#127 - Vidit Aatrey and Adora Cheung

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Vidit Aatrey and Adora Cheung. Vidit is co-founder and CEO of Meesho. Meesho is a platform in India that allows people to resell products using their social networks. They were in the summer 2016 batch of YC, and you can check them out at meesho.com. Adora is a partner at YC. Before working at YC, she co-founded Homejoy.
You can find Vidit on Twitter at Vidit Aatrey, and Adora is at no limits.
All right, here we go.

**Adora Cheung** (0:35)
This is Adora from YC. I'm excited to have Vidit Aatrey, CEO and co-founder of Meesho, which was founded in 2015, and you went through YC in 2016 So today, Meesho is probably one of the hottest startups in India, if not the hottest startups. And I'm super excited to hear about, for everyone to hear about your entrepreneurial journey, your thoughts and opinions on not just Meesho, but the startup ecosystem here in India.
So thank you for being here.

**Vidit Aatrey** (1:02)
Thanks so much for inviting me. I'm super excited to be on this podcast. Thank you.

**Adora Cheung** (1:06)
So let's start off with, I love the name Meesho, which I believe is short for Mary's Shop, which means my shop.
And it obviously alludes to what Meesho is today. Maybe you can start off with giving us a quick background of what exactly is Meesho and give us an idea of how big you are today.

**Vidit Aatrey** (1:23)
Sure, so Meesho is essentially a way for anyone, literally anyone in India, to come and start as well as grow your social store. And it could be on any social platform, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, tomorrow could be something else that comes up.
And what has happened over the last three years is now we have close to half a million monthly active such social store owners who are making some income per month.
And these people are selling across all possible categories. We started with fashion, moved to non-fashion lifestyle. Now it's food, some travel packages, cosmetics, like almost everything out there. If you want to start a store and you do not have money to start that store offline, you come and start that store on WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook. And we give everything that you need in the ecosystem to do so.

**Adora Cheung** (2:13)
So most of these people before Meesho existed, what were they even have a business or most of them, you have enabled them to even have a business in the first place.

**Vidit Aatrey** (2:21)
Yeah, so I'll just set some context here. Right. So it's very, very common in India, like 90% of total commerce happens in these small mom and pop stores.
And for every small shop that you see, there are 99 other people who always wanted to start a store, but just never could get capital. India is not such a rich country. Most people do not have access to capital. So these people who never had the opportunity to start a store came onto a platform and became entrepreneurs for the first time, because we do not need them to invest any money in working capital or setting up an offline shop. You can come here, start your shop on WhatsApp, access anything from our supply marketplace, and only when you get an order, you purchase that from the marketplace. So just taking away those barriers of entry, I would say, so almost everyone who is using our app today has become an entrepreneur because of us.
They were not doing this offline, like almost everyone.

**Adora Cheung** (3:14)
So, when you think about then the end consumer, the people buying the goods from the resellers and the new entrepreneurs, were they buying it from other people like them before? Or what do you think about, you know, like, why not just, I guess, sell directly to the people themselves?
Why not the middleman in the middle, I guess?

**Vidit Aatrey** (3:33)
Yeah, so 90% of total commerce, this is 2019, right? And today also, 90% of total commerce happens in these small mom and pop stores. You will see in societies, people will just put a board outside their house and start selling products. And most of these products are long tail unbranded products, where there is no pull of the product. People don't know about it.
What value these people add is these unbranded products through their trust relationships, through this trust selling, they go out and push these products. They highlight what is special about it. And then people start buying, then people start recognizing this emerging brand, right? So, selling unbranded categories through a mall has never worked out in India. It has always worked through these mom and pop stores. So when these unbranded products have to sell online, if you see all big destination marketplaces in India today, mostly sell brands across all categories. None of them have figured out how to sell a lot of unbranded products.