The Ledger
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Aatrey: Marketplaces cannot be commoditized like payment protocols
“Payments are same on every app. It's not that my, if I do payment with one app to the other, they stand for different things. Payments is a commoditized one simple thing. Products are not. Like it's two different stores you go to cannot be exactly the same. Th…”
Vidit Aatrey: Nykaa does not represent mainstream Indian e-commerce
“I don't think that company is a good representation of India e-commerce. It's very narrow in a category, and very narrow in terms of the customer base they serve. Their average order value, if I remember, comes from 1518 102,000, something like that.”
Aatrey: BlissClub is India's first women-focused fitness brand
“What she's trying to solve is she's fundamentally building the first women focused fitness brand, right? Because in India, most fitness brands have always been associated with men. Like no one saw women focus problems.”
Meesho CEO: Micro-influencers outperform celebrities via brand alignment
“Very, very small influencers are very effective, because it's just not go to the celebrity with millions of followers. You have to find someone who connects with the principle of the brand.”
Vidit Aatrey: Top influencers will match celebrity follower counts within years
“In the next few years, some large celebrities will have the same following as, ah, some large influencers will have the same following as celebrities.”
Aatrey: Hyperlocal celebrity marketing outperforms pan-India ambassadors
“So, we kind of, we had different celebrities for different parts of the country.
Like, we had Swaro Ganguly for West Bengal, we had Ram Charan for a certain state in South India.
So, I'm saying it's a, it's basically we went very local
and we saw that to be mu…”
Aatrey: Meesho's core positioning is the deepest selection at the lowest prices
“When they come to Misho, people believe that this selection I will not get for a more affordable price anywhere else. Like they have to believe this. And I will get the largest possible selection in the price points that I can afford.”
Aatrey: Early profitability pushes e-commerce companies into a negative spiral
“There are one stage of the business, especially in e-commerce. You need to cross a critical mass of scale. And unless you get there, if you try to become profitable too soon, you get into a negative spiral.”
Aatrey: Meesho will become profitable by the end of 2023
“So, our goal is, I think by the end of this year, we'll become profitable.”
Aatrey: 85% of Indian retail is long-tail unbranded small businesses
“And 85% of India retail happens via a lot of these long tail unbranded small businesses.”
Aatrey: Activewear brand BlissClub was built entirely on Instagram
“That entire brand was by the way built on Instagram. Like everything was built on Instagram and they found people.”
Aatrey: Meesho users frequently image-search Instagram screenshots to buy products
“One of the very common Products that people use on the Misho app is people take photographs and they search that same photograph and buy. And most of those photographs come from Instagram.”
Aatrey: Fashion trends have decentralized into relatable, body-double influencer followings
“I feel now it's very decentralized to some extent, and everyone knows what kind of person feels like a body double to me, right? Like, hey, this person has the same beliefs, same liking, same kind of body, and I like this person, I want to buy what they would …”
Aatrey: Indian Aspirational Discretionary Spending Will Grow Non-Linearly
“I just feel like a lot of this as per capita goes up. This 2000 goes to 4000. Most of the increase is happening in discretionary, not like people fulfill their non-discretionary needs anyways, right? So it's going to come here. So I feel that this aspiration t…”
Aatrey: Amazon's core value proposition is speed and convenience over everything else
“Amazon is like convenience. So I want to stand for convenience, right? So they will make sure that everything that you order, you always feel like it comes faster here. As compared to anyone else.”
Aatrey: Only 1M to 1.5M of India's 60M small businesses sell online
“Very, very India has about sixty million small businesses, about million, million and a half only sell anything online.”
Aatrey: Indonesia has 15M online sellers compared to India's 1.5M
“You look at Southeast Asia, e-commerce, they started four years after India. About fifteen million people who sell online, online just in Indonesia. India is still a million, million and a half.”
Vidit Aatrey: Meesho was valued at $5B in last round
“Our valuation, this is the last round of about five billion.”
Vidit Aatrey: Meesho completed 1 billion orders across 140M customers
“We have about 14 crore people who buy from us every year, about a million small businesses. In the last one year, we did about one billion orders, which is about a hundred crore. That's about a hundred crore orders in the last 12 months.”