2019: Looking back at the year that went by

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Tis the Season of Reflection.

As the year draws to an end it is the perfect time to reflect on the learnings and share them. Here are my key learnings turned guiding principles from the year that went by

Guiding Principles of 2019

  • Live in the present
  • Become Better Everyday
  • Make Concentrated Bets
  • Increase Optionality

Live in the Present

A friend once told me “Unhappiness comes from Conflict“, simply put, when you desire X but are stuck with Y. While we all want multiple things to happen/get better simultaneously, the only way to stay peaceful is to accept your present situation and adjust your life around it.

Our lives are made up of multiple phases across dimensions of family & friends, career and personal life that are ever changing. Each phase would have a few key events that would lead to highs/lows across different dimensions.

All phases of life give you an opportunity to focus on some aspect/dimension of your life and it’s best if we use that time to do just that, focus on what’s right in front of us (and not fret too much about the rest).

A good question to often ask yourself, “What should I be optimizing for?”

I cut down on reading, movies, travel, socializing etc and 2019 for me was about mostly focusing on the new baby and the new job.

Become Better Everyday

Successfully Implemented by Dave Brailsford & popularized by James Clear, the idea that tiny changes sustained over a period of time compound massively.

The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together – Dave Brailsford

The power of compounding married with the fact that there’s as much (if not more) life ahead of us as is behind builds a really strong case to become a much better version of yourself. Bonus, being better improves lives of others around you.

I tried to follow this rule and ensure that I make almost every day count by exercising (Cult, Ahoy!) / writing / learning something new.

Make Concentrated Bets

While conventional wisdom says that diversification is the key to investing success, some of the best investors, like Warren Buffett & George Soros have spoken about the virtues of making concentrated bets.

Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing – Charlie Munger

Be it investing, career or relationships, most gains are to be made by focusing on few things and giving them all the effort (think Power Law). I’ve seen quite a few people trying to spread out too thin and not achieving anything substantial. I feel it makes sense to focus your energies on limited ideas & people and double down on them

Caveat: Avoid Ruin

PS: It’s quite likely that investing more time/effort on your career/startup will yield bigger returns than stocks/mutual funds etc.

Increase Optionality

Optionality in investments refers to the right to do something, but not necessarily the obligation to do so. Just like in investing you can build optionality into your life and exercise them for better outcomes. Collecting high-quality options is the equivalent of unlocking doors that open up to new possibilities.

While on the surface this might look conflicting to the above mentioned point of being concentrated, in reality they work best together. Optionality in asymmetric bets (limited downside, high potential upside) across domains can be built with just small % of resources (time/money etc).

Naval Ravikant on building Asymmetry

Few things I did to increase optionality

  • Meet New People & reconnect with old acquaintances – Increases Serendipity that opens up opportunities
  • Take up chances to expose myself to new ideas & experiences – Gives you new perspectives that might have a big impact
  • Watch my Spends & Avoid Debt – Better personal financial management enables risk taking/bigger bets
  • Being conscious about & working on my health/fitness – Better health allows you more freedom of choices in certain areas of life.

Wishing you all a wonderful and enriching 2020 🙂

Capital ROI of various Indian Startups

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The tide has been trying to change for sometime now, from Growth at all costs to Profitability & Sustainability. Recent Tech IPOs in US reflected the same and made things pretty clear.

While Uber & Lyft’s abysmal IPO sustained the push to margins and profitability, explosion of WeWork was the final nail on the coffin.

Since the relatively nascent Indian startup ecosystem is a reflection of US & China (in some aspects), one can expect to see a stronger push for Margins/Profitability in India as well.

I tried to collate a view from all publicly available data on revenue and losses for various Indian Startups to get a view of what’s happening. Hope you’ll find it useful too.

Source: Paper VC, Entracker, Mint, ET etc


As more Indian Startups file their earnings for Financial Year 2019, more data will emerge. I’ll try to update this view.

Living Life in Single-Player Mode

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I am a huge fan of Shane Parrish’s podcast and one of best episodes from it was with Naval Ravikant. Naval shared a lot of awesomeness in it and one of the things that stood out for me was the thought of looking at life as a ‘Single-Player’ Game

Life: A Single-Player Game

The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player. – Naval Ravikant

While talking about transitioning from anger/anxiety to calmness and how to control one’s responses or mental-state, Naval mentions how most people are conditioned to live life in a multi-player mode wherein the things that we chase are the visible social status and other such indicators.

Subsequently, the key to being happy is to get rid of yearnings for visible status indicators and focus on your internal state. 

Socially, we’re told, “Go work out. Go look good.” That’s a multi-player
competitive game. Other people can see if I’m doing a good job or not. We’re told, “Go make money. Go buy a big house.” Again, external monkey-player competitive game. When it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100% you’re competing against yourself, single-player game – Naval Ravikant

Naval drives home the point really well. Instead of chasing external progress, we’d be better of chasing internal progress. 

Life in Single-Player Mode

While, the points mentioned above, are mostly about taking care of your mental state, focusing on being happy and such, I’d like to extend the idea of life as a ‘Single-Player Game’ to living life in a ‘Single-Player Mode’

A single-player game is usually a game that can only be played by one person, while “single-player mode” is usually a game mode designed to be played by a single-player, though the game also contains multi-player modes – Wikipedia

Approaching life in a Single-Player Mode in essence means leading life in a way that assumes complete responsibility of own’s actions and their effects, and also encourages proactive self-improvement sans any dependancy on others.

What does Single-Player Mode Look Like?

Let me illustrate the point by taking some examples

Sports/Fitness: Say you want to become better at a sport. There are two ways to go about it

1. Multi-Player Mode. In a multi-player mode, you’d try to find someone to play/work out with (or find a coach) and practice with them to improve your game. 
2. Single-Player Mode. In a single-player mode, you’d not limit your practice and improvement to finding & playing/working out with others. Either-ways, you’d find ways to practice and thereby improve your game/fitness.

Work/Skills: Say you want to become better at your job or pick up a new skill. Again, there are two ways to go about it.

1. Multi-Player Mode. In a multi-player mode, you’d try to find someone to learn from/with and depend on them for your learnings
2. Single-Player Mode. In a single-player mode, you’d not wait to find someone and instead try to learn and pick up skills on your own.

Self-Directed Learning  (via smu.edu.sg)


More often than not, whenever I’ve become good at something it’s because I approached it with a ‘Single-Player Mode’. Letting go of dependency on others for your learnings removes a lot of friction. Not only that, it shortens the feedback loop (and their-by improving the pace of learning) and lets you decide your own goals and metrics. 

To top it all, Operating in a Single-Player mode requires that one figures out ‘Learning How To Learn’. Finding out how to learn different stuff on your own is quite transformational or should I say life-changing.

‘Learning How To Learn’ is one of the most important Life Skills

Another way to live in ‘Single-Player Mode’ is to compete against yourself. Here again you have to look internally to get better. It might take a while to get this engine started but once it starts, it works marvellously 

Kanye West in an Interview with Rolling Stone Magazine

If you look around, almost all super successful people operate in Single-Player Mode. They don’t really depend on others for motivation, inspiration or figuring out how to learn/get things done. 

To conclude I’d say, if there’s something you’ve been trying to learn (coding, foreign language etc) or start doing (running, gymming, diet control) you’d be better off if you approach it in a Single-Player Mode

Best of the Web 105

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I am currently quite intrigued by the Montessori schooling. Both Google & Amazon founders are Montessori kids and can’t rave about it enough. Acquaint yourself in ‘Montessori and 10 famous graduates from her schools‘. 

“D-Mart managed to grow when the industry was collapsing, unscathed by the first wave of e-commerce. Now, as online players eye India’s brick and mortar space and partner with domestic players, what’s D-Mart up to?” Read more here #paywall

The Ultimate Learning Guide via Shane Parrish: A nice curation of some of the best learnings from Farnam Street blog. Find them here

Indian FMCG space is seeing a lot of startup action. It’s not just that the consumer preferences are changing, traditional FMCG companies have also started picking stakes in snazzy upstarts. I’ve shared some thoughts here

The Broken Window Theory In Product Design. Read here

Rewind (Best of newsletter #71)
‘A mile wide, an inch deep’ by Evan Williams. Read here

‘The days are long but the decades are short’ by Sam Altman. Read here

Lessons learned from scaling a product team from Intercom. Read here

Podcast Episode of the Week: When India’s Cash Disappeared, Part One & Two (Planet Money)
A deep dive into how India’s Demonetisation came to be. The background story of Anil Bokil, who originally came up with the idea and convinced PM Modi to make this happen. Also, has the original Arthkranti PPT. 

Listen here & here

Startup Trivia of the Week: PolicyBazaar 
In 2008, Yashish Dahiya pitched to Sanjeev Bikhchandani with a powerpoint and a prototype of PolicyBazaar. During the demo, he proved to Sanjeev that he was paying around 60% more for his Car Insurance than what he should be. That demo convinced Sanjeev and team, upon which they invested 20Cr in their Series A for a whopping 49% stake. Ten Years later, Info Edge is still participating in all their funding rounds and PolicyBazaar is currently valued at around $1Bn and Info Edge owns around 13% stake. 

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Skills and Street Smarts

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I’ve often tried to think what makes certain people tick while others struggle to get even basic professional standing or success.

I think a lens to look at various folks is in terms of ‘Skills and Street Smarts’. Skills can be further divided into two types (Shallow & Deep) and by Street Smarts, I mean the basic sense/temperament of business, people handling, ability to optimise money decisions and leverage ‘arbitrage opportunities’.

Skills and Street Smarts

There’s another dimension relevant to this discussion, that dimension is of ‘Opportunities’. Opportunities are those super forces that can help one in changing their life/career trajectory.

Needless to say, one has to latch on to the right opportunities and you’ll find for most successful people (in business or elsewhere) that they found great opportunities somewhere in their journey and capitalised well on them.

In contrast with Opportunities, Skills are something which are much more in people’s control. One can decide which skills to develop and how deep to go in them. Street Smarts, I believe is a way of dealing with day-to-day life situations and people and becomes a part of ones nature during their teens or early 20’s. In most cases, people continue to operate within their circle of street-smartness with small changes for remainder of their lives.

Empirically speaking, I think people who struggle to scrap by in life (not able to settle professionally, earn a reasonable salary etc) are more often than not in the ‘Shallow Skills’ and ‘Low Street Smarts’ quadrant. Highly successful entrepreneurs (with massive outcomes/impact) tend to lie in ‘Deep Skills’ and ‘High Street Smart’s quadrant.

Your neighbourhood slacker (Jugaadu as we call them sometimes), the one who doesn’t really have any professionally important skill but knows enough people and/or has enough business sense to find small arbitrage or similar opportunities to make a reasonable living.

 How Skills and ‘Street Smarts’ Stack Up

With different combinations of Deep/Shallow Skills and Street Smarts, various outcomes happen. The folks who concern me the most, the ones who are not able to stand on their feet and get about growing in their lives invariably happen in the ‘Shallow Skills’ and ‘Low Street Smarts’ quadrant. 

An easy way for them to come out of that quicksand is to pick up some skills and if possible team up with someone who has more street smarts than them (and can be trusted with).

Also, I believe a good majority lies in the low deep skills and low-to-mid ‘Street Smarts’ range. While, the prevalent tendency is to optimise for becoming more street smart (penny negotiations etc) I believe most people would be much better off if they instead try to optimise for going deep in their skills of choice.

The OTT Play in India

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In a 2013 piece, Ben Thompson outlined the following ‘Jobs TV Does’

  • Keep us informed
  • Educate
  • Give a live view of sporting events
  • Enlighten and story-tell
  • Provide escapism

Subsequently he makes a call for “Unbundling of TV” whereby a different category/product will come about offering a better way to get each of the above mentioned jobs done.

Thing started changing well before Ben wrote that piece and some of those changes seem solidified, at least for now. 

TV Unbundling In India, 2018

Migration from TV to OTT

As per a recent survey by BARC India, 197 Mn homes in India have TV with a total TV penetration of 66%. The survey also shares that over 835 Mn individuals have access to TV. The advertising spend for the medium estimated to be Rs 31,596 Cr ($4.5 Billion).

While TV is enjoying it’s last phase of penetration growth (like print media) there is a big migration from TV underway in India with Gen-Z & Millennials leading the wave.

The first phase saw a move from ‘Traditional TV’ to ‘Cable TV’ with a huge portion of country installing set top boxes to get access to niche programming, round the clock at a reasonable price. The second phase is seeing the move from ‘Cable TV’ to ‘OTT/On-Demand Video’.

Journey from Traditional TV to OTT

I believe currently this transition is at play with users gradually moving from one stage of the funnel to the next. However, over the next few years  most users will skip the set-top box stage and jump straight from TV to OTT platforms.

People will Skip ‘Set-Top Box’ and jump straight to OTT

OTT is High Growth Market

India has been a huge market for Films, TV Shows and Sports. Increasing high-speed internet penetration, falling data prices, entry of big players with huge budgets along with original content aimed (mostly) at youth has over the years set the ball rolling for OTT (Over-The-Top) consumption in India.

The current Indian streaming market is roughly pegged at $300 million with 30 OTT players with Hotstar being the most popular service.

Top OTT Players in India
(source: impactonnet.com)

As of today, OTT is one of the hottest markets in India with everyone scrambling to get a piece of the pie. OTT viewers are growing by 35% Y-O-Y and projected to grow to 355 Mn by 2020. OTT video revenue is expected to reach Rs 5,595 Cr (~$800Mn) by 2022. With  projections like these the current gold rush starts to make sense.

OTT Market Players:

With over three dozen players, OTT is becoming a crowded market with players trying to attack it from all sides. From small digital content studios to giant media/production houses, everyone’s got their eyes on the prize.

The types of players can be divided into the following categories

  1. Media Groups ( Star, Sony, Zee etc)
  2. Production Houses (Eros, Balaji Telefilms etc)
  3. OTT Platforms, International & Local (Netflix, Viu etc)
  4. Internet Companies (Amazon etc)
  5. Digital Content Platforms/Studios (Arre etc)
  6. Others (Aditya Birla Group etc)

A fast growth market with a lot of headroom to grow, voila. However, similar to what I mentioned in ‘The Transportation Layer Protocol of Business‘, while everyone is free to compete, not everyone stands a fair chance at winning. Moreover, even if one is able to create value, in absence of a sound business model, they just might be not to capture it.

Will come back to explore this topic in a later post

Content, Community, Commerce and all that Jazz

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Over the course of years, lots of startups have tried to leverage their content/community to sell stuff to users but have seen limited success. So much so that one has to try really hard to find some examples of  content or community platforms across the world that have managed the crossover at a reasonable scale.


Can you name a startup (content or community) that is able to successfully sell stuff at a reasonable scale to their users?

Just so we are clear, here by commerce I mean transactions (visitors/user of a content or community platform buying stuff on the platform itself). While monetisation via ads and as affiliates have been proven models for long, commerce has been successful in rare exceptional cases. Through the course of a series of posts I’ll try to explore why some platforms could get the commerce play working while others languished.

The Trifecta

What exactly are the 3Cs:

This slide from a ‘Mary Meeker Internet Report’ gives a good summary of The 3Cs

The Three Cs go long back in Time

The Three Cs are probably as old as Web 1.0
(Pic: An article published in Guardian in 2000 about 3Cs)


How to Think about 3Cs
If you think about it, there are two broad ways for the 3Cs to come together.

  1. Content/Community Platforms adds Commerce (Houzz, Polyvore)
  2. Commerce Platforms adds Content/Community (Amazon, StitchFix)

One way to look at Content and/or Community to commerce journey is like a funnel. Content/Community in that case will be Top of the funnel (TOFU) and Commerce, the final transaction will be Bottom of the funnel (BOFU).

That is, more people will engage with the content and/or community (TOFU) and some of them will end up purchasing goods aka commerce (BOFU).

Case 1: Content/Community Platforms adding Commerce
Case 2: Commerce Platforms adding Content/Community

Majority of popular consumer startups fall in two quadrants (Started as Commerce or Started as Content/Community). It is difficult to recall any startups that had both Content/Community and Commerce play from start.

Starting Points for Some Popular Startups

Empirically speaking, it looks like the journey from Commerce to Content/Community (Case 2) is well within the reach. Amazon has been doing it for ages in multiple ways (UGC and Content Acquisitions), in India I think Nykaa is doing a reasonable job. If one spends more time I’m confident a lot of successful examples of this category will come out.

However, the journey from Content/Community to Commerce (Case 1) seems extremely arduous with only a handful successes.

Challenges in Leveraging a Content/Community Platform for Commerce

  1. Low Captive User Base: Most users of content platforms are actually non logged-in visitors (Organic/Social Traffic over Direct Traffic). How will you monetise a user base that isn’t regular/loyal.
  2.  Positioning: While it’s much easier to trust a content/community platform, when it comes to making purchases, the bar is fairly high. People prefer to go to experts. Who would you trust to deliver your order without any nonsense, Amazon or some upcoming content/community site?. Increasingly the mindshare in various commerce categories is already taken (Think Amazon, Swiggy, Zomato, Goibibo, Bookmyshow, Paytm, Myntra). Given the low switching cost on Internet, this challenge is particularly hard to cross.
  3. Expertise: E-commerce, however easy it might appear from outside requires significant operational expertise. Most folks continue to underestimate it, resulting in bad user experience and dissatisfied users that will never buy from you again. Since people underestimate what goes in getting e-commerce experience right, they are perennially underinvested (also, in most cases it is structurally difficult for a content company to invest a lot of resources in such endeavours). Lastly, in each category you are competing with the best in the game (product and/or resources wise)
  4. User Experience (for commerce): This one is particularly true for hosted community platforms. Imagine a community of food lovers, sports lovers on Facebook/Whatsapp etc. As mentioned in #1, the users in such cases are captive to the platform in question not to your group and to make things worse at one end, the platform experience doesn’t facilitate smooth e-commerce (Imagine buying something from a FB/WA group) and on the end hand, you can’t possibly migrate these users to your own site/app which might have a better commerce experience.

Because of the reasons mentioned above I believe it is extremely tough to upgrade from content/community to commerce. I’ll also go to the extent of saying in most cases the platforms in question are better of monetising via traditional channels ads, affiliates, events etc than to start their own e-commerce. 

As of the exceptions to the rule like Houzz, we’ll try to figure out what makes them tick in the next post in this series. 

Best of the Web 104

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Paypal Mafia, Luck Vs Hard Work, Life in Weeks, History of Email Marketing & more


A very crisp and interesting read on the evolution of Email Marketing and a brief look at things to come. Find more here  

“Luck matters more in an absolute sense and hard work matters more in a relative sense”. James Clear gets deeper into the ‘Luck Vs Hard Work’ question. Learn more here

As Google marks their 20th anniversary, here’s a first look at the next chapter of Search, and their plan make information more accessible and useful for people everywhere. Discover more here

“The stock market is a place to make easiest money in the hardest way. The path is very complex, and you never get answers to a lot of things”. Read more here

Stupid, Aggressive or Smarter? How are Digital devices altering our brains? Read more here

Rewind (Best of newsletter #70)

1) ‘How To Tell The Truth’ by Ben Horowitz. Read it here

2) Stop Making Users Explore. Read here

3) Your Life in Weeks by Tim Urban(Waitbutwhy). Read here

Video of the Week:
The Incredible Story of The PayPal Mafia. Watch here

Startup Trivia of the Week: OYO 
In 2015, OYO was delisted from Makemytrip, Goibibo and Yatra. Around that time Goibibo also launched GoStays, a competitor to OYO. Back then OYO claimed only 10% of their business came from these aggregators. The status quo continued till Oct-2017 when Yatra decided to re-list OYO.In Feb-2018, MMT (and Goibibo) also re-listed OYO. Source

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The Transportation Layer Protocol of Business

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In his classic WSJ piece from 2011, Marc Andreessen declared that ‘Software is eating the world’.

Seven years hence, things are unfolding as Marc had prophesied. Industry after Industry, software is re-writing the rules of how the game is played.

Almost two-thirds of companies currently face high levels of disruption – Accenture


Transportation has been one of the few industries that have already seen a lot of Schumpeterian “Creative Destruction”.

From being ‘Limo service for wealthy people in SF’ to ‘Ride sharing for commoners in Bangladesh’, Uber and many other software based transportation services have come a long way. Goldman Sachs estimates the ride-hailing industry ballooning to $285 billion by 2030.

A host of startups around the world are working in the transportation space with Uber, Lyft and Didi being the bigger players. The Indian Market is also seeing a lot of action in this space.

Popular Transportation Startups In India

3.5 Million Daily Rides across Ola and Uber (via ET)


While the pure transportation market is huge, there’s an sizeable adjacent market (roughly 1/3rd the size in terms of orders) growing at a faster pace. The market in question is ‘Food Delivery’

Food Delivery Market In US & China

Food Delivery Market in India via Mint


Apart from Swiggy and Zomato, there’s Foodpanda, Uber Eats and two more big players starting Food Delivery over the next 3-6 months.

Challenges for Ride-Sharing & Food Delivery Startups

Both Ride-sharing and Food Delivery startups are the epitomes of gig economy and have unlocked huge markets that were previously untapped.
However, to make some economic sense for both types of companies have to make sure that their delivery staff runs at highest utilisation possible.

But, because of the inherent nature of both ride-sharing and food delivery markets, the orders are concentrated at certain peak hours of the day. 

 I am assuming the graph would be similar in India (via http://toddwschneider.com)

Hourly Delivery Orders for a Fast Food Cafe


Ride Sharing Peak Hours*:  8AM – 12 PM, 5 – 9 PM
Food Delivery Peak Hours*: 12PM – 4 PM, 8 – 11 PM

*Rough Estimate

This cyclicality in demand means there are upper limits to optimisation during peak hours and there are long windows of low demand

These long windows of low demand are a huge problem as they lead to 

1. Poor Unit Economics (To cover fixed costs the delivery boy should be utilised fully)
2. Weaker Driver Retention (Part time gig workers will gravitate towards a service that guarantees opportunities to earn more)
3. Scaling Challenges (Uneven/Skewed demand during certain hours makes it difficult to scale delivery ops in an optimised way)

On The Flip Side
Less Demand => Poor Driver Utilisation => Poor Driver Retention => Poor Experience => Less Demand


These problems are pronounced for and particularly hurt the food delivery services, that’s also one reason why most of the ‘stand-alone food delivery’ startups found it difficult to get off the ground and ended up folding. While most startups offering logistics services in Hyperlocal/Food-Delivery space trying defeating gravity and failed, Delhivery (with benefit of hindsight) was able to identify the challenges well in-advance and did a pivot into e-commerce deliveries that offered better fleet utilisation opportunity among other benefits.

The Case for a Transportation Layer Protocol

Both Ride-Sharing and Food-Delivery startups not only share common challenges around fleet capacity utilisation, they also to varying degree share some strengths 

  1. Huge Captive Customer Base
  2. Network of Drivers across cities
  3. Scalable Technology Stack for Managing Logistics 
  4. Proprietary Data about People, Businesses, Routes, Traffic etc
  5. Operations Infrastructure 

Protocol: A set of rules and guidelines for communicating data

Value Capture on The Web – Joel Monegro


The Internet Protocol Stack enabled various web applications to be built on top of it and a handful of them grew up to become today’s Internet Giants (Facebook, Google, Amazon).

Just like the internet protocol layer enabled various apps to be built for the web, we can see a bunch of startups trying to build what can be called ‘Transportation Layer Protocol’ or ‘Transportation Layer’


The Transportation Layer implies having a base infrastructure to build various consumer (B2C) or business (B2B) offerings on.

‘Transportation Layer’ Composition (Building Blocks)


Most companies in this space end up building different variants of Transportation Layer Infra for internal consumption. But to leverage it and attain a dominant market position (with a sustainable business model) the startups should/would try to become the ‘Transportation Layer’ for the country.

Startups with different business models for ‘Transportation Layer’


Ekart Way*: Just like Flipkart’s logistics arm also handles logistics for other companies such as Adidas, in future some of the B2C companies discussed here might also start doing deliveries for other restaurants (managing the delivery orders a restaurant gets directly).

A startup can run multiple lines of businesses on top of the common infrastructure & generate adequate customer demand for their offerings

— A Successful Transportation Layer at Play

Becoming the default app for any transportation related services is the ‘Holy Grail’ as you get both more transactions and revenue per user and it costs you less to service each request. Also, the bigger you become the network effects ensure that less likely you are to get displaced.

This, I believe is what’s unfolding in India and startups from both sides (ride-sharing and food-delivery) are vying to become the ‘Transportation Layer’ to services various consumer offerings.

Indian B2C Startups atop Transportation Layer


Expansion to Adjacent Markets:

  1. Ride sharing Startups – Both Uber and Ola (Foodpanda) have been doing food delivery for around an year now. 
  2. Food Delivery Startups – Swiggy has shared their plans of expanding into Grocery and Medicine Delivery.
  3. Grocery & Medicine Delivery Startups – I Don’t think the grocery delivery startups have shared any plans for other categories.
  4. Concierge Startups – Dunzo, has started doing bike taxis, food delivery and grocery
“Transportation Layer’: A Work-In-Progress


The image above you should give you some sense of what the fruits of becoming the default transportation/logistics layer would look like with different B2C/B2B offerings stacking up atop shared demand and infra.

However, while getting there might be possible it’s gonna be incredibly difficult. Moreover, despite the number of startups aiming, only a few market players are strongly positioned to get a good crack at it. I’ll try to explore more in another post

Twitter’s Balancing Act

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While its counterparts (FB, Instagram etc) have been able to ride the growth waves to the fullest, the ride for Twitter hasn’t been exactly a breeze.

Flat Growth in Twitter’s MAU


As visible from the image above, Twitter’s Net New Active User Growth (New Active Users – Lost Users) was “-One Million MAUs”. Amidst, the fake account cleaning activity underway, the company expects this -ve growth trend in MAU to continue and the MAUs to drop further by ‘mid-single-digit millions’ in the next quarter.

While the MAU growth has been rather Flatish, the DAUs and Revenue numbers show some signs of growth

People are using Twitter more often

Twitter is making some money

For now Twitter claims to be prioritising ‘Health’ over ‘Growth’ by undergoing a massive cleanup (Apparently, the company’s health problem also costed them an acquisition offer from Disney).

However, in middle of all this Jack Dorsey announced last week a new functionality, the ability to change the user feed aka timeline.

Jack’s announcement about changes to timeline


A lot of Power users felt a collective sigh of relief. A few features have been on the wish list of a lot of users namely

  1. Abuse control (Stopping accounts that spread hate/harass others, bots)
  2. Ability to Edit a Tweet
  3. Reverse Chronological Timeline (Raw user feed)

Not sure about others, but I found this update rather interesting. Though I initially (and to some extent later) felt how the Twitter timeline experience had sorta deteriorated, but it never bothered me that much. 

In fact, I think for most people the value Twitter provides in terms of ‘staying in the know’ (along with one’s network) is much more than any bad changes to timeline.

A quick look at Twitter’s Timeline/User feed

Starting 2015 (Jack’s Return), Twitter started making changes to the user timeline to offer a better experience (and better monetisation?).  Prior to this the timeline was simply in reverse chronological order.

The Twitter Algo (pre-recent changes) via Buffer


‘Ranked Tweets’ are tweets recommended for each user by Twitter’s algo on the basis of

How Twitter’s Algo works


Apart from ‘Ranked Tweets’ and ‘In Case You Missed It’, Twitter also started ‘Seeding Tweets by accounts they don’t follow’ into users timeline

Via Quartz


While this last move definitely annoyed a lot of users from both timeline intrusive and also their own privacy POV, it apparently worked wonderfully well for Twitter.

From Twitter’s Q2-2016 Letter to Shareholders


As for me, I was finding more interesting tweets and new people to follow due to the ‘A, B and C liked this’ feature. I remember stumbling upon new content and users regularly and thus ended up interacting with that content and also following up more people.

It’s been a week since I reverted back to original timeline, while there is no meaningful difference in the quality of my timeline, the discoverability of new content/people have definitely gone down. I don’t remember starting to follow anyone in the last week or so.

Twitter for as long as I can remember has had a concentration of power users.

Median Twitter User has only 1 follower, as compared to Median FB User that has 100 friends


As Felix Salmon writes in Wired, 
“Twitter is becoming increasingly concentrated on a tiny core of power users. It’s less and less a distributed mode of many-to-many communication, and more and more a broadcasting hub for the elite—a highly unequal place where their least-considered, Ambien-addled opinions get amplified to a global audience of millions.”

Power users are at core of every product and one must count them lucky to have lots of them, however defining your product roadmap on the basis of what power users want isn’t necessarily the best thing. Given the tricky spot in which Twitter finds itself in (chasing profits via monetising eyeballs and keeping power users happy) they have to make changes to the product that makes their revenue targets met without compromising the user experience much and without bloating the product with hundreds of settings.

PS: Snapchat is another example of challenges a company faces on being the other side of Power User dynamics. 

When products are at mercy of power users