It was the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Our resellers were forced to stop all sales and their earnings came to a halt. And at Meesho, we were wondering what we could do to create a revenue stream for them again in spite of all the restrictions. It was in these trying times that Meesho Superstore came into being...
Origin Story:
Two days into the lockdown, the answer struck us — grocery! — one of the only commodities that could be sold in spite of all the restrictions. Initially called Meesho Mandi, it was our endeavour to ensure resellers had a livelihood when e-commerce deliveries were shut across the country.
We spoke to Milan Partani, Business Head of Meesho Superstore, who was mostly responsible for orchestrating the initiative and building it to where it is today.
Despite having no experience in the category, “we figured out who would be the sellers, how to do hyperlocal discovery, how to enable intra-city logistics - all within a week and on the eighth day, we started taking orders,” says Milan. Meesho Mandi was open for business.
We identified 2 - 3 vegetable vendors such as Ninjacart, Terafarms etc. who would supply fresh fruits and vegetables to retail stores and onboarded them on our platform. Since most of these were B2B sellers, they were selling bulk quantities of any vegetable, which our resellers used to further weigh and break into smaller quantities as per their customer orders for distribution. Although our resellers found it operationally difficult to work in this setup, they started making money again and wanted more grocery categories to sell.
First Big Challenge: Scale this offering to more cities and categories
About 3 weeks into operations, we realised that our current suppliers were strong only in certain geographies and limited categories thus, restricting us from scaling fast. This presented our first challenge — scaling our offering to a wider geography. We partnered with: Vishal Megamart, a chain with a presence across a wider range of cities and categories, and Zomato to tap into their idle delivery fleet to deliver groceries from Vishal to our resellers. And boom, we scaled our offering to 100+ cities across India using this network within a week and many of our resellers across the country were back in business.
Aha Moment: Stop-gap solution turns into a pilot business model
In a matter of 4 weeks, we had managed to create a pool of suppliers, solve for hyperlocal discovery, unlock a large delivery fleet, and enabled our resellers across 200+ cities to make money again. What was more heartening was that we saw a rise in demand for this service! So, we thought why not make it a full-fledged business?
We created a small team to look into grocery selling as a business arm and during our outside-in, we found that we had unwittingly piloted a community business model that some companies in China had also created.
Listen Or Die: We followed our Listen or Die ritual, and conducted on-ground research in local markets every day at 3:00 am for a week.
We met every link in the supply chain on the ground — every farmer, wholesale seller, aggregator, retailer and consumer — and understood their way of operating, price points and margins, and pain points.
7 bold moves that helped us with scaling Farmiso from zero to one
1. Launch first, iterate later
Over-indexing on planning at this stage will not be fruitful especially because success depends on how fast we adapt to new things we learn from business. While incumbents took over 2 years to set up and launch a hyperlocal business (that’s the amount of time it takes to move from a national shipping structure to hyperlocal), we took decisions in such a way that we could hit the ground fast. Our product team ensured that hyperlocal deliveries are supported on our app from a tech point of view, while business teams figured out if there are partners who can both help us with supply as well as delivery.
2. Find partners to work with - bring PMF - then build yourself
Milan recollects reaching out to folks from Swiggy, Zomato, and Vishal Mega Mart over LinkedIn, using common connects or cold connections to try and find solutions to problems that were already solved for the industry. In some of these calls were synergies and opportunities identified. When one of our vendors was unwilling to break minimum order quantities (about ~10-15 kilos of vegetables) into smaller chunks that were being ordered on our platform (about ~2-5 kilos of vegetables), we reached out to Zomato.
In our pilot stage, the Zomato fleet would pick up our shipments from the Ninjacart warehouse - split them into smaller order chunks and deliver them to our users in a hyperlocal fashion. Only when we saw traction, we started questioning - how do we scale this model nationally? Who would partner with us at scale? That’s when Vishal Mega Mart(VMM, for short) was introduced. VMM’s ~100 stores would provide supply, Zomato would pick up orders, our resellers would make the sale and our end customers would have their groceries at their doorstep even during peak lockdown period - and all of this enabled by Meesho, within four weeks of launch! Since we did not have the expertise of building a hyperlocal supply chain for fresh, we started offloading roles to partners - supply, warehousing, packaging, and deliveries.
3. Heavy experimentation attitude
Despite having no experience in the category, “we figured out who would be the sellers, how to do hyperlocal discovery, how to enable logistics and on the eighth day, we started taking orders,” says Milan. While the vendors were sourcing, packaging and delivering, we focused on organising and running the entire process keeping speed in mind. The rationale behind the move was to hit the ground running and save time so that they could understand the seller/user experience in real time and make tweaks to the system immediately. We knew with moving fast, with moving ahead with so many partners we would eventually hit customer experience negatively in some form. But then we would learn from it, and then improve on it. Milan says this was the “dirtiest speed over perfection” that they had ever undertaken.
4. Lean, lean, lean
Instead of investing in a warehouse (a path taken by most grocery businesses), we leased out a space within one of our vendors’ warehouses while outsourcing packaging to another vendor. Always ask: Is this wide-scale investment needed?
Additionally, at the time, no one in our team had last-mile (delivery stretch from the seller/retailer to the consumer) delivery experience. So, we outsourced the last mile delivery operations to a couple of other vendors including Shadowfax, BlowHorn, and Let’s Transport among others. Always ask: Can we outsource?
Even when we moved our city from Bangalore to Kolar, we continued to use the Bangalore infrastructure to save time and cost of setting up the facility from scratch. The end result of this continuous endeavour was that we re-launched Farmiso (our then re-branding) within 14 days of closing operations in Bangalore. Always ask: Can we reuse what we already have?
5. Genchi, Genbutsu & Genjitsu
There are 3Gs is a Japanese concept which means “In case of an abnormality, all the concerned members should actually go to the place where the problem has occurred, see the actual thing & take realistic action to solve the problem” - and that’s exactly what we did.
“Empathy is the most effective Speed Over Perfection technique.” - Milan Partani
Farmiso was built on very heavy on-ground real understanding, as decision-makers ‘did’ before they ‘prescribed’, so the processes that were set worked well for us.
Resellers would share a google form with consumers to place orders and then eventually place orders on the app. After a point of time, we started seeing drop-offs and figured that resellers were not able to collate orders from a google form.
To go deeper into what was breaking, Milan himself became a reseller for his society for one month. Every day he would send the form, collate orders, place orders and observe the process microscopically. This gave him confidence, that this would work - and resellers would make good money. Other leaders also followed and built conviction.
“Speed over Perfection is all about getting your hands dirty to learn fast” - Milan Partani
6. Openness to failure: Learn, accept, move on
Three months into the business, the demand team made a startling insight. As the lockdown restrictions eased, price as a value wasn’t enough for the Tier 1 consumers of Bangalore. The demand for convenience i.e. doorstep delivery and delivery at specific time slots increased.
When deliveries were found to be slow in Bangalore, Milan and a couple of Meeshoites sat in delivery vehicles and noted down reasons for slow deliveries. A part of the problem was latitude/longitudes being off by 30-50 metres, one-way lanes, delivery in peak traffic hours, etc. Some were solvable, but some problems made us realise that Bangalore was not the most lucrative city to run speedy, low-cost grocery deliveries.
7. Ruthless prioritisation
Taking hard calls will always be an important part of any 0-1 journey. As is using data and user-first thinking to identify only the most critical-to-growth initiatives. Bangalore wanted faster deliveries, to enable faster deliveries the cost of delivering increased, and our core value proposition of building the lowest cost supply chain for groceries was compromised.
A lot of companies let personal bias into their decision-making and end up prioritising ‘critical-to-experience’ hygiene initiatives that may or may not lead to growth. Not us. Always ask: Is this a 10X opportunity?
And hence, we took the difficult, yet necessary decision to stop operations in Bangalore. But with the promise to relaunch within 10 days in a different city.
We split the team into six and sent them to smaller, tier-2 and tier-3 cities around Bangalore with a 100 sq. km. radius. We replicated the on-ground exercise there only to find that the market, especially in Kolar, is very strong and largely unstructured.
Plus, the ease in traffic increased our last mile vehicle utilisation by 200% and reduced the cost of delivery by almost 2 times. We knew we had found our ideal city to launch Farmiso. And in 14 days, we launched Kolar. At this point during our interview, Milan re-emphasises our Listen or Die principle and says the best way to understand the users' (reseller and consumer) pain points is to go and talk to them.
Our model has undergone a lot of changes, and it continues to change. Even as we speak, we’re pivoting our last-mile operations from a pickup model to a home-delivery model. All this while trying to maintain our low-cost value proposition. The only thing that hasn’t changed is us asking ourselves, each day: Are we fast enough? Are we learning faster?
Credits:
- Written by Sheeba Mammen (LinkedIn, Twitter)
- Edited by Aastha Shah (LinkedIn, Twitter) and Mangala Dilip (LinkedIn, Twitter)
- Designed and illustrated by Shoumita Dhar (LinkedIn, Dribble)
- Special thanks to Milan Partani (LinkedIn, Twitter), Prachi Jha (LinkedIn) and Aastha Shah
