How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping App

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 5th 5th July 2021 we launched our app. Yeah. We went number one in the shopping section of Android Play Store in India. Wow. Today is 2026. Every day since then we've been the number one shopping app on Android Play Store. Holy crap. Every single day. We just heard Varun's story from Giga. And one thing I was thinking about is that his story feels like the 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 Misho 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. 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 want to be entrepreneurs here and I hope they learn something. So today Misho 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 what we've been at. Last 12 months we had about 250 million consumers buying from us. Close to a million sellers. That's 250 product. Unique people bought unique people who bought um a product and and all of them bought about 10 times a year. So 2 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. Oh yeah. All right. because you live in a population of 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 happen. So of the people that are buying anything online something like half of them or more than half potentially are buying on M show. 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? We started in 2015. Both Sanjiv and I come from small towns. I was born in Mirat. Most of my family comes from western UP mostly a farmer family. Sanjie was born and brought up in Hazari Bag in Jhark and back in 2015 when we were trying to figure out like first of all we very excited about this mobile internet wave both of us were 2 years out of college we're 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 and then both of us will go back to our families in Merit and Jarhand 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? 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 like there's no new player who going to come what is there to solve and both of us basically believe there's definitely something needed because none of our families are basically buying online. Yeah. So I think that was a simple reason of why we started up. So we said we have to bring everyone in India online 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 uh we have been but the core mission of the company is actually still the same. 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 going to leave our jobs and what even was that process like for you guys to decide I'm going to 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 so I I was in Bangalore working in this company called Inobi so it was one of the first tech companies in Bangalore and I one called Sanjie. Sanjie 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 that stuff so much is happening because I was part of an ad techch company you could see all startups in the 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 you kind of saw that from working at the first company you saw that okay these budgets are going up really fast. I I I basically I saw mobile internet taking off as part of that company. You could basically see everything changes every month, right? 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. So he moved back from Tokyo. He was in Tokyo and he was there for 3 years. And by the way, this and I will go back to our origin story even into 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 and something more fast and I've been here for 3 years now. It looks like great like I will come back and basically we'll try something." 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 to basically the digital ecosystem but how to basically get started with your first product. So we said let's just go and speak to few people right so we said who are not selling online mostly small businesses not selling online brands were selling online but small businesses who were 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 in HSR in Kangla we'll just go into these shops and ask them hey why you not selling online hey why you not selling online and everyone will give you a reason so these are like regular shops you just like showed up at the shops regular shops across categories 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. So Sanjiv and I basically thought, hey, like if we help this person sell to customers in this area, it'll be a great business, right? So we called our first version fashion near fashion nearby. So everyone you could as a fashion shop list your shop here and sell to customers locally. So we started that version 3 months later we shut that downh in 3 months. Um and we had a very very stupid learning. Our learning was we started this product and we never ever spoke to consumers 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 you only understood one side of the market really well. Basically, it's like the most nostous mistake you can make. Because when we started to basically push our app and asking consumers to buy, they will say this is the worst of both worlds. 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're giving me a limited selection of people in my locality and I can't even touch and feel the product. Right. So, it's it's worse than a mall, worse than e-commerce. And we said, "Yeah, it makes sense. 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. We basically shut it down in 3 months. We built our app, 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 move to the next version. And was at this point had you already gotten into YC or did that happen later? So YC happened actually a year after we started up. So with the second product which is so first product was called Fashioner. The second P product was called Misho but it was different than what we eventually got product market fit with. 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 justly 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 their understanding. It may not be the right thing to do. 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. They used to have a WhatsApp group. Ah. So whenever someone comes and buys from a shop at the end they will take a 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. So they were basically selling they had this like very simplified version of an e-commerce flow whereas just like a WhatsApp group they would send stuff on. Absolutely. It's easier to manage for them. It's low friction for the consumer. So basically WhatsApp group was the online shop. Yeah. So we said this looks cool and we've been trying to kind of get these to a shop format. Maybe in India WhatsApp is going to 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. So all those things so that was Misho. Misho meant Mary shop my shop. 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 WhatsApp on WhatsApp. So we did that for a year. We went to YC came back. 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. So even they were using a a software to run this shop on WhatsApp manage payments this and that they're like hey no no if you charge me for this maybe I can manage the way I was doing it earlier um so we said like I don't know if we can make really make revenue in this business so what do we do again at the same time we had close to maybe hundreds of thousands of users using our product hundreds of thousands of shops and there was certain segment of small already are at hundreds of thousands of people using hundred thousands of shops and users at this point. Yes. To run their business on WhatsApp. So like one way to look at that would have 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. So yes, that's true. I would say also there are hundred thousands of people who are doing this but they're not the most active and and and that's what I'm going to come to the inside that we tried to find people who were are the most active here. And we found a very different profile of businesses who were the most active on our product. These were online native businesses. They don't have an offline shop and they were using our product to sell on WhatsApp groups only. Oh interesting. So they were drop shippers. Okay, they were drop shippers. Um in our language they were resellers how they call themselves in India. So they were drop shippers 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 and payment. Okay fine I'll collect cash. So a lot of people re back revert back to the old behaviors because like using an online tool and making that big change sometimes can feel overwhelming and if my online business is a smaller share of the business should I even do it right like totally if my offline business is bigger they would not change but what happened all of these users who were online native they were the power users of our product huh okay so you found people who really loved it yes so we said we have to make money from them huh because no one else is going to pay us money. So we have to make money from them. So then again Sanji and I started doing the same thing. We will go to their house and they will be spread across Bangalore and sometimes outside and we'll ask them tell me like how do you run this business? So we figure out the problems and the biggest problem we figured out for them is many of them were like most of them were women like homemakers who wanted to start a business of their own and the reason they became a drop shipper is because drop shipper is a zero upfront cost business. You don't have to buy inventory and sell. Right. You connect with suppliers who will directly ship to consumers. And we said looks 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 Misho Supply. It was listed as separate app on the Play Store. Misho 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 I understood what what does PMF mean. Unless you see product market fit, you never know what product market fit. Can you tell us a little bit about what that felt like? Like whatever metrics you feel comfortable sharing and what it felt like. Yes. So for the next 10 months, we spent zero rupees on marketing ever because we did not have money. As I said like money was the biggest constraint we had. So we never had money until we get to series A. We doubled every single month. So, organic discovery and like very high retention. 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. Because you're solving such a core pain point for them that they're investing their time in improving your product, giving you feedback. So, I think then Sanjiv and I said this looks like product market fit like something that we have not seen before. So, we shut down our first app called Misho. Wow. We rebranded the Misho Sublab into Misho and basically that became a product. It was a social commerce product where anyone could become a Misho entrepreneur/drop shipper, run a WhatsApp group and sell products to consumers. So you basically became your first evolution was from being this toolkit for sellers to basically a full supplier for sellers. You you were 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 CO 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. Yes. 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 of cellular data on your phone. Yes. 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 used to get a message from Airel or Vodafone that one rupee deducted 50 pes are 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. Whereas on WhatsApp you decide to choose when you want to download an image. Most of it is text. It's very very efficient. 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. So WhatsApp had real distribution advantage over anything else in this era. Absolutely. So we said let's just go big on this. So we got to this product in 2016 and the next 5 years we have committed on this in 2020 peak 2020 we had 10 million WhatsApp groups in India running. For the sole purpose of buying products from Misho. So so that's not just 10 that's not 10 million buyers that's 10 million sellers there are 10 million 10 million sellers. Absolutely. There are 10 million Misho entrepreneurs and then they must be selling to 100 million people or more. 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 go happened cost of data went to zero and with pandemic a lot of people were forced to learn how to buy online because they were 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. So there's this earth shaking 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. Absolutely. Like tell us what your psychology in that moment was cuz 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 how do you how do you decide that and what do you decide to do with that? 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 lot of investors who were on the board and they were like can we do this as an experiment can we see it for a while um and I was actually clear that you can't do this as an experiment because the day you go to directly to consumer all these drop shippers are going to hate you because you're intermediating them and directly going to the consumer they feel that business is going to go away. So if you do this as an experiment is like lose-lose. You will not get the consumers and you lose all these WhatsApp group owners and you have nothing else left. 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. M so Sanjie 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 a consumer all of them are going away now none of them have a problem with downloading an app none of them have a problem uh feeling that hey how do I buy what does add toart mean like many of them still had it and 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 are willing to provide us capital if we make the shift because if you go consumer for you to basically create awareness being a consumer app is going to take a lot of money. So, we said like it's tough but we will do it. And I'm fortunate to basically I I was very fortunate that we had the right team and the right investors. Yeah. who were basically who took the right long-term view and said this makes sense this will be a much larger opportunity we do this it's a bit risky but if you don't do it who else will and actually there were a lot of other companies who were playing who had a similar product to us back then in 2021 and none of them ever pivoted and none of them are known anymore most all of them have shut down they got acquired or shut down they had some kind of like selling on WhatsApp type of thing yes because a lot of our clones had come up so they running that business but as I said it's hard. It's hard to kill your 2021. So July 5th July 2021, we launched our app. I think 7th July 2021, we went number one in the shopping section of Android Play Store in India. Today is 2026. Every day since then, on Android Play Store. Holy crap. Every single day, right? Like you'll never go to Android and find someone else. That's awesome. And just um we used to have 10 million users as I said of our app which was built for these social sellers. 5 months later we had 100 million MU. 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 5 months. And and I think now when you look back and say that's the best decision made 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 too close to consumers. And I would say as a consumer company that's the most important skill you need to have. 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. Yeah. And and I think that's what we did. It eventually worked out. 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 uh evolving product but the same mission and internally. So we have a company values which says be problem first. Be very rigid with your problem and be very flexible with your solution. And I think our journey has been the same thing. Yeah, even though from day one we started with the goal of bringing all Indian consumers and businesses online, we've been very very flexible with the solution leveraging WhatsApp, right? Like helping people create a shop. All of those things keep changing. So solutions keep changing but you have to be very very I would say like committed to the problem that you start with. 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 occurs every few years. And for you guys, it was a shift that probably would have 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 you ahead or whether you can leverage it to the advantage for yourself? You're absolutely right and I believe AI is going to 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 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. And it has to be the same thing now. Like you have to say forget what you have today. If you basically start an e-commerce app with this mission statement, what would you do? Using AI and actually we're trying to do the same thing. Like for example, we recently launched a new voice agent called Wani, 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 barrier so that more people try your product right WhatsApp was in that direction 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 axis of innovation has been around affordability like if you want to make a billion people buy all of them struggle with basically doing a lot more with less budget Right. So how do you do it? And we've 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 going to change again with AI 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 going to 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, Extremely overwhelmed. Very, very tough for them. And that's a large part of what who we have to serve going forward. Right? So when we started to basically test out this product, it's a voice AI product. We said we want to build an experience where a consumer never has to read anything on the app, never has to type anything on the app and never has to click a button. So the software just becomes invisible. Yes. And you just have voice and images keep coming in front of you and keep going away. 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 a vision now. Okay. 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 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 and you can keep using it to basically transact. So I think all businesses will change in a big way very soon. Um and you have to let go of the past baggage. What you have to it 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. 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-m 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 were 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? I I would say this feels to me that 2015 16 of the new paradigm right 2015 16 was when mobile internet was taking off and Singi 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 going to happen 2 3 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 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'll 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 techsavvy they don't find this useful I think everything can be reimagined especially 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. It's incredible. I think that's a very inspiring message to leave people with. Thank you so much for joining us Vivid. Appreciate it.