Creating ‘Digital Entrepreneurs’

According to the founders, the most special thing about Meesho platform/app is that it allows any person to be an entrepreneur without any investment, from the comfort of their homes. It’s a ‘zero investment’ proposition which creates ‘digital entrepreneurs.

How does the app work? To begin with, starting a business on Meesho app doesn’t require any investment or qualification. The start-up follows the concept of reselling. Once the user enters the app, there is a well-established catalogue of products ranging from clothing to kitchen equipment. All a user needs to do is resell those products to their contacts by sharing the catalogue to friends, family or others on various social platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and generate sales. A commission is earned on every order besides bonuses.

Users also have the option of listing their own products by enrolling into Meesho’s seller account following which they can broadcast themselves on various online social groups and start earning.

Building this app was not easy. Like every start-up, Meesho founders had their share of struggle during the initial days, right from developing the app to deciding on the language. But every decision they made, it was taken in the direction of creating a ‘user-focussed’ business. The start-up wanted to reach out to as many sellers as possible during their early stage itself to get the head start without any risk.

Around 10% of Meesho users are influencers on Instagram and Youtube who are able to make a handsome income by reselling products on the platform. A large chunk of their users also consists of women and students, who are usually very active on social media and are thus able to leverage the opportunity, following small store owners in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

In an interview with Y-Combinator, a California-based seed accelerator, Aatrey had mentioned that they imbibed a lot of patience, especially during the initial days and hired like-minded people from their own network. He terms this as the “single best decision” of his life while reinstating the value of having a strong foundation.

In 2016, the start-up was one of the three Indian companies to be selected by Y-Combinator for a three-month summer programme besides being a part of the first batch of Google Launchpad – Solve for India program.

Meesho secured its first funding of $120,000 from the california-based seed accelerators. Since then, the start-up has raised a total of $515.2 million in funding over 9 rounds; the latest one being Series E in April 2021 which gave the six-year-old start-up a valuation of $2.1 Billion and an entry into the prestigious unicorn club.

In June 2019, Meesho became the first start-up from India to receive an investment from Facebook. The start-up managed to grab the Big Tech’s attention due to its target audience—women and students— and their common goal of enabling small communities and businesses to grow. This partnership was also a part of the tech giant’s strategy to expand its presence in the rising internet market. Facebook has more users in India than it does in any other country and the number is on a steady rise. With India emerging as the second biggest smartphone market, the opportunity is immense.

The Early Entrant

70% of India is said to speak non-English language and that’s where Dailyhunt’s product finds its relevance. Understanding the ignored and untapped potential customer, something majority of the start-ups and giants hunt for today, Dailyhunt was the first one in the league to enter the regional content space.

The market environment also played its role as a catalyst for Dailyhunt’s success. The smartphones were getting cheaper and the app stores were taking off back then. Dailyhunt’s ascendance coincided with Android’s rise in India. This gave the company its golden push to capture the market and take an early lead. Not only they created the content which customers understood (news/information) but also what they enjoyed (short videos).

Dailyhunt’s platform provides three major types of content: news, e-books and magazines. The entire content is available in 14 different regional languages and can be accessed through the app or the website. Majority of it is sourced from over 3,000 providers, including some hyperlocal correspondents for news.

Talking about revenue, the major chunk comes from advertisement. It ties up with large news media and publishing houses for content on its platform and shares the advertising revenue on the news screens with them. Second is the revenue generated from e-books and magazines, which is shared with the publishers.

The platform to date has progressed from 2,000 content creators to 50,000, progressing towards personalised content.

A Multi-Faceted App

While it is important to cash on the opportunities with right moves, it is more important to have the foresight to understand the market sentiment and create an opportunity out of it.

The sound of ‘Made in India’ and ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ echoed loud in the country, with local companies jumping on to the opportunity. Dailyhunt was not far behind. It already had a product at place which was created on those sentiments and the market environment further accentuated its popularity.

In September 2020, the company launched a short video making app — Josh — to fill the void created by Tik Tok, Likee, Vigo and other Chinese apps which were banned by the Indian government.

This latest addition to the platform is estimated to have around 85 Million monthly active users with over 1.5 Billion video playing daily. It has managed to stitch partnerships with 200 exclusive content creators on the platform. Local language support is one of the key attractions of this app which saw a massive growth in the first few days of its launch itself. This is especially applauding because Dailyhunt placed its bet on regional languages at the time when it was considered not so ‘glamorous’. The business was driven solely on the sheer demand for such products, with no frills attached.

Dailyhunt entered the Billion dollar club after raising a funding of over $100 Million led by Google, Microsoft and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation. Following the announcement, the company raised another over $100 Million as part of a Series H financing round from Qatar Investment Authority and Glade Brook Capital Partners. To date, the company had managed to secure $430 Million from various investors.
The latest round is to scale up Josh and double down on its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) push. This brings us to the strong technology backing of the app, which has been devised intuitively, driven by AI, and is an outcome of deep machine learning.

Strong Technology at Play

It is pertinent to talk about the technology behind this app and overall Dailyhunt platform, which is one of the reasons behind its sustainable success and product differentiation.

Each language has its own script. One of the challenges Dailyhunt faced was interpreting the font of that particular language on mobile devices. The issue was tackled at an early stage itself. Besides, each language has its nuisance in terms of its correlation of multiple words with other languages. So when people work on data science and machine learning, sentences are broken into words and are correlated. This complexity was solved by the company through supervised and unsupervised data learning technology. In the former, the machine is trained allowing you to collect data or produce output from the previous experience while the unsupervised learning technique doesn’t need training or intervention. This is done because, if the reader doesn’t understand the context of each word, he can’t enjoy the essence or emotion of a content.

Using AI inputs like time, usage patterns, festivals, clusters and social signals, Dailyhunt is able to categorise content. The company claims to be only one in the field to have its own ad-tech online real-time auction bidding engine, besides Google and Facebook. The company’s system has been architected to run a huge data stake and user signals in real time, hence, enabling them to deliver data in real time.

This robust technology serves one single purpose – Creation of a strong digital media platform and an AI driven content discovery environment which will help consumers discover, consume and socialise with content.

Give wings to goals with passion

Get completely immersed in your vision and allow it to consume and engulf you. It is not uncommon for Mark Zuckerberg to stay up late to programme while at Harvard nor for his company to conduct all night hackathons. Some of these nightly sojourns have given birth to the Facebook features that we casually use such as Chat and Friend Suggestions. While it is not about night and day, what is important is the fact that when you passionately obsess over your vision some of the best breakthroughs happen. Entrepreneurial success comes only when you give yourself completely to the vision and obsess over how you can achieve that vision that is burning within you.

“Ideas don’t come out fully formed. They only become clear as you work on them. You just have to get started”. Mark Zuckerberg.

Keep the customer in mind always

When businesses build and create products and services with the customer at the forefront, it is always a win. It is very easy to fall prey to your product and eventually stay in love with it and completely lose sight of what the customer wants. This is one of the most common failures of entrepreneurship when the founders end up spending time on convincing the customer that they need the same. Instead, if entrepreneurs pause and understand the customer mind and get under their skin to know what makes them tick and then marry it to the entrepreneurial vision, the outcome is easily saleable. Facebook works with the overarching theme of what customers want to share about themselves in a social platform which is the driving motto behind the backend of Facebook.

Build simple but effective products

Making a product that is simple, easy to use, and addresses the key concerns of a well-defined target group is key. That is what Facebook excelled at. It never over engineered anything beyond a point and struck at an optimum point. In an overzealous attempt to dazzle the customer, entrepreneurs often make the product so feature rich that becomes counterproductive. As entrepreneurs it would be worthwhile to learn how to build a simple and effective product that fascinates the customer but never overpowers them as that puts them off.

“I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.” Mark Zuckerberg

Start small but think big always

While it’s admirable to have a grand vision and passionately think about it always. Actions are what will take you closer to the goal. Interestingly Facebook, while having the vision of connecting the world, took it small initially opening Facebook up only for college students, who are reachable and available. Scaling up immediately after founding can be extremely dangerous, however starting small and gradually building as funds and support trickle in will be a wise move. Entrepreneurial success is largely dependent on the first few years of stability which is when the team, customers, and money start to trickle in.

“I’m here to build something for the long-term. Anything else is a distraction.” Mark Zuckerberg

Rejig your teams as you move the needle

One of the sharpest things to do as an entrepreneur would be to know what type of team members you need at each stage of the company’s growth. This was something Mark Zuckerberg did intuitively. He shrugged off some of the founding members to bring in new talent as the company scaled. Facebook’s hire of Sheryl Sandberg as its COO was a prudent one and was instrumental for the company’s phenomenal growth. So, knowing what team should be in place at what stage of the company is required of business leaders. Entrepreneurs must keep the growth of the organization at the epicentre and never be clouded by emotions.