The Exchanges

Q So I think the biggest ah,, uh, growth came from getting distributors On the Misho app where these women can directly share the link of the product and the shipment will happen on the distributor side. The women will have her own markup, which she can decide. It's not Misho who decides the markup. Is that right?

A Yes. So, um, when we started this, we wanted to keep the experience to the end customer as similar as it is to an offline boutique, right? So if you go to a boutique, no one puts an MRP on products ever, right? Because Uh, especially in unstructured commerce, there's a lot of negotiation that happens. If I see hundred, if you say hundred rupees, I will never buy it for hundred. I will say, give me a 10% discount, maybe because I'm an old customer, or, um, I will, for example, threaten to walk off from the store. So most people let their customers negotiate. And if we had given a fixed price where we fix a margin, I think that experience would not have been available. So, Very cleverly, something that was, had never been done before anywhere in the world. We said, we will give you a range. This is the men, this is the max. If you sell at men, you make zero margin. If you sell at max, you make maximum margin, but you have the flexibility to price the product. And we saw that this worked really well for all of these women entrepreneurs to convert these customers on WhatsApp.

AI assessment note: “Yes. So, um, when we started this, we wanted to keep the experience”

Q Do you still call your users every now and then?

A Yes. So, and most people in the company do. It's not just me. So for example, we have a program that is called listen or die in the company. Everyone in the company has to speak to users within 30 days every month. And then you have to submit a report of what kind of feedback you got and what we can do to solve some of our user problems. But we have to do it. And why we do it again is because most of the people in this company are not the target user for our app. So how will they ever know what problem we are facing? So I do it. I do it every week. Most of the company does it every month as part of this program. And most people enjoy it because a lot of times you're working, you're coding something, but you never understand the impact of what you've developed. When you speak to someone and she talks about how her life changed because of the product you build, Suddenly you feel a lot of pride in yourself.

AI assessment note: “Yes. So, and most people in the company do. It's not just me.”

Q And how has your go to market changed over a period of time? I remember there was Facebook, then Misho has been seen on TikTok.

A So we use everything. Um, I think we've always been very, very creative in terms of how we approach go to market. Um, so even now a good chunk of our user base, about 10% of all our acquisition happens through influencers on YouTube and Instagram. Who are these influencers? These influencers are local influencers in tier three, tier four cities who talk about opportunities to people. A lot of people don't know about them. A good 10, 15% of our total acquisition, rather more, I think it's about 20% now, comes from user referrals. Why? Because we have women user base who are active on social platforms. It's not a lot of effort telling other people in your family about this opportunity. And that was really one of the big ways of how we could grow so fast. So leveraging referrals where people recommended people in their own family, uh, was a big way for us to grow. And then we have been very creative in terms of using a lot of platforms that are for the next hundred or five hundred million, I would say, such as TikTok, WhatsApp is big for them. Uh, Facebook is big for them. And now we see increasingly Instagram, uh, is also coming up, but we've always been ahead in terms of seeing where our user base is.

AI assessment note: “about 10% of all our acquisition happens through influencers on YouTube and Instagram”

Q So, if I ask you one thing which Misho has replaced in physical world, what it would be? My guess is it would be the MLM kind of networks?

A No, it's the fashion boutique. It's the fashion boutique that women run out of their houses. So, we also realized over time, we used to first think that the same user base, it's very different. People who work with MLM companies are agents for that company. Being an agent does not come with a lot of respect, right? It's more a broker for a particular company. In our case, we have seen, we, which was again a very contrarian move, most people discouraged us to doing this. We do not put Misho's name in front of the end consumer, right? We want this lady to create a home brand, because with that brand comes our identity, with that identity comes respect and confidence, which is a very core part of the gratification that you get from the platform. Right? And it's super important that you deliver this. Women who used to run boutiques earlier were looking for this gratification. Women who are part of MLM were not. So this is a very different kind of user base and we consciously choose this. I'm not making my user base go out and say, Hey, I'm a Misho agent, buy products from me. That's what I mean.

AI assessment note: “No, it's the fashion boutique. It's the fashion boutique that women run out of their houses.”

Q What has been, uh, the thing that has kept the momentum going? You never slowed down. You always kept growing. One thing I remember always, you are always humble, always learning, always ears to the ground.

A So, and I think that comes from the type of business we are in, right? So in our business, none of us are experts at what we are doing. Like I am not a homemaker. I have never run a boutique. I don't know. Uh, I've never been asked to not work and feel not respected at home, right? We've, if you are not humble in this business, you cannot make it big because almost everything that we have done, Every nuance that we've built in our product has come from user feedback. And that user feedback comes when you know every day that I still don't know more than I know. And that has to come from that feeling and everyone in the company knows that. If you come here, one thing that we make everyone do at the time of hiring is speak to our users and get feedback. We don't believe in a lot of exemption that exists in the e-commerce market. We challenge everything because what we are trying to do is something very Very different, very unique for a very different kind of user base, right? How many people are building a product for homemakers in India only? Very few, right? So we've learned only from being very close to our users, and that keeps us humble, and that keeps us wanting to learn more and more, because that has only worked for us. Every year we have solved some hard problem, understanding our user better, and that has helped us Propelling the whole growth part for the company. And I …

AI assessment note: “Every year we have solved some hard problem, understanding our user better, and that has helped”

Q You have spent some time in the Valley. What did you imbibe from there that is part of your company now?

A So during my time of YC, one thing that I took back to India was So in US, people have a lot of focus at what they do. So one thing that I was very surprised by people were achieving a lot with very small team sizes, extremely small team size, like team of four people doing revenues of millions of dollars per year. And the one thing that you used to realize is, uh, everyone is just focusing on one or two problems and they will not do 10 things. It also comes from the fact that a lot of ecosystem is developed. Like for example, If you want to solve for one thing, you will have an API for almost everything else, and you just focus on solving one product problem. Whereas in India, that did not seem to be the case whenever I worked in some companies and I spoke to people, a lot of people always doing a lot of things, team size was larger, which generally takes away focus. So I always tried to bring back everyone to saying, hey, I know now we have resources, we can do a hundred things, but this Is the core of everything, which is making a user successful. You can do a hundred of other things because you have team members, you have time bandwidth to do all of this. But if you don't focus on what the core is very quickly, you start to do a lot of things because it shows growth. Uh, but you lose the edge. And one thing that I saw in USA, like people who are doing one thing, they were j…

AI assessment note: “one thing that I took back to India was So in US, people have a lot of focus”

Q And, uh, what has been the strategy while hiring the key leadership? Like how did you attract them?

A I think I just answered. It's been, um, after we realized what kind of DNA worked for us, which was people who are more entrepreneurial take more ownership. We just focused around it. Now even the company structure we have is aligned to that kind of DNA. So for example, we don't have functional, functional structure in the company. We don't have a head of product, head of business, head of XYZ. We rather have general managers who own outcomes in the company. So one person owns number of users in the company. Number one person owns, uh, the amount of, amount of business every user does on the platform. And they have teams across different functions to get to this outcome. So product team, tech team, marketing team, everything in one to one guy. So it's more like mini startups within the company rather than functional leaders because we realized that we have We're fortunate enough to have so many entrepreneurial guys that we should enable them with the right tools rather than making, make them specialize into something that they don't like.

AI assessment note: “what kind of DNA worked for us, which was people who are more entrepreneurial”

Q And what do you think will unlock, let's say the next level of revenue growth for Misho?

A So we don't think that much about revenue growth as much we think about how do we make our user more successful. Um, our biggest culture value is every day we have to get better and better at making our entrepreneurs more successful. And if that happens, we will make more revenue for sure because people become successful, especially, uh, on both sides of making money, they're always very happy to share those earnings with you, right? And they're also aligned Uh, with your goal. So we don't think as much about revenue, but if you talk about how will we grow as a company and how will we grow as a, uh, as a community, right? So there are three things that we focus a lot on. Like we focus a lot on, um, what kind of TGs we haven't solved the problem for because India is a very heterogeneous country, by the way, as soon as you go beyond the top six cities in India. People speak different language. People eat different. People have very different taste for fashion. The kind of sadis that sell in South India are different from what they sell in East India. Even among South India, all four states have different kind of sadis selling. So you have to localize selection for each and every place. You can add a lot of category that are relevant in different parts of the country. So that is definitely one opportunity that we keep focusing on, keep getting better. Second is how do you make You…

AI assessment note: “if you talk about how will we grow as a company... there are three things”

Q What were the early challenges I would ask, you know, besides raising the fundraise as you said, in building the Misha of today?

A Team, as I said, um, team is definitely a challenge that anyone faces when you are a small team and you don't have money and still you want to get the best of talent. Uh, so it took us time to build the right team, but the good thing is when you don't have a lot of money, And you still try to hire a lot of talent. You will be forced to hire people who are not coming here for money, but they're coming for the larger thing. And that helped us set a particular culture in the company. If we had a lot of money on day one, I would have just overpaid most people who would have come here thinking that I'm getting a lot of salary in this company and they would have come here to do jobs. So some of these challenges are definitely opportunities for anyone. So I would say definitely building a right team in the beginning was a big challenge. Apart from that, I, like everything else was solvable, right? I won't say there's some particular challenge. Uh, fundraising was definitely one of them, um, that I would say. And third thing that I would say at the end of the day, we struggled with a lot some time ago, and it's not as much of a problem now, is how do we get to a lot of these users, right? So as I said, I talked about how, uh, we struggled to get A lot of existing users, existing boutique owners onto a product, that that changed. That happened because we solved that problem by tailoring…

AI assessment note: “team is definitely a challenge that anyone faces when you are a small team”

Q So, uh, you have, I believe, gone to Series E, race last for Series D. Series D. So, tell us about your experience. How has your pitch changed at every round? Because from selling to vision, then talking about numbers, then talking about the market size.

A The vision never changes much, right? Um, it just, the scale changes, and with scale, the kind of things you can do changes. Um, like for example, two years ago, we were not focusing on five different types of TGs, but we do today. Four years, like two years ago, we were focusing a lot on just homemakers, understanding what their problems were, but now the kind of resources we have, we can Like focus on homemakers plus students plus working women plus someone else, retired folks, all of that. But the problem that you're solving is still the same. Our mission is still the same. We want anyone in India focused at women, start their online store without any investment. It's exactly the same thing that we had three years ago. It hasn't changed a bit. Only thing that has changed is numbers. So we go and just show larger numbers to raise money. But practically nothing has changed. It does. Like it does. But because we focus on one thing only, right? Like we want to focus only on one thing. I'm not doing 10 businesses in my, in, in our company, which is very common when you have a lot of resources in India, like you want to do X, Y, Z, everything happening. We continue to focus only on one problem that we will solve and we'll continue to solve that better than anyone else. But practically everything else has remained same.

AI assessment note: “Only thing that has changed is numbers. So we go and just show larger numbers”

Q So how did you get the initial thousand or 10,000 distributors?

A Yeah, so in the beginning getting suppliers, manufacturers or traders on the platform now in 20 twenties, even in 2016 was not that hard because Flipkart and Amazon had done so much work in terms of getting these small or large businesses to learn how to put products online, price them, cataloging them. Getting to the top thousand was not that difficult by the way. Now at 40,000, we realize that a lot of these very, very small manufacturers have never come online. Mostly the big guys have gone online on Flipkart and Amazon. Now we are doing a lot of innovative stuff to train these guys, helping them as much as we can, building more hand-holding experience in the beginning. But at that time, getting to all these manufacturing towns such as Surat, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Panipat solved most of the problems.

AI assessment note: “getting to all these manufacturing towns such as Surat, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Panipat solved most”

Q And, uh, what is the average, uh, earning per month these three million women make through Mishu?

A The average is a very bad reflection because we have people who come with very different expectations from this. There are people who come only to make money, right? There are a lot of women, a lot of women who come here not to make money. Their families are earning enough, but they're coming here because they want respect. So I'll give you a story, right? So I recently was in, ah, one of our community events, which is called Mission Rise in Varanasi. I met this lady. She came to me and said, I want to thank you in person. Because what you've done for me is bigger than anything someone could do. Before Misho came into my life, I used to be known as someone's wife or someone's mother in my locality. Now everyone knows me from my business name that I've created through Misho. She does not care about money. Like her husband earning enough money. The problem was that no one used to care about her. No one used to respect her. So now she's known as a fashion influencer in a community. She gets certain respect in the community for that, and she feels more confident. So a lot of people who come onto the platform are not just coming to make money. They come in looking for an identity, which will make, give them some standing in their community. So that's why the average number doesn't make any sense. We have people who make thousand rupees per month and are active every day on the app. …

AI assessment note: “The average is a very bad reflection because we have people who come with very different”