What I learnt from the founders of Zepto
I got a chance to hear the story of how Aadit Palicha and Kaivalya Vohra started kiranakart which gradually turned into zepto at a Y Combinator Startup School meetup, at the zepto office.
I have a bunch of learnings and observations from interacting with the founders:
- Starting early helps. By the time KV was 15 and had no intention to start a company right away (it was something he thought he’d do when he was in his late twenties), he’d binge-watched quite many Y Combinator and similar high-quality resources which must’ve been crucial to improving that founder DNA.
- Prior history with the cofounder can be helpful. You have more time and a richer dataset to evaluate fit. The prior history and years of friendship helped convince them to try out this grocery idea with just a 40-second phone call.
- Speed is super important. Their first version (put together in a few days) was a pure software marketplace platform that they expected to blow up overnight. Nothing happened. They iterated to a consumer-facing app with them buying and delivering products, then to partner with local kirana stores, then to dark stores model. All these iterations and launches together were done in just 2-3 months, some of which were put together in just a few days.
- Being scrappy helps increase speed. When they wanted to partner with a kirana store with all its inventory online, many would have taken the longer route of getting a space, buying racks and equipment, buying items, and hiring someone to enter things into a database. But it’s too sophisticated for the early stage. Instead, they partnered with a kirana guy, manually scanned and entered all the items on the database themselves, and even monitored deliveries. It was faster. Just like code smell, I believe in speed smell, and speed smell has to be intuitively fouler than code smell in the early days.
- Willingness to do anything. Early on, being a grocery delivery startup essentially means you’re a delivery boy. Imagine being from a key area in Mumbai, pursuing undergrad from Stanford, and roaming around in autos doing delivery all day. You’d get made fun of, a lot, by the people closest to you as well. Most people can’t do it. But they didn’t care. They knew they had to do it all-deliveries, support, and product dev.
- Markets are never saturated. A lot of investors turned them down because there were a lot of people in this space, and a lot had already tried and died. After the event, I asked Aadit the famous Peter Thiel question-“What do you believe strongly but most people disagree with?”. He replied, “There are no bad markets or bad business spaces. The right person can even turn around the airlines market, even though it has a bad rep for not being so profitable.” This must’ve been a strong enough belief, because it is true for grocery business as well, and I think they are the right guys here.
- Talk to the dead. Learning from others’ mistakes is a huge power-up. Early on, they spoke to people who’ve already tried and failed in this space and understood why they failed. This helped them not make the same mistakes and die similar death.
- Measure your product. They would have never pivoted and believed so strongly in 10-minute delivery if they didn’t look at the data points which showed better retention and repeat orders when the delivery time was low. I would imagine they tried to find a correlation with many other parameters and retention and stumbled upon this in the process. None of it is possible if you don’t measure your product. Analytics is key.
- Being data-driven. I’ve always admired this about the zepto founders. They can answer your doubts and questions with data, not just with conviction.
- Having other founders on similar journey accelerates you. Y Combinator and its group sessions played a huge role in pushing them to do more in less time. When you hear the progress others have made in the meantime, it makes the competition more evident and pushes you to your limits. This behavior is hard to reproduce if you are building in a vacuum.
While writing this I realized they are the Facebook of their space. Growing super-fast. I wonder if they will face
the problems of clones in markets they don’t serve yet, just like Facebook. It’d have been a great
question to ask. However, meeting them has been super inspiring. Plus, I got to meet many founders from Mumbai and a
lot of them are working on something really interesting! Hopefully the momentum of the local community continues.
If you liked the blog above, you should also read: Advice I wish someone gave me before I joined college →