Products for Bharat Are Built in the Field, Not in the Boardroom

Default behaviour is offline

When your user is a first-time internet adopter, your real competitor is not another app. It's the local input dealer who has known their family for two decades. We learned this the hard way after spending months optimising our checkout funnel. Conversions barely moved.

What moved them was a phone number on the screen and a Hindi-speaking voice on the other end. Not because the product was broken — but because trust isn't a button you A/B test.

Pivots are not failures, they are tuition

We started as a pure advisory subscription. It worked — 100K+ paid users, healthy retention. But the unit economics on subscription alone wouldn't take us to profitability in a market this price-sensitive.

So we pivoted into a multi-brand e-commerce marketplace. Same users. Same trust. New monetisation surface. Within 18 months we hit $10M ARR and operational profitability — repeat transactions went from 20% to 70%, prepaid from 5% to 50%.

The pivot wasn't a failure of the original idea. It was the original idea paying for the next one. That's the part founders don't talk about: the first product is rarely the business. It's the permission slip to build the real one.

Unit economics are a creative tool

Most PMs I meet treat unit economics as a finance problem. I treat them as a product problem.

When we expanded gross margins from ~20% to ~45%, it wasn't through cost-cutting. It was through launching private-label products that we sourced and priced ourselves, changing the basket mix by surfacing higher-margin SKUs, and rewarding prepaid behaviour with small but visible nudges.

Every one of those was a product decision. The CFO didn't write them — the product roadmap did.

What I'm taking into AI

I'm now doing 0-to-1 again — this time on an AI product going to India, Africa, and South America. The playbook isn't transferable verbatim. But the instincts are.