This Y Combinator startup makes it easy to sell on Facebook and WhatsApp

Meesho team in Bangalore. Photo credit: Meesho.

A curious phenomenon occurred in India during the past few years as the smartphone wave swept the country. The mom and pop stores that dotted its towns and cities skipped the usual ecommerce and landed right into Facebook and WhatsApp – the two social spheres where India converses, debates, and simply hangs out.

Artistic housewives, creative prodigies, and fun hobbyists also found Facebook and WhatsApp perfect lanes to set up shops, invite friends to take a peek at what was on sale, like and comment on them if interested, and then close the sale offline. Here’s where Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, pals since their college days at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, spotted a big opportunity. The new shopkeepers on Facebook and WhatsApp could do with some help in running their business, the duo figured. So they built some mobile tech tools for it. And their startup Meesho won the backing of Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator.

In India, we know that small businesses would be traders and remain traders.

Now as Meesho graduates from Y Combinator Summer ‘16 batch, the startup is launching its full suite of tools and also announcing a round of funding from Indian angel investors VH Capital, Kashyap Deorah, Rajul Garg, Investopad founders Arjun and Rohan Malhotra, Maninder Gulati, Abhishek Jain, and Jaspreet Bindra.

“India is not like China, which has millions of manufacturers. There, Alibaba could just put it all together and sell it to the whole world. In India, we know that small businesses would be traders and remain traders. You can’t make them manufacturers or weavers who will make unique stuff and sell,” Vidit says.

“So, what we can do for these small businesses is to help them do trading easily – procure supplies easily, let them display their products to their customer base, and sell to their customers easily. That’s what we are working on,” he explains.

Vidit and Sanjeev got these insights the hard way – from their own experience founding and running a hyperlocal fashion marketplace, FashNear.

Not the textbook pivot

Meesho founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal at Y Combinator. Photo credit: Y Combinator.

Vidit and Sanjeev started FashNear in July 2015. It was a mobile app where you could see offline shops around you selling fashion merchandize. You could pick all you wanted to try, get them delivered at home for trial, and then buy what you picked. Sounds great, isn’t it? Not really, Vidit and Sanjeev soon found out.

India is not like China, which has millions of manufacturers.

Indian shoppers online expect huge discounts. That’s the big lure ecommerce companies have been using to coax doubting customers to buy online. From Amazon to Myntra, everyone’s running some kind of sale all year round. But offline stores can’t afford that – especially not small businesses. They sell on MRP (maximum retail price), except once or twice a year.

“We realized that when we put the products on an app, most consumers would simply compare it with other fashion apps like Myntra. For them, an app is just an app – even though the products with heavy discounts on Myntra would be that of season minus one or season minus two – basically old stuff – and when you buy from shops around you, that means all of it is fresh stuff which aren’t discounted. Users don’t realize this. They ask, why no discount?” Vidit tells Tech in Asia.

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