The CEO who kills his own winning products

This article summarizes an episode of Vertex Ventures’s video series featuring Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of Meesho.

Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of Meesho/ Photo credit: Vidit Aatrey

Success breeds complacency, but clinging to a winning product often guarantees its obsolescence.

Vidit Aatrey, co-founder and CEO of Meesho, argues that business leaders must dismantle their profitable designs before shifting markets or competitors do the job for them.

By prioritizing the core problem over beloved software solutions, Aatrey outlines a framework for survival that treats code as disposable and forces companies to constantly reinvent their approach.

Fixing the issue matters more than loving the app

Many founders mistake casual customer conversations for deep market insight. Meesho bypassed this trap by treating its apps as temporary tools.

To bring Indian shoppers and independent businesses online, Meesho developed a methodology that treated software as expendable by observing distinct market behaviors:

• Notice missing behaviors: Aatrey and his co-founder observed people shop online in Bangalore and saw nobody doing the same in their hometowns.
• Talk to both sides: Their initial software failed because the team listened to shop owners while ignoring frustrated shoppers.
• Watch actions over words: Sitting inside physical stores showed the founders that owners already used WhatsApp chat groups as digital storefronts.
• Find the urgent users: Physical store owners merely played with the software, but people making a living selling items online used the application daily.
• Build for heavy users: The company started giving online sellers inventory without upfront costs.
• Shut things down quickly: The team killed failing projects immediately and discarded successful ones when shopper habits evolved.

This methodology distills down to one principle. “Be very rigid with your problem,” says Aatrey, “and be very flexible with your solution.”

Relying on chat apps only worked for a short time

This willingness to discard functional code meant the team constantly evaluated its vulnerabilities, identifying the next major threat lurking within its recent success.

Leveraging chat groups to sell products made strategic sense for India in 2016 when mobile internet access remained expensive and downloading unfamiliar applications felt risky.

A popular messaging service offered familiar habits and built-in trust, giving the emerging platform a crucial foothold. However, the company soon realized its actual advantage came from understanding why people rejected new software in the first place.

The moment internet prices dropped and phone storage increased, relying on those same chat groups became a huge operational burden.

Text messages bypassed expensive internet fees
Early users actively uninstalled heavy programs because phone carriers sent constant alerts about data limits, a friction point solved by allowing buyers to choose when to download photos through a simple text messenger.

Avoiding a safe test protected the entire business

AI opens doors for new buyers

The traditional digital store could disappear entirely