Is tier two for us. And then within tier two, if you split further, tier three. Then tier three growing faster than tier two, growing faster than tier one.

So, tier three is growing faster than tier two?

Well, in, like, with the right denominator, right? Small denominator, but growth is faster. Correct. Cities that I've never heard of will show up in charts, key, "Oh, deliveries got stuck here." Like, "Okay, where is this?" And why is this significant? Why is it 1% of our total? And because it's, it's, it's people are ordering from there, right? India Post is our partner. That's unlocked sort of a next set of pin codes where again, we are seeing orders coming in. So really, that whole $3,000, $2,000 going to $3,000 is getting, yeah, is getting people to order for the first time, right? From a CAT perspective. And the AOVs in some of the smaller cities are like unimaginable. People think tier 2, to AOV will be. But there is CAT A, CAT B, CAT C consumer everywhere, right?

So, like, Shiprocket's platform AOV is around 1,500 rupees, correct? And tier 2 is 65%. So do the math, right? The point is that we get tons of orders from, from, like, from tier 2, which are very high AOV.

So that's again, a trend that, you know, I'm finding people not building for. Are okay. Regional high AOV is, is, like, you pick up any region you want, and there's like 100 ideas right after this video. Tier three India, let's say, I don't know, Patan Kot.

What would be the average order value there?

I.

Just, just let's just throw a number.

I, my guess would be it'll be either at my platform average or, or slightly more, is my guess. Cuz it's Punjab is. And anybody can open right now. You guys can open Shiprocket Trends, like literally trends or Shiprocket login and ask the question and see if you get the answer. I could be wrong, but I don't think it'll be like 500. Like, I don't think it'll be 700 for sure. It'll be like thousand plus for sure, right? That's my.

Yes.

So, so I'm saying that there's a lot of opportunity there, right? Each of those things, they're selling. Who's really targeting only them? No one. So, you pick up a Tan Kot, you see what's happening there, you see the other sort of affiliated categories, go to Reddit, go to Twitter, go to Instagram, and pick something there, and then go and do validation, right? Go and check, are, do our customers truly, like, in pain?

Right? So the moment you kind of put that kind of lens, every category will seem quite big to you, because you can build, build then a community around, you can build a ton of things around it. And this has been the evolution, by the way, of D2C in the last 10 years, as I've seen it. It's just happening at big blocks, now it's going to happen at small blocks, then micro blocks, and it's going to keep, like, keep innovating.

You know, so let's talk about the first pillar, right? Which is the acquisition of the customer, the discovery. Now, Google and Facebook are smart companies, right? To say the least.

Sure.

And they know how much they can charge you for that click.

And they will push you to that limit.

Right.

To the extent that your margin is going to eventually get eaten up by them.

So, how do you fight Google, Facebook? How do you avoid the tax?

How do you avoid the Google, Facebook tax?

Yeah. So, uh, I.

Anybody understood that question?

Yeah.

So, typically, algorithms are designed to kind of give you an ROAS which doesn't kill you, but doesn't make you rich, right? Uh, and it's their business model, like, this is the way it works, right? Um, I think first of all, like, I don't think relying on paid media is the right way. And I know this is not a popular belief because people want to do performance marketing, and, and I know you have to do it. But I think for the right product, first of all, you will have a lot of organic pull. You have to think of marketing as burst, right? You get the customer, then let the customer buy, then you get more customers, let them buy. Now, I know this is like, just textbook and very ideal in reality, but at least north star, that is what you need to be going for. That will keep you a little bit sane on, uh, not constantly bleeding through your contribution margin, right? Secondly, I think, as I was saying earlier, the intelligence graph around retail shopping is something that, you know, is missing in India. We obviously built some of this, right? We, we've started to build through our one-click checkout system, right? Where we process now a third of our volume, right? Over 10,000 websites, and billions of cookies, actually, right? We are starting to observe in our closed first-party network, trends which, which can help inform D2C brands of running better ads. Super early, so I'm not able to, uh, there's not a product yet, right? But I'm telling you a sign of, you know, things to come, where, like, we've got signals. There's a bunch of companies who have signals, and these signals alone can can.

help you kind of you know really make the right decisions on. I'll give us a very simple example, right? So when you run your brands, the moment you start getting orders, the thing that people really should be tracking is your ROAS, your return on ad spend on delivered orders.

Because with cash on delivery, right, I don't know if you guys know this, but when you start this, it's like it is a big pain, right? And you will be writing comments to me at that time about these NDR orders, right? And we can talk about cash. We should talk about cash on delivery and RTO is a huge part of like what we try to solve. And uh, but but but coming back, right? I think so the point is the net delivered order signal is not there with Google or with Meta. We have it, right?

So, it's not talking to. No. So when you run your brand, how do you close that marketing loop? How are you telling Facebook that look, this actually is a bad customer. Please don't show this ad to them again? Well, just because he bought for the first time doesn't mean. Customer. And maybe they didn't buy at all, right? Maybe they're actually a serial returner because we see that data too on the platform. We have like a. Are there people who are? 100%. We have there's buyer fraud at at super like high levels, right?

What percentage of fraud exists in India? See, fraud comes in different sizes, right? So, for example, they can be there's no buyer skin in the game, right? When you, let's talk about COD, like when you do when you do cash on delivery, there is no skin. You're like, okay, I want this order. That's it. Press a button. And then you want somebody to magically show up. If it's a day late, you can say, I don't want it.

Right now, during this journey, there can be several things that can go wrong. For example, you mentioned address earlier. India addresses can come like behind big tree, right? Yeah. And and and you know what makes it harder sometimes they deliver [laughter] in my in my database. So I'm like, you know, why it's happening? That's just a landmark. The guy goes there. He calls him there. I'm standing here. Come fast. Right. And then they kind of do the last mile themselves. Right. There's no center. That's because he doesn't have an address or it's not formal. Correct.

So, so it's a difficult problem, right? To to map this. But the point is, you can do a lot. Like we have over a billion addresses, right? Where we can tell that, you know, if you missed out like a tower number or something before it's going to get returned to you, we can tell you right at the point of checkout saying, no, no, no, this is this is your address. Please fill it correctly. We profile consumers on on return behavior, right? So there would be consumers. If they have a 8 on 10 return rate, something's wrong, right? That person is not really genuine. They're not genuine. We track IP addresses, you know, we track like if you have why are you ordering to a unique address every time, right? If it's the same guy ordering the same. So we we do a bunch of these checks on checkout. So they we block bad buyers, right? In some ways. Uh, but it's a huge problem because buyer intent is something which is like you can't change it. We see people ordering the same thing on three different websites in the same day and we know that they're just playing fastest linger first to wait for who delivers first, right? So that's how brands get kind of screwed later because they just like, you know, they don't know what's happening.

Is it still 30% RTO? Like? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is basically on the COD base, it'll be 20, 20, 20 to 30, 20 to 30%. Overall, of course, cash on delivery is now about half, right? So blended, you're making 15. Even with UPI, it's not fully gone. Because metros, UPI is higher. And then see the problem with cash on delivery is cash on delivery was invented by Flipkart, rightly so. They ushered in e-commerce into India with cash on delivery. But it's actually a product that was built for instilling trust. It is not a supply chain product at all, right? It's a product for doing trust to say, look, I understand you don't trust to pay me online. Somebody will show up, right? And then you you're used to the counter experience of giving money and getting the product. So, you'll get it, right? Now, what's inside the product, you still that's still a risk, but at least you know it's coming, right? And I got to pay when it comes. Now, the innovation here is like ultimately this is a trust problem. It's not a fulfillment problem. That's why I said e-commerce, you have discovery, trust and fulfillment. All three need to get sorted for India to usher in sort of, you know, this open commerce. And I'm saying right now, we're working very deeply on trust and fulfillment. To give an example, we have something where we are saying, look, don't use cash on delivery. Use something we've built called Pay After Delivery, Pay. Right? Pay at delivery is a UPI mandate that you give at the point of checkout. So there's no cash, but there is no UPI either, right? And then that's a prepaid order into the supply chain. You know what the RTO on prepaid orders is?

Much lower. Guess anybody? 1, 2%. Yeah. Like 1% less than 1%, right? So clearly there is an intent and like everyone's intent downstream because it's a fuzzy logic, right? Everyone from the hub manager, delivery boy, consumer, it's all fuzzy. Oh, he said this, he said that. While we try to kind of tame that with our workflows and WhatsApp and AI and whatnot, the point is, if you go to the root cause, it's a trust problem, right? So if somebody could give you trust at the point of checkout saying, hey, I'm taking accountability, I'm only taking a mandate if it delivers, debit you, doesn't deliver, I won't debit you. Something as simple as that can solve this problem, right? So I think we are heavily focused on going upstream into solving that problem, right? Because until trust is solved for open loop kind of commerce, it's not going to take off in a big way, right? That's why we got into sort of, you know, partnering with fulfillment center companies to have sort of, you know, be able to look at the goods or be able to look certify the goods at some point saying, look, it's fulfilled by us, you know, it's it's coming soon or it's coming now. We have dark stores where we're doing partnerships to kind of have. So I think trust is extremely important, right? And the marketplaces win there because they become a walled garden and they own it. They own the trust and but they own the consumer too, right? So as a business, you're just renting demand. You're not getting customers. You won't get that data. You won't get anything, right? So to build your own business, you need same level of trust and fulfillment but still be able to do it on your business model essentially.

Understood. Now I want to shift gears a little bit. Okay. Uh, there's a new show that we are starting. Um, it's part of the student experience. Uh, it's inspired from a show in the US called uh uh Undercover Billionaires. Okay. Okay. So what what they do is that they take a billionaire and they put him in a city where nobody knows him for 3 months. Okay. And he's only allowed to bring in $100. Nice. They get $100 and a car. Okay. And in 3 months, the goal is to build a million dollar valuation business as a billionaire. That's it. And you have nothing. Only $100. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to put you in that situation for a second. I'm not actually taking 3 months away from your life. But over the next 5, 10 minutes, if you are in that situation and suddenly you're put in the middle of, I don't know, again, let's use Patan Kot. Sure. Right. And if I tell you in 3 months, you have to build Sahil a 100 cr business. Sure. Right. What would I do? What would you do? And you only have 10,000 rupees to begin with. But can I do anything I want? You can do anything you want. Yes. So see, I'm a I'm a techie at heart, right? So I I wouldn't go into uh building a product based business because that's not my. That's fine. First thing, right? Uh, I think the 10,000 would do. I have a house too or. No. You have a car. You can sleep in the car. Okay. But food. So we. Food. So first one month you have to figure out. There's no money basically, right? So the first one month I got to basically sell myself, right? Uh, in some way, which means that I need the money to just survive. Correct. Uh, so what can I do? Right? I can do a bunch of stuff, right? I can consult or I can go work for somebody, right? Uh, while building my idea or something to get that 100 cr. And I have 3 months. So I got to first figure out my sort of mass low pyramid. Everyone's an MBA here, right? The the the rotan situation. But beyond that, I think look, I am a firm believer of finding the problem first, right? So until I, you know, even if it takes me 3 months just to do that, I will want to go to the depth of that because if I solve it, even on the last breath, right? That customer will pay me the next day. Correct. And I think that to me, like if I was doing something with AI for example, what can scale? Let's say you want to do 100 crores in revenue. Let's say you think of a B2B solution. I mean, that's more natural to me. So you need 5,000 rupees from I don't know, 10 crores a month. So you need uh uh 20,000 customers, right? To pay you 5,000. Okay, maybe 10,000 paying you 10,000 is a better. It's more. So you basically are thinking. So guys, think about what he just thought, right? What he just said is that to get to 100 crores valuation, you need to get to 10 crores. 100 crore revenue. Oh, I was saying 10, 100 crore value. But okay, so 10 crore revenue, you have to do 1 cr a month. Yeah. So you have to do 1 cr a month. So thou so so thou then I would do 2,000 customers paying me 5,000. So if 5,000 rupees, 2,000 customers, that'll get you like a cr a month. To a cr a month. Okay. So that's the matrix that you're looking at. Now, 2,000 businesses, why will they make me 5,000? Right? Is the question. And we are all want to be like come from business, want to do business, and so on. Every dial knows key, you make me 20,000, you take 5,000. It's very simple. There is no other framework. I'm telling you, boss, right? I mean, and if you can't do that, then there's no value. Then you're doing vitamin sales, right? Medical, right? You tell the guy, I can grow your business. What do you have? Right? So, I think I think you got to think about that, right? With AI today, I can use my laptop and my Wi-Fi. Hopefully, I have that. Uh, you sold your car to get a laptop. Sorry, I didn't have a laptop. I don't care about the car, but I have a laptop, right? And uh, I think I would literally find the 5,000 businesses. 2,000 businesses. So I Okay, you have to. Yeah. I do two three things, right? So I look at. So okay, here's what I would do, right? I would first figure out without looking at the number of businesses, keep problem. Let's say digital marketing. This what's coming to my mind as we speak. Right? Everybody, I think needs a voice receptionist. Okay. Every dental, every store. Okay. With AI and AI voice, I can build something in 5 hours for any of these businesses. And by the time on my 10th business, it would have like the next thousand will most likely happen self-service, right? And then by that time, I'll have enough money to hire a team, right? So, and what is this? Now, let's break this down. Let's say I can either extract 1,000 rupees from 10,000 people, I can extract 5,000 from 2,000 people, or I can extract 10,000 from 1,000. I I've got those options, right? The answer will not depend on how many businesses there are. The answer will depend on what value can I deliver first. That is my OKAD to then go and ask for the money, right? So doing a virtual AI receptionist that screens your leads, you can add your catalog. So 24/7 it can answer questions, right? It can take it can screen your just dial in India leads for you. Maybe do an outbound saying, who the hell are you? Right? I might even cuz I hear there's lots of junk and stuff. So it can really become like a cool assistant for you. It is screening qualified leads. It is answering your customers 24/7. Brands will like that, right? A shop owner will like that. And it knows your catalog. It can do a little bit of pre-sales, right? Product and so on. Uh, I think is easily like if a store owner, right? Easily they'll pay me 5,000 bucks for this, right? Now, whether I do it per call, per lead, per that, I have to figure that out too. Largely, I would sell it only as outcomes, so that my barrier to sell is zero. That's my other learning with that. Look, you don't pay me anything big, right? Yes, do it. So no upfront cost. No. And then I'll get 2,000 customers like this, right? Because everybody will want it because the product will be hopefully good enough. Uh, and if I'm able to blend 2 to 4,000 a month, then I'll figure out how to get the next set of SMEs because to get the SMEs itself, you can now just use AI. Like I would just. But but you know, nobody knows who you are. How is he going to let you inside his office? He's not. I'm just going to digitally get them. That was our biggest learning with Shiprocket, right? So we are a total of 1500 people and we're 10 buildings away from here, right? That's all of that's that's it. We don't own you're asset light. I'm asset light too. I own nothing. Correct. I don't even see the packets. Uh, that go through that that that kind of go through the network. So, so I wouldn't need to meet them at all. Like I would simply, for example, right, you can today scrape local business listings, right? Using Claude, you can run an automated uh marketing loop, right? Entirely to say, okay, personalize the email, write a WhatsApp message, tailor it to, you know, their social media. What are they saying? You can kind of get that and start bombarding maybe like 100,000 or whatever 10,000 businesses uh overall. Let's say you went after one niche is what I would recommend. Dental clinic, whoever has high margins, right? Go after them because they they'll want the fancy stuff, not after the guy who has no margins, right? You could I'm just saying in your in your consideration set, find the one with the better margins, right? Because why make your life difficult to begin with and and then and then hyperpersonalize their problem statement to go, right? And you go and meet these two three doctors and pain, what can I solve for you? Right? Their words are very important because when you run your WhatsApp marketing, unless you're using their words, they will not respond. Same goes for consumer, by the way. When you do your Reddit research and all that, use the pain. See, when you sell, right? Here's a mistake people make. People go and sell that I have this, I have that. What you need to sell is what is it for you? Correct? It will solve this problem for you. Are you facing this problem? It'll solve it for you. That's it's a very simple hack. But and even in my company often we kind of end up forgetting this, right? Uh, and the problem framing has got to be in the customer's voice, right? And now there are tools to like accurately do it at a per product level. You can just like run scrapers or. What bunch of things, right? So, so I would do that, right? I would personalize it. I would send out bulk outreaches. I would give them a self-service loop to sign up, you know, pull your business name, set up your reception, whatever, set up your virtual assistant or whatever, right? Receptionist to take calls and and and yeah, I mean, I'm sure I would get like a,000, 2,000 customers to sign up in the first month and then the ones who are slightly bigger businesses, I would show up and say, and let me solve your 10 other problems with AI. So I would I would get to ac like in 90 days or or 120 days maybe uh without the car and phone. I think. But but this is I mean, yeah, this is what this is what I would do. Does it work? Um, yeah, no, that thanks for sharing that. Sure. Sorry. No, it makes a lot of sense. It make I was thinking in a completely different direction. I was thinking I'll start like a pizza joint. Uh, but this one sounds better [laughter] for sure. You know. So how do you think about uh, you know, the trust part, the second pillar, how, you know, India is a trust deficit society, right? Uh, how have you seen good brands build trust with the customer, especially when you can't see the customer and meet the customer? I think it's um, so trust comes in, like I said, there are two levels of trust. There is trust in the brand or whatever brand product and fulfillment, right? Because you need to know that it'll come to me. Think about this way, right? A lot of the large brands who sell on fashion marketplaces, like think of Nike, right? Or BAA, right? BAA is a customer. Now, BAA has a pretty decent D2C business. Right? When you buy BAA on a Myntra or Amazon or anywhere, right? You're not deriving the trust of BAA from that marketplace, right? You're not going there for that. You know BAA, you're not discovering BAA there for sure. Right? So why are you buying it there? Because you know it will come on this and this date and you know that something happens, I can return it. God knows if I do it on, you know, no offense to any E2C brand directly, God knows what happen, right? That is the essential problem, right? In the in the fulfillment side, in the brand side, how do I even know for the first time when I see it, should I order it? That is the sort of top of the mind conversion, right? Uh, and in that case, I think the brands who've done it well are founders who are obsessed with their customer, not product. You should not get obsessed with your product ever, right? You have to be obsessed with the customer. Or the deeper thing way to think about is get obsessed with the problem. Then you can. We all creator prneur, everything, whatever, right? You guys are very good at this. So like and then you you kind of you're brand, you're passionate about that problem. Then people say, are authentic story, I want to, you know, people, the new age Gen Z buyers also want to not buy mass produced like chapa like they want to attach themselves to a cause and a story. And and it's hyperpersonalized. Their lives are hyperpersonalized, man. So the product should also be right. So, so I I think that is the way. Uh, yeah, I mean, I would think about that way. Um, now, so you're basically saying founder driven authentic brands. Yeah, I think comes from. And they see examples like I think about Vun and Guzzle, like the biggest story in T2C. We've seen them scale from super early days to, you know, and they become a mega brand. And they were super passionate, right? About like firsthand experience for kids. That's how they started. Organic, you know, products for kids. That was the initial kind of use case because they themselves were were were facing it, right? Um, and then they expanded obviously into a bunch of other categories over time. But I think they were so obsessed with that problem that they you become the spokesperson for that problem. Now, however small that niche is, it doesn't matter. But you need to be able to feel strongly about it, right? And I think you need to you need to really love your customer. You cannot hate your customer and build a business. Now, I I know it sounds trivial, but sometimes I've seen people. I think, how do you not know about the customer? That means you you can't build it because somebody else built it. You have to build for the customer type you like and love. I love memes. I love spending time with them, right? I'm a business guy. They have like I love it, right? And that's why I'm able to think like them and I have empathy for them and I want to follow them and I want to learn everything about them. So it's automatic. So if you like your customer segment or your TG, automatically you're going to kind of become like experts in that TG. And then you will know the problem sharply. And then you can build the authentic brand and build the trust. So I think it, you know, I I wish I could tell you are you put the sticker and do these three things. Sure. And you look it up like, but the re reality of the the soul of that is this, like it has to be that craft of the founder. I am going to own this, right? Like I know I like this company Nuke a lot. They build electronic products which which I love because I think they're like they've just taken that premium feel to to like, you know, the wire and there's like little details I care about it, right? And maybe I'm just maybe I'm one of few, like maybe it's a it's a super early category or whatever, but I love it. And they'll never have to market to me again, right? You know, I was meeting the Shark Tank people. Yeah. And they were telling me that, you know, one of the reasons founders want to go on Shark Tank is of course for, you know, the the initial spike that you get in the traffic, but more than anything else, they sell more than a non Shark Tank. Yeah. Uh, brand because the customer has seen the founder. Yeah. Right. And because they can relate to the founder and they've seen the eyes and the authenticity and the honesty in the eyes or dishonesty, whatever that they make their judgments and the story, right? It's like simple. Think of the old days where we look at actors on TV and then like derive trust, right? It's the same thing like today because consumers are willing to look at you as the founder as the act as the as the actor in this case. As the chief sales person. Yeah, because you're so passionate about that one niche, you're constantly talking about it, right? You've got micro influencers talking about it. Now you've got the following of that community talking about it with you, right? So you are they look look at you, right? For for this little thing. Now, within this thing, you obviously can solve multiple problems for you can build a community, you can build products, you can build an ecosystem and wait it out. You know, that's that's what I'm trying to say. And then you'll build a lasting sort of brand with unit economics where something will scale. Otherwise, it's like just trying. I mean, we have seen this in Masters Union. Almost now 75% of our students or of applications come through our YouTube and Instagram channel. Oh, wow. 75%. It's probably more. I'm getting this probably a little bit less. Probably closer to 80%. Is through Instagram. So our Instagram, we have across all of our channels, maybe a million followers. And it's all English speaking channels. So that's obviously premium and niche. Yeah. And then on YouTube, probably across all of our channels, another million, million and a half followers. People like you have sign up forms there or how do you. No. So people discover content like they would discover content like this. They're like, okay, what is this? Why are there sitting behind? Is it a college? Is. By the way, the Masters Union name does not have the word college, school, university, institute, academy in it. Right? Right. At the beginning, I was told it's completely wrong. You should put in the name what you are actually. You're not a union in any way. Sure. We said, no, no, no, we will not because, you know, we'll see what we become over a period of time. Now, from next week, we will have the word university. We we're doing a launch. But till now, it's it's just this sense of trust that they have in the content. See, I think like think about what you've built at with Masters Union. You've built a platform where you were passionate about experiential learning. That's it. I mean, think about it. It's one statement saying, look, I don't think India has good experiential learning platforms and I'm going to go solve it. Right? And and that has your vision changed? No, like you're just doing multiple variants of it. You're trying and hacking multiple things together and it's working. So the point is, like you you got to commit to that one problem. And like that's how things happen. That's that's how products get born. That's how new niches and categories come into existence. And it'll come from your conviction. There's no other way. No data can make you do it. You know, I always thought for a long time um that Shiprocket is around shipping. Yeah. Because of the name. You know, it's only when I discovered it much later and when my students started to use it and they talk about it, then I understood that it's a full value chain, right? Uh, and SAS more than anything else. I actually thought that you compete with like a Shadowfax or you know, in my mind was just that. Well, now let's talk about the third pillar, which is the fulfillment. And we've spoken about a little bit, but, you know, how have you seen India's sort of fulfillment journey of the last 10 years and what are your hopes for the next 10 years? I mean, the the gur behind the big tree will stay. I don't think that's changing. But what are as a satellite imagery, what is happening next? Yes. So I think uh, you can break logistics into information flow and goods flow, right? Because both are both have to go hand in hand in at least in digital logistics or any logistics for that matter, right? The old school way was maybe a phone call or some way, right? Now it's obviously trackers and, you know, IoT, whatever. And again, that's also now been 5 years, 10 years. So, so I think there's there's two three things happening. One, the physical structure infrastructure in India is expanding, right? At a massive pace. We've all seen in the highways and we all know it's happening. That's going to add tremendous value because it's it's really going to make it easy. Um, so that is a key one. If you ask me, like over a long period of time, I think the fact that demand is growing for digital consumption, a lot more use cases, hyper local, this, that, bunch of ways of fulfilling orders are coming up. Supply chains are transforming by putting goods closer to the edge as much as possible. So the B2B side or the PT, I mean, the backend side of supply chain is also changing because the old models of, you know, hub and spoke, but well, how big of a hub and how far off a spoke are are being rethought, right? In many ways, whether it's the quick commerce of the world or even the rapid, you know, 4 hour, 8 hour kind of things are changing, right? So in this kind of scenario, um, I think that, you know, logistics is is going to be extremely important, right? Because there will be again, like 10 Indias at the same time. And there will be first to commerce, there will be people buying on Meesho who've never bought. Right? They got to figure that out. You've got India Post like really trying to become digitized. You know, we're working with them very closely to now say, okay, well, why we have one lakh 50,000 post offices? Right? We have a floating even today with the largest post office network in the world. Believe it? Largest post office? And they're all staffed. They're all working. And they don't churn the delivery postmen, right? So, so they really. So there's a lot of things you can do. So the point is that it's transforming in a way where the information flow, I think continues to work and then get choked, work and then get choked, right? So what is the job of Shiprocket? We're simply taking your data flows from your orders and everywhere else using a bunch of AI and decision making on, you know, which orders will likely return result in an RTO if you use courier A or where is the pickup pipeline itself choked? So don't use this guy cuz he won't show up, right? Things like that. And we also stitch together. We can use a hyper local guy to do a pickup because I know it's not working right now with courier A and then inject it to their hub. So that's but essentially we're only doing decision making and integrating people who do the work, right? By doing this, we have digitized logistics for brands where we're saying, look, you don't have to worry about this. For you, it's an API or an MCP call or a web platform or an app, whatever the whatever way you want to use it. Um, and we'll take care of digitizing these guys where, you know, today we have obviously our rider apps. We've got trucks, we've got FTL, we've got crossbar. We just moved a container last quarter, right? So because for us, it doesn't matter essentially an API. Right? We're simply but the thing is all of these logistics sort of infrastructure outfits, right? Um, the digitization and the communication at it's there's still a ton of work there, right? For example, if a brand tells us that, hey, don't do the pickup today, do it tomorrow. Okay, I can pass it through the API, but it's not going to happen, right? So because the last mile of the instruction itself doesn't happen. Right? And then again, see logistics with one one thing that you know, people I think often miss is that it is a 90% SLA business everywhere in the world. Right? We as Indians. Explain 90% SLA. See, if you run tech, you talk about 69s, right? Which means at 99.9999 uptime or service availability or whatever. Logistics is a 90% SLA business, which means I can I can only deliver 90%. Because there's natural calamities, there's like floods and. You're saying globally it's 90%. I'm not sure, but I'm saying in India it's not. I tell my customers that look, we're going to screw up in 10%. Like it's going to happen because like we can't control it. It's beyond our control, right? It's beyond our control and it's going to happen. So you need to be prepared for it. I mean, yes, like if you think about RTO, like the economics on that are it's super bad. Literally, I've seen businesses shut down because we couldn't fix it because, you know, it's the biggest problem in our drop shipping. It's huge, right? And and RTO is like, you two-way two-way freight. Your your stuff is out there for like 7, 8 days. There's uncertainty in your cash plan. It's it's really bad, right? Um, so I think so I think it it becomes important to anyway. Yeah. So. But like are we seeing like drone deliveries and and all that? Yeah. So I think I think from that perspective, we've done some of that. We we've done trials too, right? We have some warehouses operating. We're doing drone deliveries in Gorgo. Uh, it started. Yeah. Yeah. We did it a couple of years ago and I think it's right now for because there's a lot of regulation, right? It's for medical grade stuff. I just don't think the economics right now work for last mile delivery as such. Uh, but I think what is changing is uh, edge fulfillment is going to become big, which means that more and more people will start to put stuff near the end customer. Because think of like the telco towers, right? Where you have like one city covered and then you need to have the network. Right? Now, this is being done by the quick commerce marketplaces, but I'm saying like in the long run, whether it's a B2B, T2C fulfillment, it's just it's so much more efficient that I think it'll start to happen everywhere, right? Is is one of the things that I think will change in logistics and. And that'll be very specific to India. It's not elsewhere, right? I don't think so. We recently had people from, like a Brazilian, one of the largest marketplaces visit India. They were meeting Blinkit and us and a bunch of companies to learn that, you know, how the hell are we able to do quick commerce and make money? Like it's a very India like unique kind of kind of. I was in the US last week. There's nothing there. It's crazy, man. You order a sandwich for $10 and you pay $15 for delivery. Then the guy asks for tip [laughter]. And it comes late. My hunger is gone. Like it comes late too. So I think we are really spoiled. Uber Eats is not bad. Yeah, yeah, that sounds okay. But then the quality is hit or miss. So I think the the the thing is that, you know, we are very, very spoiled as consumers. Think about it, right? Which is that there are business models that can be win-win-win and create value. And and that is where India I think is is headed. You're going to see a lot of India first. I think India first is is definitely uh, for me, like I and look at look at all the brands that have done well. How many of them are like a, you know, at least a direct copy paste of anything global? None. I I can't see one. I say, oh, this is exactly this because you cannot. It may have started off as that. Like Zomato may have started off as Yelp. I started as Shopify. You started Shopify and then you became. That's okay. I'm saying look, it's great to take inspiration and kick something off, but but really, you know, Bharat is is where where the next, you know, thing is. It's obvious. It's everywhere. And what what I'm encouraging people to do is to is to, you know, there are so many tools which are there and you can just you can just go build for all this, right? It's there are so many playbooks that is it's very simp. You don't need anything now. You need Claude and like a laptop. Like that's all you need. You know, on that note, I want to open it up to questions from the audience, guys. I know you guys had a lot of questions, so please shoot. Uh, raise your hand. I will look at you. Yeah, go ahead and wait for the mic. So I like how sir was mentioning that brands that come short time have a more chance to you know get sales because like you say in Hindi, but uh, the surplus of knowledge that we have in the kind of world we living right now. I just want to ask that like if there's like a young person like me who is trying to open a new brand, something, what should be the three pointers that can not be missed which are generic across businesses? What would be those three pointers? See, I would, like I said, completely focus on the problem, right? Without defining that problem, I wouldn't even move to the next one because that's what you're solving. So having a sharper understanding of, you know, like literally being able to imagine the customer, what is the problem, right? The second is their willingness to pay, which means that you may think this is great and they may say it's a problem, but are they willing to pay for it, right? And then the third is, do you have unit economics in this in this thinking? Because, you know, you could have a big problem, customer might be willing to pay for it, but it doesn't make money, right? So it'll fail on the third test. So all three, you ask three, right? And any business to be honest, it's just a simple framework, right? You can apply this because if you don't, uh, uh, uh, if you don't get the problem right, on the other hand, I think the other two are useless. A lot of times people move on too quickly from one and then like it doesn't scale or doesn't sustain. Look, I'm saying that you have to be iterative for sure, right? There is no question about it. But the framework to try and test is this, right? Because see, if it's a problem, then you'll find people who are willing to pay. And then you have to be able to deliver the solution in a cost that makes you money. Simple, right? But the trial and error piece is super real. And don't get wedded to your, you know, that, oh, I have this brilliant idea, I'm going to spend one year and, you know, lacks of money on it and then you test it and you're like, it's a bad thing, right? So that's why I said, don't get wedded to your product. Get wedded to the problem. Then what happens is you can try multiple products, right? You might pivot into 10 things and thank you and still get success at some point. But if you keep kind of staying stuck to your product, then you waste all your money trying to market something that doesn't work essentially. And by that time, you give. I've seen it happen a lot, right? That's why I'm telling you that if you spend the time right, and I can tell you there are there are thousand niches right now, right? And there will be 10,000 in the next 5 years that you can go and build for. Go ahead, behind you. Hi, sir. Hey. Sir, uh, I have two questions. Sure. From what you have seen, like in long run for Bharat, who would you personally think would grow exponentially, tech startup business or a strong product manufacturing business? Both. Like if you had to choose. This is being recorded, so I can't say anything. But uh, I would, I think both have such a big promise, right? Because see, with tech, what happens is this whole next half a billion users are going to come online. Voice is becoming a big one to reach them. Unstructured data to becoming usable. All of these things are happening now. So, and the and the disposable income is also rising now. So next like 3, 6, 9 years, let's say in three milestones, you know, I think the access to the next audience is a bigger dream and goal, right? And that is why I would bend towards tech. But if you are manufacturing, here's what I think. I think India will become a bigger manufacturing hub and an exporter for two three reasons because I think for the same reason I I explained earlier, consumption will grow. I don't think we want to be a rising net import country. I don't think that is how the policy is. I don't think that is where as a nation we want to be either. I do think that, you know, there will be categories where India will start to build very, very large scale manufacturing capabilities and will be a net exporter because I think with the world econ, like the way things are moving, I just feel that that direction becomes has been for some time and it'll become more and more right in the coming. Like toys, for example, already we are seeing a lot of it is now getting domestically manufactured. We have a customer who basically pivoted the whole thing and and built a factory essentially. Right? So, so there's lots of these examples that are going on now. Why? Because see, the simple consumption is growing. Right? Either you can be on the side saying, I am going to help bridge the consumption to the product, or you can say, no, I'm going to make the product too. And hence, both are both are equally exciting depending on what your skill set is. For me, my skill set is technology. So obviously, I I am biased to that, right? But my technology works if other people make products. Right? So that is why I want everyone to also take away that please manufacture because if everybody sells, then there will be nothing left to sell. One is needed for the other to exist. I think the. I think manufacturing is important, right? Everyone wants to trade, but it's important to manufacture at some point. I think depends on what your skill set is. Yeah. It boils down to what you want to do. Both are exciting. I have one more question, like similar to so I have my own startup of import and export. So it's just started 2 years ago. Okay. So like which sector would you personally bet on to build a high growth export business, like coming years? See, it can be anything what the demand indicates, right? And what you can make or source. I know that's a very, very uh uh uh frameworkish answer because see, okay, I can tell you what I'm seeing. I'm seeing u gemstones and jewelry, handicrafts, some of these things pick up. But I'm also seeing things like peanut butter, which are not even native to India being sold because people are hacking keywords around non-GMO organic, blah, blah, blah. And they are able to make it and land it there in a price where it sells. So, so I'm saying that's just pure arbitrage, correct? Right? There will be opportunities like that. But really, you know, what is India known for from an export perspective, right? Is what consumers will look for. Now, whether it's yoga or health or, you know, I think the Ayurvedic side, I think we we don't have enough on the Ayurvedic side packaging that is suitable for for uh global buyers. And I just think that that's a huge category there. You go to amazon.com, right? Or iHerb, a lot of these, it's a huge market now. We should just do like India should be dominating that. India should be on all of those shelves because we make that stuff for 5,000 years, right? But we're not there. And there is. And we are selling the extracts by the. We are the ones who are selling the extracts. Some of you guys maybe right who are doing the manufacturing, but we are not capturing the the more meat of the value, right? So, so yes, uh, yeah, sorry, hopefully that that gives you some idea. I don't think there is a certain category I would say go and bet on because you have to do research there. But ultimately, where demand is heading globally and what can be done in India, you'll find the arbitrage. And now there is also tariffs, so you got you got to watch. You got to think about that too. Sure. Thank you. Most welcome. Go ahead. Uh, your company started 14 years back and you turned a volunteer now. So as an entrepreneur, it took you 14, 15 years and you were losing. So what kind of courage gave you that uh to hold on business to be patient for 15 years for a for business is about making money, right? So to be in laws for 15 years and continuing that, so that courage and second question was that in your website it was mentioned in 2020 your business turned down by 95%. Still you were running it and you posited that time. So how you managed that times when your revenue was down.

95%. He's a he's a CA by the way. Yeah. So he's good job.

So look, thank you for the question. I mean, to be honest, we were profitable the first year we started, then we raised money and invested in hiring a sales team. So we started losing money because the sales team would sell after 6 months or whatever. Um, and then obviously we went towards platform building. So again, started spending money on engineering. When we pivoted into Shiprocket in 2017, it took us only 2 and a half years. We became fat positive, right? So the company made money in 2020, right? We've given out investor exits worth hundreds of millions of dollars, right? One of the only companies who've given money back while being private. And after 2020, we were, we basically wanted to build the OS for India. So we painted a bigger bet. So we kept catching back to profitability. 15 years, say we kept losing money. Customer got company got opened with a customer check. Correct. Day one, that was the first check into the company. Made money, then invested. Money came to the next step cycle. Made money, then invested. Money and now in 2020, we said, look, we don't want to do just shipping because problems span from visitor to delivery, right? Let us build the checkout, let us build our ads, and let us build the whole stack, and we will again take an investment, right? And then we'll make money. So I think it is a matter of the scope, right? The courage comes honestly from just survival. When you have to make payroll, trust, trust me, you will get the courage to find a way to make the money because that, to me, honestly, and many founders will reflect that, is where you get that courage. You cannot let your team down, right? Hopefully.

And I think that is where you'll get get that right.

And we'll take one last question.

Go ahead.

So I have two questions. Sure. Uh, one, when mentioned earlier that I do have mine business, so they have shelf life problem. There problem with the, you know, environment that they're shipped in. Sometimes it happens that the customer receives the item and it's already, you know, spoiled. So how can we solve that problem as a seller and as a, uh, shipping chain that you have, how can we help customers get the correct item? One, and second, with all the quick commerce coming up, like Blinkit and Zepto and all of that, we see this course is PGB Bharat. How do we help our local Kirana in a way that because they have been the support of Indian household until this came up? So they are all dying, to be honest. Since you said we're all customers, we're spoiled now that, you know, we get everything in 10 minutes. How do we solve these kind of problems that are actually related?

That's a great question. Uh, great question. Um, I don't have the answer to the first one, to be honest. I don't know because it is the answer lies in packaging and in supply chain, right? What I mean by that is, it'll really boil down to which product, what shelf life. I have seen brands do a great job at packaging in certain ways or storage in certain ways. For example, if you said I'll do Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Chennai, suppose, right? Um, and suppose your, your mithai can the specific one we're talking about can last 48 without any problem, right? And still has another two days of then consumption time, man, right? Or let's say 24, let's say, let's say you want it to be there in 24 hours, right? Now, Delhi, if you try to send from North to Bangalore, correct? But 10% GM loss, sales loss, customer da, right? And D to whom, right? So the point is, ultimately, either you bake it in, but you know, the problem with bake it in, baking it in, is the economics may work, but the customer is pissed.

Right? The customer is very unhappy, and that makes brands very unhappy. Ultimate, it's not the money only, right? The guy wanted the damn thing, they didn't get it.

So, for example, they, I get so many of these escalations. Root, I personally have to go and say, please make it happen. Personal, let's fix it, right? So I think packaging and then supply chain key planning. We'll have to decide that until the cold ecosystem is not able to get democratized, right? For the food, this thing, how do you get it digitally consolidated? And you know, you have a PTL load, how do you make sure everything, all the links work, right? Um, and it'll come. I'm just saying it's a matter of time, right? My friend runs an ice cream brand, same problem, right? He's think, boss, how, why can't I use your stuff? Uh, I'm just like, there's just not enough of you guys yet where we go and solve the cold supply chain card digitization, fractionization, call it what you like, right? So, so I don't have an answer unfortunately, which can help you directly. Um, I'm happy to circle back though. I can ask my team members because we do work with a lot of the mithai brands, right? So I'll, I'll look back and if you want, like, can we get get back to you? But on the, uh, on the other side, I, so I'm very passionate about, uh, digitizing everybody, right? And if India has 6 crore, 7 crore businesses, then like 4 crore of them are Kiranas, right? They are genuinely the retailers of India. And they know how to manage credit. They know how to kind of talk to your household. They do demand planning. They do purchase ordering. They do stockkeeping. They do, uh, everything, right? All your business functions, and they can do it better than a lot of us in this room. So they are very sharp businessmen. See, I used to, I've interned at Walmart, and my strong belief is that like, you know, I used to think about this a lot. India big, and you know, because because Walmart may all those shopkeepers became employees of Walmart. How hard is that? Right? Um, and I then I didn't see it happen in India at, [clears throat] all because it's just, there's not the culture to drive like far from the city. It's not there. It's not happening, right? And instead, what's happened is we've got quick commerce, which is essentially it's a Kirana with much better logistics and demand, right? That's what it is. So if you can give trust and fulfillment to your favorite Kirana, they already have demand. They have customers. You just need to get the loop going, right? So I would do that. I would give them the toolkit to say, boss, you can do this now, correct? It's your customer, you will have to evolve now. You don't want to evolve, then that's on you, right? But if the toolkit exists and you are willing to evolve, I, I see no reason why that customer can't have their own, especially in tier two and three, right? Because I think they're the sort of social, I don't know, the network is is a little bit stronger than the bigger cities.

Sah, on that note, thank you so much for this time. We really, really appreciate the, you know, generally speaking, I tell at the beginning of every podcast when it's on YouTube that you should watch it on 1.5x.

Or 1.25x.

Right? But this one, please watch it at 0.75x. You have to go really slow because there's so much packed into this, and, uh, you know, and you'll have to keep Claude open on the side to decode all the jargon that he threw at you guys. Okay. So.

No, no, but this was, it was generally very awesome. Thank you, S.

And we need to do a version two of this because there's so many more questions that I have not asked.

Lovely. You know, lovely being here and lovely talking to you guys and