Today, Meesho, one of India’s leading online retail and merchant tools companies, goes public. It is the second YC company to be listed in India.

We met Meesho’s founders, Vidit and Sanjeev, three months into their journey. They applied to the Summer 2016 YC batch just after they launched their website. According to their application, they had 300 users at the time. As with most beginnings of great startups, they had a pretty clear idea of the problem they were solving, but hadn’t figured out the solution yet.

Their problem was this: very small merchants represented a large percentage of the total online retail market in India, and those merchants were being underserved by the existing tool sets. Shopify and Bigcommerce, the existing tool providers at the time, were too expensive and too heavyweight for their needs. The example they gave during their interview was that of a homemaker who had a side business selling sarees to her friends and neighbors. She did this primarily over WhatsApp and Facebook.

While selling sarees to your neighbors didn’t scream ‘big opportunity’, the India-specific example was foreign enough to the two American and one Australian interviewers that it kept us on our toes. Going into the interview, we thought the Indian online retail market was already crowded, with the likes of Flipkart, Zomato, and Amazon India. But from their example, it became clear that we didn’t know what we didn’t know. The statistic that got our attention was that 3M Indians were selling (mostly apparel) on Facebook, and less than 5% had websites. For reference, there are a total of 3M small retailers (online and offline) in the entire US. This was a big opportunity.

The Meesho founders (2016)

Meesho’s startup journey is not the tale of a rocketship to the moon. Rather, it was a decade-long grind of long days and disciplined product development. It is a tale of constantly asking customers what they need and then quickly and relentlessly iterating and testing solutions. It’s a tale of not shying away from hard problems. They started out by creating e-commerce tools that integrated with Facebook’s Graph API. These tools helped sell and track orders. The tools got better and better, and the number of merchants grew along with those improvements.

By staying close to their customer, the team soon realized that supply chain logistics and shipping problems were the biggest impediments to their merchants’ growth. But as we all learned during COVID, supply chains are complicated and fragile. Improving supply chains is a hard problem. Rather than shy away, they leaned in. By doing so, they not only solved their customers’ problems but also built a business that is not easily copycatted.

Next, they learned that their merchants wanted to drive more traffic in order to grow. Recognizing the growing importance of influencers and online content in purchasing decisions, they built tools for these creators in order to drive that traffic. Then, in 2021, six years after they started Meesho, they launched a consumer-facing app and website, competing with the likes of Flipkart and Amazon India. It turns out that India’s online retail market wasn’t that crowded after all.

Over the course of 10 years, Meesho has methodically built their company by relentlessly listening to their customers. They have followed where their customers’ problems led them. In doing so, they have helped India harness the energy of its small business entrepreneurs. Their tale should serve as a great example to all startups.

Vidit and Sanjeev are both humble people with unassuming demeanors. That exterior, however, belies relentless energy and a steely determination to change the world. We couldn’t be more proud to have been a part of their journey to becoming a public company and wish them the best on their journey forward.