Ola Vs Yulu, India's $130B wedding market & India's own JSTOR💡
Insights into the big "macro" tailwinds of the week.
We are back with our new newsletter edition, which covers three important business topics in one go. Today, we discuss Ola’s entry into gig mobility, insights behind India’s $130B wedding market, and the launch of India’s “One Nation One subscription.”
GrowthX’s four-week live growth program begins this Sunday, December 1st 💫
Applications are open, and we are down to the final round of selection for the cohort. This is the program to learn from if you want to improve your skills in the four key pillars of growth: customer acquisition, onboarding, retention, and monetization.
Ola Vs Yulu: Gig wars 🛵
First, some context.
Yulu has been ruling India’s EV 2W shared mobility wave. With 40,000+ vehicles in 11+ country cities, it has become the go-to choice for last-mile delivery gig workers in e-commerce, food, & quick commerce. But Ola is here to crash the party and drop 2 models with better ranges.
What worked for Yulu?
The pay-per-use model with "no-license, no-training" light vehicles lowered the barrier for city migrants to join delivery work, offering a decent part-time income. For example, plans start at as low as ₹160/day (battery swaps included), making renting cheap. Interesting to see how a B2C model found a PMF (product market fit) in the B2B space.
Why is OLA doing this?
It’s coming for a slide of India’s booming gig economy (including all sectors)—expected to hit 20 million workers by 2030. Even in the most mature category, i.e., e-commerce, our penetration is only 7%, compared to 25% in other Asian markets. The runway for growth is huge as the Tier 2 & 3 movement is still yet to kick in.
What will be the “moat” here?
The real moat isn’t the cheapest rental—it’s the access. If you’re in Bengaluru, you must’ve seen one of the Yulu zones near you—convenient pick-and-drop spots for gig workers, many of whom prefer flexibility & renting over owning. For Ola, cracking this will be key, as it has launched both of its models for sale, unlike Yulu, which only sells one model and rents out the rest. Either way, in a nutshell, it’s going to help India’s growing blue-collar economy.
India’s $130B wedding market: Decoded 💍
First, some context.
The shaadi season is back with a bang. All social feeds are flooded. Btw, if you didn’t know, the wedding industry is the 3rd biggest industry after food and groceries. With ~1 crore weddings every year, it’s also 1.5X Sri Lanka’s GDP and a recession-proof space where the price-sensitive Indian consumer loses all rationale. Now, let’s dig into some insights into what’s happening here.What’s driving this?
The answer is — “demographics” & “signaling”. See, 60% of our population is below the age of 35, with the median age just being 28. The reason why the TAM is growing each year. Plus, interestingly, the average middle-class weddings (₹15 to 20 lakh) make up 51% of total weddings and drives 63% of the total country’s spend. On top of that, signaling plays a huge role — thanks to Bollywood’s influence, destination weddings have become a social statement.Fact.
Before COVID, 20% of loan applications from young Indians were for weddings, with many families up to 30% of their life savings on this one event. Btw, this is not new, India has been relying on wedding debt for decades.
Where does the money go?
If you look at the money distribution, catering, jewelry, venue, and apparel together make ~75% of the pie. But the interesting part is that both jewelry and apparel spaces are mostly (50%) unbranded at the moment — so there is a big runway for new modern premiumised brands to come up. Don’t forget that Manyawar makes ~₹1,300 crores because they got they nailed one thing bang on.What will we see more of?
We’ll see more brand creation in this space. Along with modern solutions like SaaS for wedding management (like Wedhaven in India, and The Knot in the U.S.) & marketplaces for vendors (like WedMeGood, ShaadiSaga) coming up, making large-scale weddings easy to execute.
India to have its own JSTOR 📚
First, some context.
The Indian govt. approved a ₹6,000 budget for ‘One Nation One Subscription’ (ONOS) — creating a central portal of journals & research papers for 6000+ government-run institutions. Btw, if you didn’t know, JSTOR is probably the biggest centralised library in the west that has ~12 million journals and articles. But the free access to such great repositories is obviously limited.
How will this help?
This solves one core thing—access to knowledge for Indian academics and students across Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. Before this, different colleges had overlapping subscriptions, causing inefficiency and knowledge gaps.
While this platform won’t be as huge as JSTOR with only 13,000 journals, we’ll only see more publishers being part of this as the govt. will be able to negotiate better prices with publishers because of the bigger contract size.
India’s macro R&D story.
This step is a great tailwind for the macro R&D story of India, as boosting research efforts will give a significant push to the country’s talent growth and innovation across multiple sectors & businesses.
Btw, we launched our latest Insider episode with Rahul Mathur (pre-seed Investor at DeVC).
A GrowthX member since 2023. He shares how GrowthX played a pivotal role in his -1 to 0 journey of figuring out what’s next 💎
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