Meesho: Spotting the gap led to e-Commerce revolution

HYDERABAD: Pivoting the business model after realising the actual gap in the market — the lack of ability of small businesses to expand to eCommerce platforms — gave birth to Meesho.

The journey of Meesho started in 2015 with two 24-year-old entrepreneurs, the CEO and Founder of Meesho, Vidit Aatrey, made the decision to leave InMobi in 2015 and launch his own business along with his college classmate. Then he co-founded Meesho alongside its founder and CTO, Sanjeev Barnwal. They both came up with the concept to create a platform to assist, Micro. Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs).

Meesho is an e-commerce platform focused on bringing the small business economy of India online. As of today, there are 100 million consumers who have bought the products through over half a million small businesses across all kinds of categories on the platform.

For a majority of sellers, who sell on Meesho today, the platform has become a single or the major source of livelihood for them.

Coming from middle class families, they observed that the majority of Indians bought from local and small scale businesses. They identified that these businesses did not have a platform to expand their revenue. This problem excited them and pushed them to go on and find a solution

They observed over time that not a single small business practiced e-commerce or even aware of it.

They researched as to why these businesses were not doing online selling and found out that the sellers were only interested in maintaining the local customer base. They launched 'Fashnior' for the few businesses which were willing to expand but they failed. They later realised that understanding businesses was not enough; they needed to understand the customers as well.

That's when Meesho came into existence, it was a small scale launch where they helped out the small businesses. Later, they realised that most of the small businesses were run by women and they needed a platform to showcase their ability to be independent and earn a living. What Meesho did inadvertently helped millions of women to start businesses of their own without any capital.

The stories of these women have inspired the founders to strive hard toward the betterment of people.