SeedToScale | Curated by Accel

It’s essential to keep things as simple as possible initially, with a total focus on understanding the consumer problem statement. Because when it comes to subscriptions, users drop off a lot — they are commitment-phobic. 

In the next stage, startups must know how to decentralise well. A founder cannot go on micromanaging a hundred things. Many startups fail because while they thought they solved a problem, they had no idea about its sustainability in terms of how it would scale economically. 

And as far as possible, until you hit product market fit, keep things as lean as possible. If you start hiring too many people for specific roles, it gets difficult to roll things back when they go wrong. 

Eventually, it all boils down to two questions: Who are you building for? Do they consumers like your product? In this conversation, Nandan Reddy and Phani Kishan from Swiggy and Accel's Anand Daniel share lessons learned while building and scaling their startup in a crowded market.

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Over the past decade and a half, new-age marketplaces in India have transformed how people buy and sell products and services. From Flipkart to Swiggy, Urban Company, and Zetwerk, each has reimagined "the bazaars," shaping the future of commerce and livelihood in India. 

Starting November 3rd, we will share stories from the trenches about building and scaling these marketplaces, along with foundational lessons from their journeys.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/3DqT87o

About TaxiForSure

TaxiForSure, founded in 2011, was the outcome of a drunken conversation in a Bangalore pub between friends Raghunandan G and Aprameya Radhakrishna, who had both been to National Institute of Technology Karnataka and the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad. Raghunandan was 33 and Radhakrishna a year older.      

Three-and-a-half years after it started up in a 100-square-feet office in a Bangalore suburb. TaxiForSure was acquired in March 2015 by bigger rival Ola Cabs, which paid $200 million in a cash and equity deal as it attempted to fend off competition from Uber.   By August 2016, TaxiForSure was gone after Ola integrated its service with its own and fired hundreds of its employees.    

Today, Raghunandan and Radhakrishna, who both worked briefly at Ola as advisors before walking away, are successful people and have funded a string of startups. The former has founded fintech firm Zolve and the latter is co-founder of Koo, the Indian version of Twitter. WasTaxiForSure a failure?. Not so if the experience and insights they gained into running a startup in a space like mobility shaped their future roles.   

Highlights

1. Research, research, research. When things get difficult, and they will, this user research will be your north star. 
2. There is a tendency in founders to assume the role of the customers. Stop. You were the customer when you conceptualized the marketplace, now you’re no longer a customer. Build for what the customer wants, not what you want. 
3. Happiness. The happiness of the team guarantees happiness of all stakeholders, which in turn ensures happiness of the customer. A happy customer will always reflect on the bottom line.
4. Build a team with diverse backgrounds. If you plan to disrupt a market, try to hire from outside the market. Those within the market come with their mental blocks, and fresh perspectives guarantee innovation.
5. Evolve to where the market will be, not where the market is currently. This will ensure that you’re ahead of the pack.

Like in most markets, India is a large but under-penetrated insurance market. While the COVID-19 pandemic led to a sharp uptick in life insurance premiums, bringing it at par with the global average of 3.2% of GDP, non-life premiums - health and motor insurance - continue to lag at sub 1% of GDP, compared to 2% for developing Asian countries and 5% for developed economies. In a low-income economy, paying up premiums to protect against potential long-term downside is not a top priority for people.

 However, this will grow. As India’s GDP and per capita income grow, more people will begin insuring themselves and their assets. This has happened globally and India is no different.

Second and more important, the state of insurance in India leaves much to be desired, both for the insurer and the insured. Improving this can be vital to changing the Indian consumer’s relationship with insurance, and building enduring private companies in the space.

We spoke to Varun about his journey building an insurance company, how he approaches building a brand in an industry with established players, and what he sees in the future. He is joined by Abhinav Chaturvedi and Subrata Mitra, investors at Accel who have had a ringside view of Acko and Coverfox.

Key Segments

• 3:19 - 7:20 - Varun’s journey from Coverfox to Acko
• 14:13 - 17:43 - Technology’s role in insurance: Underwriting Distributor vs Underwriting Customer
• 17:44 - 20:11 - Future of Insurance: Ancillary Services
• 21:36 - 25:30 - Learnings from the US Insurance Sector
• 36:32 - 40:12 - Managing regulations in Insurance
• 44:31 - 46:31 - What’s next for Acko

The Accel team wishes Varun and Acko all the best in their mission.

Blog authored by Sankalpana Agarwal from Accel

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

India, frequently referred to as the two-wheeler factory of the world, serves a tremendous market both in India and abroad. About 15M two-wheelers were sold in India in 2021 and 3.7M two-wheelers manufactured in India by the top 4 Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) were exported. By 2030, the number of two-wheelers sold in India annually is expected to reach 35M representing an about $30B market, growing at the back of limited penetration of affordable public transport (public transport only serves 7% of the total trips at present) and the ever-increasing cost of not-so affordable four-wheelers.

However, with rising fuel prices and the increasing cost of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) scooters, ownership of personal two-wheelers has become financially challenging.

Owing to this, customers are now looking for reliable and affordable personal mobility solutions for their daily commute. This new customer demand, along with increasing environmental concerns and favourable government regulations, has created an urgency for electric mobility and set the stage for the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs).

As Accel, we have always looked for new-age solutions that add immense value to consumers and Bounce with its dockless mobility solution presented a great investment opportunity in 2018. What started out as Wicked Ride - a luxury bike rental platform and pivoted to a dockless mobility solution has today become a full-stack EV mobility solution for the Indian masses with 3 core business verticals - electric scooter manufacturing, Battery-as-a-Service and dockless mobility. With a capacity of 220K+ scooters per annum, Bounce launched its Infinity e1 electric scooter in early 2022 and has already received 60K+ pre-orders. It completed 5M+ EV rides covering 27M+ EV mobility kilometres with 1M+ swaps by building India’s largest battery-swapping network present in 40k+ locations across India.

To understand this new era of mobility which is rapidly unfolding, we spoke to Vivekananda Hallekere, Co-founder and CEO of Bounce, who has been at the helm of EV mobility adoption in India.

In this conversation, Vivek talks about his journey, the various phases of Bounce, EV trends in India and abroad, the inevitability of EV adoption and the need for regulatory support.

Key Segments

• Bounce’s journey from luxury bike rentals to full-stack EV mobility - 1:15
• Battery charging, battery swapping and Battery-as-a-Service - 17:00
• Future of Electric Vehicles - Global and Indian - 26:06
• State of regulatory environment in India - 44:46
• Future of Bounce and Energy-as-a-Service - 50:46

We thank Vivek for coming on and sharing these insights with us and we wish him and Bounce team all the best for this amazing journey of revolutionizing personal mobility for India.

Blog authored by Lakshay Bansal from Accel

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

Banking opportunity in India is tremendous, with overall banking assets expected to reach $3T by 2025, with deeply under-penetrated private credit markets which account for ~50% of GDP (vs. 150%+ for developed economies).

Despite this large opportunity, customer experience and engagement in traditional consumer banking in India is broken and has been so for over a decade.

With the increasing digital penetration in the country, customers armed with their smartphones are looking for an easy, seamless, quick and personalised experience and their expectations are ever-evolving.

Neo-banks attempt to fix the broken customer journeys and provide a superior banking experience, serving as a layer over traditional banks. This means that customers no longer need to spend hours at their physical bank branch queues, mired in paperwork for everyday banking needs. While doing so, a neo-bank improves access to a whole suite of financial products across wealth management, lending, and insurance through a single platform.

As Accel, we’ve always believed that technology can revolutionise banking and attempted to enable that ecosystem, first through our investment in Monzo in 2018, then through our investment in Zolve in 2021, and recently through a growth investment in Niyo - Niyo is a leader in the consumer neo-banking segment in India with a base of 5 million users.

To understand this new era of banking which is fast unfolding, we spoke to Vinay Bagri, Co-founder and CEO of Niyo, who is a long-standing veteran in the banking industry in India.

In this conversation, Vinay talks about how Niyo came into being, shares some of his reflections on the ongoing changes in the banking ecosystem, draws parallels from other fintech segments and discusses the need for regulatory support.

Key segments

• The large market opportunity for a neo-bank in India - 18:05 - 19:48
• How neo-banks provide a completely new banking experience - 20:22 - 22:41
• The success of neo-banks globally - 24:00 - 25:20
• Customer segmentation in neobanking - 30:25 - 32:12
• State of neo-banking regulations in India - 36:28 - 39:10

We thank Vinay for coming on and sharing these insights with us and we wish him and Niyo team all the best for this amazing journey of revolutionizing consumer banking for India.

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

B2B marketplaces are different. There are tremendous opportunities, but also different challenges. This arises from the business model itself. Having to cater to both the supply and demand side is one thing, the other is adjusting to the nuances of the products and commodities being bought and sold. This is different for every domain and therefore there is nothing that can be replicated. Everything had to be thought through first principles.

One example of a company that did exactly this is Bizongo, the largest business-to-business online marketplace for packaging needs in India. Bizongo has been a phenomenal success story in the last few years, witnessing exponential growth during the pandemic. Founded by Aniket Deb, Sachin Agrawal and Ankit Tomar, the company is now at a significant point, poised to scale. The team raised funding of $110 million in December 2021 and now stands at a valuation of over $600 million.  

As Bizongo scales, we thought this was the best time to get CEO Sachin Agrawal to talk about their First 500 days.

I also have on the podcast Prayank Swaroop, my colleague, and partner at Accel, who led the seed round in Bizongo. Prayank has been a part of Bizongo’s journey from the beginning, and he will help us shed light on some of the decisions that helped Bizongo get here.

We’ll be diving into the initial days, the evolution of the business model, pivots, and finally the challenges due to the pandemic and how Bizongo overcame them. With Prayank here, we will also take the opportunity to dive into how investors think about such businesses and what they look for in founders and the team when they invest.

I thank Sachin and Prayank for coming on and sharing all of these stories and insights about Bizongo’s first 500 days. We wish Sachin and the Bizongo team all the best, they have an amazing few years ahead of them!

Summary of the conversation:

• GMV versus profitable business - 17:14 - 18:31
• Creating a culture of trust at Bizongo - 26:14 - 27:06
• Building a bond as co-founders - 29:23 - 30:24
• What is working capital? - 32:06 - 34:18
• Business expansion during Covid times - 35:59 - 38:11

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

The D2C ecosystem has truly found its feet in India. There are now a lot of great brands making niche, high-quality products for targeted audiences. The e-commerce wave has given them a channel of distribution that they own. But as the market matures, there are other needs for young D2C startups. They need marketing, sales, and brand talent, things which they can’t easily get access to in order to grow as fast as they want to.

Ananth Narayanan’s Mensa aims to solve this problem for the new D2C economy. Mensa is a house of brands that invests in digital-first, D2C brands, and scales them globally. Previously, Ananth was CEO of Myntra, which was acquired by Flipkart, and co-founder and CEO of Medlife, which was acquired by Pharmeasy.

Remember, Mensa is not even 500 days old!

Subrata’s presence is also notable here, as he has had a long relationship with Ananth. Fun fact: Mensa was co-created as a concept by Ananth and Accel working together from the start. We’ll go into more details in the podcast, but Subrata has been in the trenches with Ananth: from ideation to team expansion, and from strategy to building out their tech platform.

I thank Ananth and Subrata for coming on and sharing all of these stories and insights about Mensa’s first 500 days. We wish Ananth and the Mensa team all the best, we are definitely rooting for them!

Summary of the conversation:

• 6:55 - 8:16 - The India opportunity for a digital house of brands.
• 8:34 - 9:58 - How did Mensa achieve Unicorn status in 6 months?
• 16:35 - 18:55 - How did Mensa use technology top scale?
• 19:37 - 21:37 -  How did Mensa convince founders to sell their brands to Mensa?
• 27:05 - 29:25  - Advice for founders from Ananth & Subrata.

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

How is the world of Open Source faring in a landscape that is being overturned by Web3 and its ascendant new technologies? It’s an important question  and not just in the realm of entrepreneurship and products. Open Source was the first promise of some kind of a technological revolution, where everyone could build and use things they want to with help and support from a real, tangible community.

Where is that promise now, what is being built out of it, and where does it stand with the advent of new technological paradigms?

That’s the topic of the conversation I have the pleasure of bringing you today.

My colleague, Prayank Swaroop, Partner at Accel, is talking to Abhishek Nayak, founder and CEO of Appsmith. Appsmith is a startup that provides an open-source low code tool that helps businesses build any custom internal application within hours. And the company has just raised its Series A of $8 million.

There's one more Accel connection here: Abhishek was also part of the Accel team for a while.

In the podcast, we try to understand from Abhishek about where the open-source world is, how far it has come, and what we can look for from it, and all of it from the lens of Appsmith.

This podcast has a lot of takeaways for founders thinking about building open-source projects and companies. 

Thanks to Prayank for the interview and thanks of course to Abhishek for taking time away from the grind of entrepreneurship to come talk to us!

Summary of the conversation 

• 16:00 - 17:57 - Why did Appsmith take the open-source route?
• 11:44 - 13:24 - Why internal apps & not consumer facing apps?
• 24:50 - 25:53 - How to build an engaged community on Discord?
• 30:03 - 31:40 - Why aren't business users adopting open source tools?
• 35:10 - 37:08 - How did Appsmith acquire users?
• 38:52 - 40:50 - Do developers care about design?
• 44:18 - 46:27 - Challenges raising money for an open source project
• 48:24 - 49:32 - Advice for founders thinking of open source projects

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India

If you know about Crypto, you can’t have missed FalconX, I’ll still give you a brief: FalconX is a blockchain, cryptocurrency, and fintech-focused cryptocurrency brokerage and digital asset trading platform. Accel has been proud partners since the startup’s inception, and we’ve been cheering on their success loudly!

Crypto is definitely here. With the slew of recent advertising and coverage around it, plus the FOMO that investments in it are generating, we are definitely overdue for a discussion on the space.

And we have just the thing for you.

Pratik Agarwal, my colleague at Accel has been interested in this space for a long time, and he is interviewing Raghu Yarlagadda, CEO of FalconX, one of the world’s fastest-growing companies of the last half-decade.

But that’s not just why we are talking to Raghu for this episode. As reported by Bloomberg in August 2021, FalconX saw its revenue grow by a multiple of 30 times in the 12 months (up to June 2021).

Evidently, Raghu and the team know something we don’t.

And that’s not all.

The crypto world is moving at a pace that is beguiling to even seasoned market watchers. There is just so much happening every day. Raghu and Pratik will also attempt to give us a lens into this world and how to make sense of a rapidly changing scene.

This podcast has all this and more. It has been one of my favourite episodes recently and we hope to bring Raghu back for more next year.

1. 6:57-7:59: Insights that helped in starting FalconX; building a tokenization gateway for institutions
2. 8:15-10:26: Why was it critical to focus on institutions and not retail customers?
3. 16:00-18:20: Convenience in the institutional adoption of crypto assets 
4. 20:39-22:21: De-Fi(decentralised finance) explained
5. 23:15-25:35: Nuances of De-Fi; Comparing it with conventional banking system
6. 27:22-29:50: Global overview on the regulatory landscape in crypto
7. 31:06-33:01: Future white spaces that could be chased starting today in crypto
8. 33:03-33:55: Newer opportunities on the infrastructure side in the crypto market

Check out other episodes from the Insights Podcast series at https://www.seedtoscale.com

Share your feedback and suggestions at https://www.twitter.com/Accel_India