Growing up in the small town of Dewas in Madhya Pradesh, Pavan Patil, SDE-IV (Backend) was familiar with how women there often felt restricted by social and family norms. But this did not stop their spirit of entrepreneurship, nor their ability to do jugaad to set off their own small ventures. From community papad making businesses to selling clothes (bought on wholesale from Surat) in Dewas, these ladies were unstoppable. This was also the reason why Pavan, one of Meesho’s earlier members in the engineering team, connected so strongly with Meesho’s mission: to enable anyone to start a business of their own, without an investment.
Pavan feels a strong connection with the women entrepreneurs who are building their businesses on the Meesho platform. In fact, he has introduced several of his acquaintances and neighbours back in Dewas to start their businesses with Meesho, empowering them to shape the finances of their households.
When Pavan joined Meesho in December 2016 as an Android Engineer, the biggest attraction for him was Meesho’s mission to empower women and get them started on their entrepreneurial journey. After joining the company he was happy to see that Meesho was not just talking the talk. And now, four years in, some of his best memories include hustling with his work fam in Meesho’s tech team to ensure that our entrepreneurs are super successful.
Pavan’s life@meesho has been an eventful one, let’s find out more:
Right from childhood, I have sensed the spirit of entrepreneurship in women around me. They have always wanted to take on responsibilities beyond what is usually expected of them. In Dewas, the housewives longed for financial freedom, and having a side hustle was the norm. They would travel to Surat, buy clothes in bulk and sell in our neighbourhood, or make papads at home and sell them to small companies. They taught me that if you have the entrepreneurial spirit, you can start a business from home, but the nature of these small businesses always remains unorganised with a lot of hurdles.
With Meesho, what we are able to do is eliminate those issues for our women entrepreneurs, and help them focus solely on selling their products rather than logistics or investment. In fact, one of my Dewas neighbours has been running a successful online business on Meesho, unencumbered by the minute details, and is able to pay for all of her son’s tuition fees. So, I am actually seeing first hand the impact Meesho has had on the lives of women across India.
The Hustle Is Real
When I joined Meesho as an Android Engineer in 2016, this is the kind of impact I had hoped to make. I met Sanjeev [Barnwal; CTO and Co-Founder] for my interview and learned all about Meesho’s goals and immediately I knew that this was the vision I had for myself too. We were such a small team in the beginning and many of us were fresh out of college, but our convictions were strong and grounded, we were dedicated and hardworking.
As a bootstrapped startup, there were many days spent purely on hustling, finding our way around, and spending some quality time together playing cricket and table tennis as well during some spare moments. We even host annual hackathons, where coders build workable products in 24 hours. Many of those products have been incorporated into the app and become impactful features eventually.
Even though I had worked previously, from previously working at an MNC like Samsung to now huddling around a table at a co-working space and learning to work outside of the 9–5 was a completely new experience for me too. But, from the get-go, I built a good rapport with the team, and Vibin [Reddy; SDE — IV (Android) — Tech] especially was huge support for me.
Pivot Is The Only Way
Soon after I joined, Meesho pivoted its business model to the one we have today, which is even more entrepreneur-centric than before, and I was one of the core team members that built the new version of the app and ramped up business.
A good example of the kind of hustle and ownership one gets to have at Meesho was that my experience was in Android, but a few months down the line, I was asked to handle the Backend. Now I had never worked on the backend before, but Sanjeev expressed confidence in me and was always around to lend a helping hand and encourage me. It felt great to have the CTO show so much faith in my abilities.
The Values Proposition
While I was figuring out the Backend, Vibin was taking full ownership of the Android side of things. Building the app from scratch was one of my most rewarding experiences. And this was followed by working on the feed of catalogs showing up on the app — another project close to me.
Catalog feeds were like quick, short-term experiments that needed to hold the interest of our users, and we needed to constantly watch them and offer real-time solutions if anything went wrong. This was a good example of how the team and I demonstrated Speed over Perfection, one of our core values.
The framework that we built back in the day have all been scaled up to meet our new requirements now. Scaling up the existing framework is as nerve-racking as it is exciting, and we got to do it again recently while launching Meesho Indonesia. Personally, it was one of the most challenging projects, because we had to change the existing code to suit a new market, while also being very mindful about not altering the parent code. Think 10X is the only way to write codes that can withstand changes in the future like this.
More recently I joined team PopShop as the Head of Technology. This is a fully integrated platform that we are building for our small and medium sellers, and it allows them to be fully in control of their online shops. We already have thousands of sellers on the platform and are offering them end-to-end services such as a website to showcase and sell their products, payment and logistics solutions, among other things, with no commission involved.
As someone who has been with Meesho and witnessed its growth from X to 100X, working on PopShop in its initial stages is a full-circle moment for me. Taking Ownership and Company>Team>Individual are the other two core values that have always been of great importance to us, and they shine through in this project as well.
When I was part of the core team initially, I realised that Company>Team>Individual was the one value that put all other values into perspective. We were working day and night writing code, with a vision for the future of the company and all other values fell into place. To achieve our company goals we had to take ownership and execute our tasks fast. Further, our company goals were aligned with making our users successful. So, whenever we shipped any new feature, we used to talk to our users to glean useful feedback on how they felt about the new feature.
Listen and Learn
Ultimately, to me, everything that Meesho does is to make entrepreneurs successful, and so of course, we would regularly communicate with them, and understand how they are liking a new feature, what improvements they would like to see, and so on. Hearing any praises about the features firsthand from them, makes me believe that all the effort I put into my work is absolutely worth it. Till date, I make it a point to interact with our entrepreneurs directly and understand their needs to ensure that their lives are a little bit better because of the work we are doing.
I have always dreamed of having this level of impact with my work. For a brief period of time before joining Meesho, I had even started my own startup wherein the idea was to unify the healthcare system under one umbrella and connect doctors and labs with patients. But, due to some operational hurdles, it did not work out, but at Meesho I have had that opportunity to make my work matter.
Growing up with no access to the internet or role models in this field, little did I know that I would end up studying engineering at IIT Roorkee, and eventually get to work in one of the fastest-growing startups in India and be able to do work that enriches me. To become a software engineer whose work empowers women to become financially independent has been a dream run for me.
Ayush Baheti found the perfect mix of problem solving and social impact at Meesho
Rajendra Choudhary on helping entrepreneurs grow from X to 100X since Day 1
Want to join Pavan Patil and Meesho’s tech team to help women across India become financially independent? Click here to see if Meesho has the right job for you.
