Q-Commerce in Emerging Markets with the CEOs of Airlift, JOKR, & Zepto | 20VC #892

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Champs, this is such a joy to make this one happen. I've been looking forward to this one for a while. So I wanna start with a little bit of context and a little bit of background. Uh, let's start alphabetically. Airlift. Usman, hit me. What was the a-ha moment for you with Airlift? In about a minute, we're gonna go down.

Yeah. Uh, very, very excited to be on this show and, and thanks for having us. For us, you know, Airlift, our, our foray into quick commerce was really solving our own problem in the middle of the pandemic. We realized that the single biggest problem we had was getting grocery items delivered at our homes, uh, in a manner that was quick, that was instantaneous. And so, we set out to solve our own problem, and that's really where it all started, and we brought a small team together, and we, we looked at whether... what, what was, was operating efficient, um, uh, mechanism to do that, and, and that's how it all started.

I love it, and thank you so much. No one ever abides by the minute intro, so well done there. Uh, Ralf, hit me. Minute, what was the a-ha for you with Joker?

The a-ha moment for us... And by the way, Harry, thank you for having us as well. Um, the a-ha moment for us was how inefficient, uh, procurement-

Pleasure is mine, my friend. I miss your, I miss your dulcet tones.

It's mutual. It's mutual, yeah. Um, the a-ha moment for us was when we, um, figured out how inefficient, uh, supply chain and procurement processes are, um, globally, locally, um, how many people are involved, how much inefficiency, how much cost is being, uh, thrown away, um, and that there's a significant opportunity to literally vertically integrate, uh, and make supply chains become more efficient, more sustainable, um, and generating, like, a nice margin out of it.

Love it. Aadit, final one with you. Tell me, Zepto. How did it come about? And also, like, fuck, you're younger than me. This is a rarity.

(laughs)

But, uh, it's lovely to have you, Aadit. But how did Zepto come about?

And it's lovely to be here, uh, and, you know, get to be with Usman and Ralf as well. For us, I think the a-ha moment was actually a little bit less, uh, you know, vision-enticing. It was more methodical. Like, we were experimenting with grocery as a space for a very long time, also egged on by the fact that, you know, we were two bachelors in the middle of Mumbai when, you know, pretty much all offline and online forms of grocery were shut. Uh, but I think when we... you know, how we moved from online grocery, you know, as a marketplace or sort of longer format delivery to eventually Q-commerce was just in the data. Like, we, um, you, you know, it was Y Combinator, we were just iterating on different levers that we had and figured out that, hey, when we take our delivery times from 45 minutes to under 15 minutes, what we see with retention is two to three X goodness. NPS starts stabilizing at north of 85 points, and you have frequency of usage numbers that are off the charts. And when we saw that, we were blown away. And, and more importantly, we saw that coupled with, you know, 4X the assortment that we were operating with, better freshness and control over quality, and, you know, pricing levers, you know, with the economies of scale as well. Like, all those in one, you know, platform was just a very compelling user experience, and it just reflected in the numbers, and that's when we, you know, decided to double down on Q-commerce.