By every rule of e-commerce, Meesho should be dead.
Yet the’ve been the most downloaded shopping app in India every single month since their consumer launch in 2021. They handle the highest daily order volume of any e-commerce platform in India.
Meesho inverted every received idea about how Indian e-commerce “should” be built. I see my mother placing 2-3 orders on Meesho every month. Not Amazon. Not Flipkart.
This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of systematic contrarian thinking embedded deep into their DNA. Three organizational characteristics that stand out to me:
> 𝗕𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗯𝗹𝗲𝗺-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻-𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁
When Vidit & Sanjeev started Fashnear in 2015, nobody actually had the problem they thought they were solving (local online shopping). They had been asking leading questions ("Would you like to sell online?") designed to get the answers they wanted to hear.
When they pivoted from Fashnear, they literally sat in shops for days just watching what shopkeepers did. This observation led them to discover the WhatsApp commerce behavior that became their early breakthrough. Meesho institutionalized their early failure into a cultural mantra. Teams are told to never assume a solution but to go with a curious mindset to discover problems.
> 𝗥𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗹𝗲𝘅𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗲
Meesho has maintained an unwavering mission (democratizing internet commerce for Bharat) while being radically flexible about how to achieve it. They've pivoted from local marketplace → ‘Shopify’ for WhatsApp → reseller platform for homemakers → horizontal consumer e-commerce, all serving the same North Star.
Meesho launched its consumer app after killing its highly successful reseller mode that grew to 10 million WhatsApp groups. Why? Post Jio, Indians started downloading ecomm apps and the pandemic accelerated online shopping. Staying mission-consistent allowed Meesho to make bold pivots that others would find impossible.
> 𝗖𝗵𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿, 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘁𝘀
Meesho gets faster every year, but never at the expense of becoming unaffordable for their core customer.
They discovered that cost was the true barrier to their mission. They pioneered the disruptive zero commission model driven by the insight that small businesses have very low gross margins & cannot afford high costs of doing business online. They then built revenue through ads and value-added services.
The same philosophy created Valmo, a marketplace of small, local logistics providers. It was structurally impossible to get the lowest cost from 3PL providers serving speed-obsessed ecomm platforms. Cost reduction would unlock significantly more customers than marginal speed improvements.
PS: I would highly recommend listening to Vidit’s interview on The Ken First Principles. Also very glad that they brought back the podcast!