ConsumerTech in India
Last 8 years have been nothing short of amazing in India, with smartphones penetration and Internet access going through the roof, most of our life has moved online.
The hardest nut to crack was shifting financial transactions online, Which UPI did really well.
With Smartphone penetration, Interent access + UPI, building in consumertech got more interesting, but even 8 years later we haven’t even scratched the surface.
There are 1000’s of service companies, D2C brands, Saas companies but hardly consumer tech companies.
“India has very few consumer app builders and only countable good apps”
If you’re exploring to build in consumertech, I would highly encourage you to pursue it.
To make your journey little easy, I will be sharing few frameworks that helped me approve or disapprove an idea in 5mins.
The entire startup ecosystem will teach you to think of products or ideas with an old framework → Acquisition, retention, and monetization
The acquisition means how will you bring users to your product, would be the cost, whether is it easy or hard
Retention means How many users are coming back to your product, what’s the reason for them to come back, is it already an established behavior or are you creating one?
Monetization means will consumers pay for it? how much are they paying? while they pay you at regular intervals?
But on the contrary here’s how you should think about ideas,
Monetization first: Will the consumer pay for this? validate that first
Retention: Why will the users come back to the product again? how many times are they likely to come back? are you trying to create a behavior or capitalize on one?
For example: On an app like swiggy you can keep on ordering food all your life, and you don’t have to worry about retention but imagine a learning app, it is hard to solve retention for such products because of no motivation for consumers.
Acquisition: How hard is it to acquire consumers? how long the sales cycle is going to be? What’s the cost per lead/cost per acquisition
A sizable business can easily be built if you have either one of these things:
High Monetisation: Where consumers are paying you high-value ticket sizes ex: Byju’s / unacademcy - their users churn after a certain period of time but ticket size compensates well
High retention: An app that high-retention users are coming back to the app again and again, ex: A payment app, a messenger app, swiggy or Rapido
Low Acquisition or organic acquisition: Acquiring users on your product for low cost or at least no cost - ex: Most of the online courses leverage youtube and solve for organic acquisition, that’s why they are able to sustain
Here are few consumer apps from India, that are doing well as a product:
