How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping App

Vidit Aatrey 0:00 [upbeat music] It's hard. It's hard to kill your existing business and start a new one. We did it, and I, I remember it was mid of 2021. So July, fif- 5th July 2021, we launched our app.

Ankit Gupta 0:15 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 0:15 We went number one in the shopping section of Android Play Store in India.

Ankit Gupta 0:21 Wow.

Vidit Aatrey 0:21 Today is 2026. Every day since then, we've been the number one shopping app on the Android Play Store-

Ankit Gupta 0:26 Holy crap. [laughs]

Vidit Aatrey 0:28 ... every single day. [upbeat music]

Ankit Gupta 0:33 We just heard Varun's story from Giga, and one thing I was thinking about is that his story feels like the s- 10-year-forwarded version of your story in various ways. And so I'm curious to hear all the different ways that that ends up being true or not true. So maybe to begin, why don't you tell us a little bit about what Meesho is? I'm sure a lot of people here have used it, but, um, tell us a little bit about what it looks like now, and then we'll talk through the arc of how it got there.

Vidit Aatrey 0:59 Sure. So first of all, like, good to be here. Like, whenever I think about YC, it takes me back, like, 10 years ago. We were part of the Summer '16 batch. Now it's summer of 2026. I would say it's a, it's a very core part of the origin story of the company, so it's something which is close to me. So good to kind of see a lot of people who are wanna-be entrepreneurs here, and I hope they learn something. So today, Meesho is an e-commerce platform where people can come and buy across lots of categories. Our value proposition is very clear. Uh, it is very, very focused on giving the best value for money to consumers across categories, and we basically built it for mass India from day one. We really started with a very simple mission of: how do we democratize internet commerce for a billion consumers, each and every business in India? And that's where we've been at. Last 12 months, we had about 250 million consumers buying from us, close to a million sellers-

Ankit Gupta 1:55 That's

Ankit Gupta 1:56 250 million-

Vidit Aatrey 1:56 ... sold at least one product

Ankit Gupta 1:57 ... unique people bought, 250 million-

Vidit Aatrey 1:58 Unique people who bought-

Ankit Gupta 1:59 Wow

Vidit Aatrey 1:59 ... um, a product. [audience applauding] And, and all of them bought about 10 times a year, so two and a half billion orders per year. I think all of these numbers are by far the highest for any platform. And this 250 million is still growing at 30%-plus year on year.

Ankit Gupta 2:16 Holy crap.

Vidit Aatrey 2:17 Right? Because you live in a population of a billion and a half people, and you still have only somewhere between 350 to 400 million people buying anything online per year. So this, there's so many people who are still not part of that ecosystem, and we're very, very focused on kind of making that

Vidit Aatrey 2:33 happen.

Ankit Gupta 2:33 So of the people that are buying anything online, something like half of them or-

Vidit Aatrey 2:38 More than half

Ankit Gupta 2:39 ... more than half, potentially, are buying on Meesho. Wow, that's incredible. I would love to hear a little bit about how you even got started with this. You know, you started this in 2016, you said. What was the first version of this idea? Or maybe even before you had an idea where you decided you wanted to do something, like, how did you even arrive at the thought that, "Let's do a startup"?

Vidit Aatrey 3:00 We started in 2015. Both Sanjeev and I come from small towns. I was born in Meerut. Most of my family comes from Western UP, mostly a farmer family. Sanjeev was born and brought up in Hazaribagh, in Jharkhand. And back in 2015, when we were trying to figure out... Like, first of all, we were very excited about this mobile internet wave. Both of us were two years out of college. We were like, "This is the time to build something." One thing we felt very passionate about, which was, back in 2015, if you were in Bangalore, you will see everyone around you buying stuff online.

Ankit Gupta 3:34 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 3:34 And then both of us will go back to our families in Meerut and Jharkhand, and you will find no one buying online, no one selling online. And both of us will always, like, talk about this all the time, like there's something, something off, right?

Ankit Gupta 3:47 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 3:48 Like, when you come to Bangalore, people feel that e-commerce has happened. I think Flipkart got sold to Walmart back then. Amazon was there. Like, lots of companies were there, and people like, "It's done."

Ankit Gupta 3:57 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 3:57 Like, "There's no new player who's gonna come. What is there to solve?" And both of us res- basically believe there's definitely something needed because none of our families are basically buying online.

Ankit Gupta 4:07 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 4:08 So I think that was the simple reason of why we started up. So we said we have to bring everyone in India online.

Ankit Gupta 4:15 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 4:15 And the beautiful thing is, 11 years forward, our business has evolved in many ways. Like, I would say we are, like, version five of what-

Ankit Gupta 4:23 Uh-

Vidit Aatrey 4:24 ... uh, we have been, but the core mission of the company is actually

Vidit Aatrey 4:28 still the same.

Ankit Gupta 4:28 So why don't we talk about what version one was then, right? Because I think it's actually quite different from version five. And so what was the first idea where you said, "Okay, screw it. We're gonna leave our jobs"? And what even was that process like for you guys to decide, "I'm gonna leave my job, you know, perfectly fine job I have here in Bangalore, and start working on something else"? Like, how did you and your co-founder agree to do that?

Vidit Aatrey 4:50 So I, I was in Bangalore working in this company called InMobi. So it was one of the first tech companies in Bangalore, and I one day called Sanjeev. Sanjeev used to work with Sony in Tokyo, and I called him up and said, "Hey, I think we should start up now." And there's so much tech stuff, so much is happening. Because I was part of an ad tech company, you could see all startups in the Indian, Indian ecosystem who were spending budgets on this ad tech platform and growing really fast. And I just felt that, "Hey, we have to do something. The time is now." So I called him up, and I said, "Let's-"

Ankit Gupta 5:24 So you kind of saw that from working at the first company. You saw that, "Okay, these budgets are going up really fast."

Vidit Aatrey 5:30 Yes. I, I, I... Basically, I saw mobile internet taking off-

Ankit Gupta 5:32 Oh

Vidit Aatrey 5:32 ... as part of that company.

Ankit Gupta 5:34 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 5:34 You could basically see everything changes every month.

Ankit Gupta 5:37 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 5:37 And so I called him up. He said, "Yeah, fine. Makes sense." He resigned next day, and one week later he came back. He came back-

Ankit Gupta 5:44 So he moved back from Tokyo. He was in Tokyo.

Vidit Aatrey 5:46 Yes, and he was there for three years.

Ankit Gupta 5:47 Huh.

Vidit Aatrey 5:47 And by the way, this... And I will go back to our origin story, even to college, the reason basically he did that. Both of us have been, like, close friends for a very long time. We were in the same department, same hostel, same wing. Like, we were next to each other for all four years of our, uh, college life. Did a lot of things together. The day I called him up, he said like, "Yeah, I have been thinking things are quite slow here and I want to do something more dynamic-

Ankit Gupta 6:12 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 6:12 ... and something more fast and I've been here for three years now."

Ankit Gupta 6:15 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 6:15 "This looks like great, like I will come back and basically we'll try something."

Vidit Aatrey 6:19 So I think that was basically the story. And as I said, like, we landed on that we really want to bring everyone in India, uh, be it all consumers, businesses-

Ankit Gupta 6:29 Uh-huh

Vidit Aatrey 6:30 ... to basically the digital ecosystem.

Ankit Gupta 6:33 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 6:34 But how to basically get started with your first product? So we said let's just go and speak to s- few people, right? So we said who are not selling online? Mostly small businesses were not selling online.

Ankit Gupta 6:43 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 6:43 Brands were selling online, but small businesses who are like the largest part of the economy in India, 85% of GDP back then. So we started to go and speak to a lot of these small businesses in Bangalore.

Ankit Gupta 6:54 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 6:55 In HSR and Koramangala. We'll just go into these shops and ask them, "Hey, why are you not selling online?"

Ankit Gupta 6:59 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 6:59 "Hey, why are you not selling online?" And everyone will give you a reason.

Ankit Gupta 7:02 So these are like regular shops you just like showed up at the shops and asked?

Vidit Aatrey 7:05 Regular shops across categories.

Ankit Gupta 7:06 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 7:07 And we realized like all these shops said, "Hey, I want to sell online, but I don't know how to find my customers online. And the people who basically buy from me are people within a certain radius of the store. I don't have a unique differentiation beyond that, but these people really like my service, really like my curation, so I really want to sell to them."

Ankit Gupta 7:26 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 7:27 So Sanjeev and I basically thought, "Hey, like if we help this person sell-

Ankit Gupta 7:30 Right

Vidit Aatrey 7:30 ... to customers in this area it'll be a great business."

Ankit Gupta 7:33 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 7:34 So we called our first version FashNear, Fashion Nearby.

Ankit Gupta 7:37 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 7:37 So everyone... You could, as a fashion shop, list your shop here and

Vidit Aatrey 7:42 sell to customers locally. So we started that version. Three months later we shut that down.

Ankit Gupta 7:47 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 7:47 In three months.

Ankit Gupta 7:48 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 7:49 Um, and we had a very, very stupid learning.

Ankit Gupta 7:52 Uh.

Vidit Aatrey 7:52 Our learning was we started this product and we never ever spoke to consumers.

Ankit Gupta 7:57 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 7:57 Right? Like we just spoke to sellers. We thought like the problem to solve is what the small businesses tell us, but we never spoke to consumers because-

Ankit Gupta 8:04 So y- y- you only understood one side of the market really well basically.

Vidit Aatrey 8:07 Yes. It's like the most newest mistake you can make.

Ankit Gupta 8:10 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 8:10 Because when we started to basically push our app and asking consumers to buy they will say, "This is the worst of both worlds."

Ankit Gupta 8:16 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 8:16 "When I go to a mall I can touch and feel the product, try the product. When I go online I get all the selection. You are giving me a limited selection of people in my locality and I can't even touch and feel the product."

Ankit Gupta 8:27 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 8:27 Right? So it's, it's worse than a mall, worse than e-commerce. And we said, "Yeah, it makes sense."

Ankit Gupta 8:32 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 8:33 It's a horrible thing to do. We said we should have done this before. But I think the, the journey has been this, right? Like you sometimes have a cool learning and sometimes you have these stupid learnings, but you keep evolving your product. I feel good about one thing, that we did not spend a year or two on that idea.

Ankit Gupta 8:48 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 8:48 We basically shut it down in three months. We built our app-

Ankit Gupta 8:51 Right

Vidit Aatrey 8:51 ... got like hundreds of customers to try the product and we very, very, very soon realized it doesn't work and we shut it down and moved to the next version.

Ankit Gupta 9:00 Oh. And was... At this point had you already gotten into YC or did that happen later?

Vidit Aatrey 9:05 So YC happened actually a year after we started up.

Ankit Gupta 9:09 Okay, yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 9:09 So with the second product which is-

Ankit Gupta 9:11 Uh-huh.

Vidit Aatrey 9:11 So first product was called FashNear. The second pers- product was called Meesho but it was different than what we eventually got product market fit with.

Ankit Gupta 9:20 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 9:20 So the product then we started was like, hey, this whole local thing doesn't work. Uh, let's start a different problem. So we went back to these small businesses and we said this time we'll not ask them. We will just le- sit, sit in these shops and see what the problems are. We want to observe a lot more than like speaking to them because they... most of them articulate problems based on their understanding.

Ankit Gupta 9:40 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 9:40 It may not be the right thing to do.

Ankit Gupta 9:42 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 9:42 So we would just go sit in these shops morning to evening. Many of these people were really, really nice to us. And we discovered one behavior. We discovered a behavior that a lot of these shops, even though they will say they are not online but they were online.

Ankit Gupta 9:55 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 9:55 They used to have a WhatsApp group.

Ankit Gupta 9:57 Ah.

Vidit Aatrey 9:58 So whenever someone comes and buys from a shop, at the end they will take a What- phone number and say, "Hey, I will add you to a WhatsApp group and I'll keep adding all the new products I have in my shop here."

Ankit Gupta 10:07 So they were basically sell- they had this like very s- simplified version of an e-commerce flow where it's just like a WhatsApp group they would send stuff on.

Vidit Aatrey 10:14 Absolutely.

Ankit Gupta 10:14 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 10:14 It's easier m- to manage for them. It's low friction for the consumer.

Ankit Gupta 10:18 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 10:18 So basically WhatsApp group was the online shop.

Ankit Gupta 10:20 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 10:21 So we said this looks cool.

Ankit Gupta 10:23 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 10:23 And we've been trying to kind of get these to a shop format. Maybe in India WhatsApp is gonna be the shop and you have to make this better solve problems around this. So we started to go deep and we realized there were two, three big problems. Collecting payments for stuff on WhatsApp, uh, updating inventory. Like many times people place an order on WhatsApp and by then the product is gone.

Ankit Gupta 10:43 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 10:43 So all those things.

Ankit Gupta 10:44 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 10:44 So that was Meesho. Meesho meant Meri shop. My shop.

Ankit Gupta 10:47 Ah, nice.

Vidit Aatrey 10:48 So we wanted to give a shop. So it's... So that's the first product we built and we went to YC with that product and our goal was like how do we make everyone, every business in India an online shop on WhatsA- on WhatsApp?

Vidit Aatrey 11:00 So we did that for a year. We went to YC, came back.

Ankit Gupta 11:03 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 11:04 And we were short of money. We could not raise our next round. And the problem was in India not a lot of small businesses are willing to pay you for software.

Ankit Gupta 11:13 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 11:13 So even they were using a sh- a software to run their shop on WhatsApp, manage payment, this and that. They're like, "Hey, no, no. The... If you charge me for this maybe I can manage the way I was doing it earlier."

Ankit Gupta 11:24 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 11:25 Um, so we said like, "I don't know if we can mak- really make revenue in this business so what do we do?" Again, at the same time we had close to a m- maybe hundreds of thousands of users using our product, hundreds of thousands of shops and there was certain segment of small business behavior-

Ankit Gupta 11:44 So, so, so you, you already are at hundreds of thousands of people using... hundred of thousands of shops and users at this point.

Vidit Aatrey 11:48 Yes.

Ankit Gupta 11:48 Okay.

Vidit Aatrey 11:48 To run their business on WhatsApp.

Ankit Gupta 11:50 So like one way to look at that would've been like, oh, we already have product market fit. Hundreds of thousands of people want it but, but you're saying that you couldn't scale it up another 10X basically because even at that point not enough people were willing to pay for it to do that.

Vidit Aatrey 12:03 So yes, that's true. I would say also there were hundred and thousands of people who are doing this but they're not the most active. And, um, and that's where we're gonna come to the insight that we tried to find people who were- are the most active here.

Ankit Gupta 12:18 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 12:19 And

Vidit Aatrey 12:20 we found a very different profile of businesses who are the most active on our product. These were online native businesses. They don't have an offline shop.

Ankit Gupta 12:29 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 12:29 And they were using our product to sell on WhatsApp groups only.

Ankit Gupta 12:33 Oh, interesting. So they-

Vidit Aatrey 12:34 And they were dropshippers

Ankit Gupta 12:36 ... they don't have the physical s- Okay. Uh-

Vidit Aatrey 12:37 They were dropshippers.

Ankit Gupta 12:38 Uh.

Vidit Aatrey 12:38 Um, in our language they were resellers, how they call themselves in India.

Ankit Gupta 12:42 Uh.

Vidit Aatrey 12:42 So they were dropshippers, and they were using a product day in, day out. Whereas when you see an offline person, they will use it for a few days. It looks good to have an offline shop, but then who will go and update an inventory every day? Collecting a payment. Okay, fine, I'll collect cash. So a lot of people revert back- revert back to the old behaviors because, like, using an online tool and making that big change sometimes can feel overwhelming.

Ankit Gupta 13:03 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 13:04 And if my online business is a smaller share of the business, should I even do it? Right? Like-

Ankit Gupta 13:09 Totally

Vidit Aatrey 13:10 ... if my offline business is bigger, they would not change. But what happened, all of these users who are online native, they were the power users of our product.

Ankit Gupta 13:19 Huh. Okay, so you found people who really loved it.

Vidit Aatrey 13:21 Yes.

Ankit Gupta 13:22 Uh.

Vidit Aatrey 13:22 So we said we have to make money from them.

Ankit Gupta 13:24 Huh.

Vidit Aatrey 13:25 Because no one else is gonna pay us monies. We have to make money from them. So then again, Sanjeev and I started doing the same thing. We will go to their house, and they'll be spread across Bangalore and sometimes outside, and we'll ask them, "Tell me, like, how you run this business so we figure out the problems." And the biggest problem we figured out for them is many of them were w- like, most of them were women, like homemakers who wanted to start a business of their own. And the reason they became a dropshipper is because dropshipper is a zero upfront cost business. You don't have to buy inventory and sell.

Ankit Gupta 13:56 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 13:56 Right? You connect with suppliers who will directly ship to-

Ankit Gupta 13:59 Right

Vidit Aatrey 13:59 ... consumers. And we said, "Look, s- their biggest problem is getting access to these suppliers and supply, so can we build that product?" And then we built a new app called Meesho Supply.

Vidit Aatrey 14:11 It was listed as separate app on the Play Store, Meesho Supply, where these users could get access to supply from us and then start selling. And we saw that product, like, grew, like some- nothing that we've seen before. I think then-

Ankit Gupta 14:27 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 14:27 ... I understood what d- what does PMF mean.

Ankit Gupta 14:29 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 14:30 Like unless you see product market fit you never know what product market fit-

Ankit Gupta 14:32 Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what that felt like? Like whatever metrics you feel comfortable sharing-

Vidit Aatrey 14:36 So-

Ankit Gupta 14:36 ... and what it felt like.

Vidit Aatrey 14:38 Yeah. So for the next 10 months we spent zero rupees on marketing ever because-

Ankit Gupta 14:42 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 14:42 ... we did not have money. As I said, like money was the biggest constraint we had.

Ankit Gupta 14:45 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 14:45 So we never had money until we get to Series A.

Ankit Gupta 14:48 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 14:48 We doubled every single month. So organic discovery-

Ankit Gupta 14:52 Every month doubled. Wow

Vidit Aatrey 14:52 ... and, like, very high retention.

Ankit Gupta 14:54 Wow.

Vidit Aatrey 14:55 And it's like people coming to your app, and they keep complaining you don't have this feature, you don't have that feature, and they still use your app like 15 or 20 times a day.

Ankit Gupta 15:02 Wow. Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 15:03 Because you're solving such a core pain point for them that they're investing their time in improving your product.

Ankit Gupta 15:09 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 15:09 Giving you feedback. So I think then Sanjeev and I said, "This looks like product market fit."

Ankit Gupta 15:14 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 15:14 Like something that we have not seen before. So we shut down our first app called Meesho.

Ankit Gupta 15:19 Wow.

Vidit Aatrey 15:19 Rebranded the Meesho Supply app into Meesho and basically that became a product. It was a social commerce product where anyone could become a Meesho entrepreneur/dropshipper-

Ankit Gupta 15:29 Uh

Vidit Aatrey 15:29 ... run a WhatsApp group and sell products to consumers.

Ankit Gupta 15:32 So you basically became ... Your first evolution was from being this toolkit for sellers to basically a full supplier for sellers. You, you are giving them a business in a box essentially built on WhatsApp. Okay, so this is now like 2019 or 2020, right? Something like that. I, I recall you've told me that once COVID happens a few big things change. So tell us a little bit about what this was like at the peak of this product, and then what happens in the few years after that.

Vidit Aatrey 16:01 Yeah. So if I zoom out just to kind of paint a big picture so you understand why was this happening. The consumer problem was that this is 2016. Cost of data in India was very high. So-

Ankit Gupta 16:12 Like of cellular data on your phone.

Vidit Aatrey 16:13 Yes.

Ankit Gupta 16:14 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 16:14 And all shopping apps are image-heavy and hence consume a lot of data. So if you go there and you start browsing, you'll keep consuming data and you'll keep getting this ... In India you used to get a message from Airtel or Vodafone that one rupee deducted, 50 paisa deducted and a lot of these consumers will they just uninstall the app and not use it ever again because they feel it's consuming so much money.

Ankit Gupta 16:36 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 16:37 Whereas on WhatsApp you decide to choose when you wanna download an image.

Ankit Gupta 16:41 Uh.

Vidit Aatrey 16:41 Most of it is text. It's very, very efficient.

Ankit Gupta 16:44 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 16:44 Mostly WhatsApp downsizes a lot of these to keep it very, very low data consuming. So a lot of them were buying on WhatsApp but would not download an app. And we realized, like you can really go really deep into the country. People who are not buying anything online would want to try buying online if you help them buy on WhatsApp.

Ankit Gupta 17:02 So WhatsApp had real distribution advantage over anything else in this era.

Vidit Aatrey 17:07 Absolutely. So we say let's just go big on this. So we got to this product in 2016 and the next five years we are committed on this. In 2020, peak 2020 we had 10 million WhatsApp groups in India running-

Ankit Gupta 17:20 Holy crap

Vidit Aatrey 17:21 ... for the sole purpose of buying products from Meesho.

Ankit Gupta 17:25 So, so that's not just 10- that's not 10 million buyers, that's 10 million sellers. There are 10 million entrepreneurs-

Vidit Aatrey 17:31 10 million sellers. Absolutely.

Ankit Gupta 17:32 Yeah. That's insane.

Vidit Aatrey 17:32 There were 10 million Meesho entrepreneurs.

Ankit Gupta 17:34 And then, then they must be selling to 100 million people or more.

Vidit Aatrey 17:38 So and by the way we believe that number is 100 million because then what happened in 2020 we said the same premise doesn't hold anymore. The problem we were solving of data being expensive was not there anymore. Uh, Jio happened, cost of data went to zero and with pandemic a lot of people were forced to learn how to buy online because they are stuck at home. So we, we realized that, hey, if you don't move consumers to our own app we'll eventually lose them to someone else.

Ankit Gupta 18:02 So there's earthshaking paradigm shift which is that, okay, data goes to zero. Like not that many people necessarily may have felt the impact of that. For most people here it was just like, "Oh great, data is now cheaper." But for your business that's now a fundamental threat to your original business.

Vidit Aatrey 18:18 Absolutely.

Ankit Gupta 18:18 Like tell us what your psychology in that moment was because right now you have a business with 10 million sellers on it, many of whom are paying you a lot of money. You're presumably making a lot of money and you're like, "Okay, I think we have to-" Abandon this, basically. Uh, how do you, how do you decide that, and what do you decide to do with that?

Vidit Aatrey 18:36 So I think it was a, it was very interesting time period in the company, um, because... And on the board as well. Like, a lot of our investors, we were already unicorn then, so we had raised significant amount of money.

Ankit Gupta 18:48 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 18:48 A lot of investors were on the board, and they were like, "Can we do this as an experiment?"

Ankit Gupta 18:53 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 18:53 "Can we see it for a while?"

Ankit Gupta 18:54 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 18:55 Um, and I was actually clear that you can't do this as an experiment.

Ankit Gupta 18:58 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 18:58 Because the day you go to directly to consumer, all these dropshippers are gonna hate you. Because you're intermediating them and directly going to the consumer. They feel that business is gonna go away. So if you do this as an experiment, it's like lose-lose.

Ankit Gupta 19:12 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 19:13 You will not get the consumers, and you will lose all these WhatsApp group owners, and you have nothing else left.

Ankit Gupta 19:19 Yes.

Vidit Aatrey 19:19 So you have to commit to this direction. But I think the, the big reason we had conviction that this is the right thing to do is actually the same reason we had conviction before this in changing our business. We went and spoke to consumers.

Ankit Gupta 19:32 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 19:33 So Sanjeev and I and actually a lot of people in our team, they started to go on the ground, met a lot of consumers, and they understood the, all the assumptions that we had of our consumer, all of them were going away now.

Ankit Gupta 19:45 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 19:45 None of them have a problem with downloading an app.

Ankit Gupta 19:48 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 19:48 None of them have a problem, uh, feeling that, "Hey, how do I buy? What does add to cart mean?" Like, many of them still had it in, in majority of India still has it, but a lot of that had gone away. So we were very clear that, hey, if you take a long-term view, you have to do it. There's never been a better time. Um, and the good thing was this is, like, the peak, peak of capital available in the startup ecosystem, so there were people who were willing to provide us capital if we make this shift. Because if you go consumer, for you to basically create awareness, being a consumer app is gonna take a lot of money.

Ankit Gupta 20:22 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 20:23 So we said, like, "It's tough, but we will do it."

Ankit Gupta 20:26 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 20:26 And I'm fortunate to basically... I, I was very fortunate that we had the right team and the right investors-

Ankit Gupta 20:31 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 20:31 ... who were basically, who took the right long-term view and said, "This makes sense.

Vidit Aatrey 20:35 This will be a much larger opportunity if we do this. It's a bit risky, but if you don't do it, who else will?"

Ankit Gupta 20:40 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 20:41 And actually, there were a lot of other companies who were playing, who had a similar product to us back then in 2021.

Ankit Gupta 20:48 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 20:48 And none of them ever pivoted.

Ankit Gupta 20:49 Huh.

Vidit Aatrey 20:50 And none of them are known anymore. Most all of them have shut down.

Ankit Gupta 20:53 Oh.

Vidit Aatrey 20:53 They got acquired or shut down.

Ankit Gupta 20:54 They had some-

Vidit Aatrey 20:55 Uh

Ankit Gupta 20:55 ... kind of, like, selling on WhatsApp type of thing.

Vidit Aatrey 20:57 Yes.

Ankit Gupta 20:57 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 20:57 Because a lot of our clones had come up, so they're running that business. But as I said, it's hard. It's hard to kill your existing business and start a new one. We did it, and I, I remember it was mid of 2021. So July, fif- fifth July 2021, we launched our app.

Ankit Gupta 21:15 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 21:16 I think seventh July 2021, we went number one in the shopping section of Android Play Store in India.

Ankit Gupta 21:24 Wow.

Vidit Aatrey 21:24 Today is 2026. Every day since then, we've been the number one shopping app on the Android Play Store.

Ankit Gupta 21:30 Holy crap. [laughs]

Vidit Aatrey 21:31 Every single day.

Ankit Gupta 21:32 [laughs]

Vidit Aatrey 21:33 Right? Like, you'll never go to Android and find someone else.

Ankit Gupta 21:36 That's awesome.

Vidit Aatrey 21:37 And just, um, we used to have 10 million users at this head of our app-

Ankit Gupta 21:41 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 21:42 ... which was built for these social sellers.

Ankit Gupta 21:44 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 21:45 Five months later, we had 100 million MAU.

Ankit Gupta 21:48 Wow.

Vidit Aatrey 21:49 So 100 million consumers were coming to our app. So that's why I believe that about 100 million people were buying or at least viewing our product via this because all of them moved here in just five months. And, and I think now when you look back and say that's the best decision made.

Ankit Gupta 22:02 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:02 Like, if we had not done it, like, I don't think we would be here today. I would not be here today. The business would not exist. But the reason we had conviction that we will not fail is because we are so to close to consumers. And I would say as a consumer company, that's the most important skill you need to have.

Ankit Gupta 22:17 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:18 You have to be the closest to your consumer. You need to know things that none of your competition, none of the people in the ecosystem know about them. So you can take certain contrarian bets that no one else will take.

Ankit Gupta 22:28 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:28 And, and I think that's what we did. It eventually worked out.

Ankit Gupta 22:31 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:32 Um, many things don't work out. Like, it could have been that we do this and something goes wrong. Fortunately, in this case, it worked out. So that's why I said, like, it's... We've had many versions-

Ankit Gupta 22:41 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 22:41 ... uh, evolving product, but the same mission.

Ankit Gupta 22:44 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:45 And internally, so we have a company values which says, "Be problem first."

Ankit Gupta 22:50 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:51 Be very rigid with your problem and be very s- flexible with your solution.

Ankit Gupta 22:55 Mm.

Vidit Aatrey 22:55 And I think our journey has been the same thing.

Ankit Gupta 22:57 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 22:58 Even though from day one, we started with the goal of bringing all Indian consumers and businesses online.

Ankit Gupta 23:03 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 23:03 We've been very, very flexible with the solution. Leveraging WhatsApp, right? Like, helping people create a shop. All of those things keep changing. The solutions keep changing, but you have to be very, very, I would say, like, committed to the problem that you start with.

Ankit Gupta 23:19 I, I think the thing that really strikes me about this, and I think it's such a universal story of great companies that make it, is that for a company to survive as long as it does, you know, for 10-plus years and to make it big, you have to survive at least a few big underlying changes in how the world works, right? Some big paradigm shift h- occurs every few years. And for you guys, it was a shift that probably would've been very hard to predict that all of a sudden, essentially overnight, this baseline assumption of how your business works changes. And yeah, that customer obsession and focus allowed you guys to kind of get through it. I mean, now I guess to kind of bring it to the obvious current moment, you know, we're going through another big technology potentially disruptive moment with AI. I imagine a lot of people working in e-commerce will see it as very disruptive. I imagine you could as well. How do you think about what that means for your business and whether there'll be another huge change for your ahead or whether you can leverage it to the advantage for yourself?

Vidit Aatrey 24:23 You're absolutely right, and I believe AI is gonna change how you run shopping online, e-commerce- Logistics. Um, every single thing I think will change, right? We're essentially a software company. Um, 70% of our headcount is in tech and product.

Ankit Gupta 24:42 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 24:42 That is changing big time with AI. Um, so I, I think it's, it's the same 21 moment, uh, for us, and that's what we keep reminding internally. By the way, we keep saying that all our good decisions have been focused on the long term and managing the short term.

Ankit Gupta 24:58 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 24:58 And it has to be the same thing now. Like we have to say forget what you have today. If you basically start an e-commerce app with this mission statement, what would you do?

Ankit Gupta 25:06 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 25:07 Using AI. And actually we are trying to do the same thing. Like for example, we recently launched a new voice agent called Vani.

Ankit Gupta 25:15 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 25:15 Right? And it came from the same conversation. When we started... I, I will by the way take a step back and even explain why. Most of our innovations that we have done as a business have been around two axis for the last 11 years. One is around accessibility. Remove the barriers so that more people try our product.

Ankit Gupta 25:34 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 25:34 WhatsApp was in that direction. Um-

Ankit Gupta 25:37 Right

Vidit Aatrey 25:37 ... and like we've recently gone into like content as a way to basically transact. That reduces friction. So our one axis of innovation has been around accessibility. The other axis of innovation has been around affordability. Like if you wanna make a billion people buy, all of them struggle with basically doing a lot more-

Ankit Gupta 26:00 Right

Vidit Aatrey 26:00 ... with less budget, right? So how do you do it? And we have done that with a very different kind of logistics, the different way of how we run e-commerce, and that's why people trust us with all their purchases across categories. Accessibility, I feel, is gonna change again with AI.

Ankit Gupta 26:15 Hmm.

Vidit Aatrey 26:16 Because so today we have 250 million people buy from us every year and not a billion. And I keep saying I think that 250 to a billion most likely in my opinion is gonna happen with AI. When you go to the rural areas in the country and you ask them to download your app and try, they just cannot use anything. They don't first of all understand what's written even in their own language. They don't know what does add to cart mean because there's nothing like this in the offline world. They don't understand what does a rating mean, review mean. They're always afraid if they click a button some money will get deducted from their bank account.

Ankit Gupta 26:49 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 26:49 Extremely overwhelmed.

Ankit Gupta 26:51 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 26:51 Very, very tough for them. And that's a large part of what who we have to serve going forward.

Ankit Gupta 26:56 Right.

Vidit Aatrey 26:57 So when we started to basically test out this product, it's a voice AI product. We said we wanna build an experience where a consumer never has to read anything on the app, never has to type anything-

Ankit Gupta 27:08 Wow

Vidit Aatrey 27:08 ... on the app, and never has to click a button.

Ankit Gupta 27:10 So the software just becomes invisible?

Vidit Aatrey 27:12 Yes.

Ankit Gupta 27:13 Hmm.

Vidit Aatrey 27:13 And you just have voice and images keep coming in front of you and keep going away.

Ankit Gupta 27:18 Yeah.

Vidit Aatrey 27:18 And you keep saying, "Yes, I like this. I don't like this." Then you verbally say your address, and you give your OTP to basically transact and move on. You never ever do any of this. Things that feel overwhelming to people. And by the way, that's our vision now. Can you with AI create all experiences on the consumer side, all experiences on the seller side, logistics side, basically like this and reduce the barrier to access anything so much that everyone comes forward? And we are by the way right now like paranoid about this. We are like, "We have to do this before anyone else-

Ankit Gupta 27:51 Yeah

Vidit Aatrey 27:51 ... because no one else should get to a billion people before us." So I, I believe this is like one way of how the business will change, and the product could look different. Like very soon we may not even have an app. It'll just a voice agent that could be outside-

Ankit Gupta 28:06 Right

Vidit Aatrey 28:06 ... and you can keep using it to basically transact. So I think all businesses will change in a big way very soon.

Ankit Gupta 28:11 Hmm.

Vidit Aatrey 28:11 Um, and you have to let go of the past baggage. What you have today doesn't matter. You have to take a long-term view and do the right thing. Even if it is disruptive in the short term, you do it. Um, and I think that's the plan.

Ankit Gupta 28:23 I think the thing that you say that always sticks with me is how much you think about the customer as the first part of your decision-making in any of these stories, right? Like you could totally have answered that question from the standpoint of this type of technology is now possible so let's roll it out to as many people as we can versus starting with what the customer's pain is and I think that's, that's such a timeless lesson in what has let you go through all the pivots you've gone through and now get to where you are. I, I guess maybe now to wrap up, um, if you were sitting in the stage here, um, you are like a college student or a young technical person much like yourself when you were starting your company, what are some pieces of parting advice you would give to them? Like what are the things you did when you started in 2015 and '16 that you think are most relevant to people now especially in this new technological moment? Like what should they be doing?

Vidit Aatrey 29:17 I, I would say this feels to me the 2015, '16 of the new paradigm, right? 2015, '16 was when mobile internet was taking off and Sanjeev and I got excited and jumped on. I think there's never been a better time again. Like AI is very early. Everyone's unclear what's gonna happen two, three years down the line and you can have a point of view and jump in. And if I was starting today, I would doing the same thing that I did in '15, '16.

Ankit Gupta 29:42 Hmm.

Vidit Aatrey 29:42 I will see what people are doing around me and then I'll go back to my hometown and see what people are doing there. I will find like what's not happening and I think all of those gaps can be now bridged with AI. You cannot say that people not using this tool because they don't understand, they're not tech-savvy, they don't find this useful. I think everything can be reimagined especially for a country like India where people always find this overwhelming. So I'll do the exact same thing. I just feel like the output would be very different.

Ankit Gupta 30:10 It's incredible. I think that's a very inspiring message to leave people with. Thank you so much for joining us, Vidit. Appreciate it. [audience applauding]