How Meesho Became India’s Biggest Shopping App
Vidit Aatrey, co-founder of Meesho, discusses the company's evolution from a local fashion marketplace to India's largest shopping app with 250 million annual buyers. He explains how customer obsession drove multiple pivots, including abandoning their successful WhatsApp-based social commerce model to launch a direct consumer app in 2021. He also shares how AI is now the next frontier for reaching the remaining 750 million potential Indian consumers.
Summary
Vidit Aatrey, co-founder of Meesho, joins a YC talk in 2026 to discuss the company's 11-year journey from a small startup to India's dominant e-commerce platform. Meesho now serves 250 million unique buyers annually, processes 2.5 billion orders per year, and has been the number one shopping app on Android Play Store every single day since July 2021.
Vidit and his co-founder Sanjiv both came from small-town India and noticed a stark gap in 2015: while Bangalore residents were buying online prolifically, their families in Meerut and Jharkhand were not. This observation became the founding mission — to democratize internet commerce for a billion Indian consumers.
Their first product, 'Fashion Nearby,' was a local fashion marketplace that failed within three months because they had only spoken to sellers and ignored consumers. Consumers found it worse than both physical malls and existing e-commerce platforms. Their second iteration observed that small shop owners were already using WhatsApp groups as informal online stores, and Meesho initially tried to formalize this with payment and inventory tools. When they couldn't monetize offline businesses for software, they discovered their power users were online-native drop shippers (resellers) who used the product intensively. This led to the launch of 'Meesho Supply,' which connected resellers to suppliers and grew organically without any marketing spend, doubling every month for ten months.
By 2020, Meesho had 10 million WhatsApp group sellers and an estimated 100 million end consumers. However, Jio's entry had driven data costs to near zero and the COVID pandemic had accelerated digital adoption, removing the foundational reasons WhatsApp had been superior to apps. Vidit recognized this as an existential threat: continuing the WhatsApp model would eventually cede consumers to competitors. Despite board hesitation, he argued that a half-hearted experiment would alienate both their resellers and fail to capture consumers. They committed fully to launching a direct consumer app in July 2021, going from 10 million to 100 million monthly users within five months.
Looking ahead, Vidit frames AI as a similar paradigm shift to the mobile internet wave of 2015-16. Meesho recently launched a voice AI agent called 'Wani' designed so rural consumers never need to read, type, or click — addressing the overwhelming complexity that prevents hundreds of millions of Indians from shopping online. His vision is to grow from 250 million to one billion buyers using AI-driven accessibility, and he urges current founders to apply the same customer-first observation approach to AI that he applied to mobile internet a decade ago.
Key Insights
- Vidit argues that Meesho's first product 'Fashion Nearby' failed because they only spoke to sellers and never to consumers, calling it 'the most obvious mistake you can make' — consumers found limited local selection with no ability to touch products worse than both malls and existing e-commerce.
- Vidit claims that Meesho's true product-market fit signal was that power users complained constantly about missing features yet still opened the app 15-20 times a day, and the product grew by doubling every month for 10 months with zero marketing spend.
- Vidit argues that pivoting from WhatsApp social commerce to a direct consumer app could not be done as an experiment — a half-hearted attempt would anger existing resellers while failing to acquire consumers, making it lose-lose, so full commitment was the only viable path.
- Vidit states that within five months of launching their consumer app in July 2021, Meesho grew from 10 million to 100 million monthly users, and has been the number one shopping app on Android Play Store in India every single day since July 7, 2021.
- Vidit claims that Meesho's new voice AI agent 'Wani' is designed so rural consumers never need to read, type, or click anything — addressing specific fears like accidentally deducting money by pressing a button — and that he believes AI will drive Meesho's growth from 250 million to one billion buyers.
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