Paytm, Nykaa, Uber & Rebel foods' growth experiments that made millions 💰
Micheal Scott was right "You do miss 100% of shots you don't take"
Welcome to the 67th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
Let’s begin today’s story.
We are covering some experiments that could inspire you with an insight and maybe help you this week to get that growth number.
Nykaa 💄
The Nykaa we know today was once a blooming startup, but something happened in 2016. This was altogether a new page on the website on the top navigation bar that told Nykaa’s users “Not sure what suits your skin type? Ask experts”.
The Experiment
As the beauty marketing boomed in India, Falguni Nayar realised the gap between potential buyer’s willingness to buy VS their understanding of the products. So, Nykaa hired 25+ experts to solve this gap & launched a beauty advice page.
The team went ahead a launched a quiz model-type page where it asked questions from users about their issues, skin type, budget etc and offered products. This not only helped Nykaa retain users who were unsure of their purchase, but also push their own line of products to the market.
Immediate buy = {intent based users + advice from beauty experts}
Uber 🚕
We’ve all heard stories about how brands change the way they operate for their customers, right? But for Uber, not only changed the way it operated, but also casted a dent in the cab aggregator space.
The Experiment
After spending almost a year in beta of sorts, Uber was still a luxury in India. Uber launched Cash (first in Bengaluru).
Cash became an instant hit. When people paid money after their ride was complete, trust was solved for. Most customers did not have a credit card (~3% population) & that was core to snail paced adoption of Uber in India.
It solved for 3 things that millions of Indian faced on a daily basis:
Lack of secure online payment gateways
Lack of trust with online merchants & cc payments
Confidence with cash payments
Rebel Foods 🍕
Know that the Indian cloud kitchen market size is expected to touch $1 bn by 2023, and Rebel Foods would be at the forefront. The online food delivery chain that you know today was once a store. But you don’t see that anymore. Why?
The Experiment
In 2011, when Faasos (new Rebel food) got its 1st funding of $5 million it had 2 choices - open more stores or go fully online. They chose the cloud kitchen route and the rest is history.
For scalability, restaurants have to either open their outlets in posh locations, & doing so results in high OPEX. Faasos circumvented the challenge by opening a cloud kitchen and targeting all segments of audiences in one go.
There is another innovation at the end of the tunnel that helped the brand go bonkers in their market share. Due to low ticket size and lack in repeat users, Faasos saw a decent growth in their overall sailing, but were failing miserably in going beyond. The founders knew if they stuck in the same cycle, they’ll soon have to shut shop.
Faasos used data. They studied what were the most common dishes being ordered in India and basically created an alternate for everything - all of this from 1 cloud kitchen.
What happened?
Faasos became an umbrella brand with over 20 full fledged brands. Today, Rebel has 450 kitchens across 70 cities in India and abroad (UAE & Singapore) and generated 99% of revenue from the sale of food products.
PayTM
Have you ever flashed your payment screen to a vendor after you paid for your tea, vegetables, or grocery shopping? Now assuming you’ve actually made the payment, but trust me when I say, thousands have been duped.
To help merchants know exactly when and how much of amount is credited, PayTM launched 1 million IoT for its merchants in 2020.
The Experiment
A device that says out loud the amount credited for merchants, to help them tally the income for the purchase they made. This is your voice activated point of sale speaker.
It’s generating over Rs.500 Cr for PayTm in annual revenues & growing.
That’s all folks! Hope you learnt something new today.
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