Your strategy can change. Your product can change. Your mission cannot. @viditaatrey on the first principle he'd teach about pivots: a team needs one anchor point that holds still, because pivots take time and doubt compounds faster than results. (1/2)

In 2021, @Meesho_Official walked away from its reseller business model their $300M Series E had been negotiated on. Half the team was disheartened. Investors asked if it could be run as an experiment alongside the old model. It couldn't. Here are five notes from its case study on why the pivot was still the right call: 1. Meesho never sold anything to shoppers. Women running small shops inside WhatsApp groups did. They showed products to their contacts and took the orders and Meesho got paid by the wholesaler. 2. Then phones got cheap to use, and Covid arrived. Shoppers stopped needing a middlewoman. Users who came to Meesho to resell fell from 70-75% to 35-40% between July and December 2020. 3. As Meesho left the model, Flipkart and Amazon walked into it. Flipkart launched Shopsy for small sellers in July 2021. Amazon bought a reselling startup the year after. 4. Most ecommerce companies take ₹10 to ₹30 out of every ₹100 a seller earns. Meesho took nothing. Its sellers were shifting sari falls and elastic bands under ₹200, where there was no margin to cut into. 5. Winning one customer cost the industry ₹1,000. It cost Meesho about ₹200, because resellers had spent years telling people it existed. FY24: ₹45,650 crore in GMV, ₹7,615 crore in revenue, and ₹197 crore in free cash flow, which was a first for a horizontal ecommerce platform in India.

Resellers were grateful. Consumers were not. @viditaatrey on what @Meesho_Official underestimated when it left reselling in 2021: consumers arrive with expectations, and support, quality, and onboarding all had to be rebuilt to earn the trust that resellers gave for free. (1/2)

"Operating mentors teach you day-to-day execution and the right frameworks. Investing mentors teach you risk, reward, and capital allocation." @myspinny's Niraj Singh on why founders need both and why he's still learning how to get the mix right. (1/2)

In 2017, @myspinny told an investor it planned to shut down the marketplace model they wanted to fund and switch to a full-stack model. The investor pulled their term sheet. Headcount went from 75 to 15. Niraj Singh mortgaged his house and funded the company himself for two years. Here are five notes from its case study on why the pivot was still the right call 1. Spinny didn't own the cars. It just introduced buyers to sellers. For every ₹100 a car sold for, it kept about ₹2. It needed ₹6 or more to survive. 2. The seller still ran the sale: They picked the viewing time and handed over the keys. Spinny got blamed if it went badly. 3. So Spinny rented a lot and parked the cars itself: Far fewer cars. But it now kept ₹5 out of every ₹100 instead of ₹2. 4. By late 2018, it was selling 100 cars a month without spending a rupee on ads. Buyers were telling their friends. 5. Early on, almost every car came from listings on other websites. Three years later, almost none did. Sellers were coming straight to Spinny. From 15 people and one rented lot to ₹4,657 crore in revenue and a $1.8 billion valuation.

The used car market was crowded and overfunded. @niraj001s didn't treat that as the deciding question. His filter was simpler: must-have or good-to-have? Good-to-have services don't survive the long term. (1/2)