Thread by @ponnappa

Not always. We launched with three products and had doubled that in a year. Depends on the market and the products being launched.

https://twitter.com/suvirsujan/status/1187567785326592001

Let's dig in with more IMOs.

Superapp strategies work in blue ocean, growth stage markets.

You're in one of these markets when your problem is scaling the business to meet demand, not scaling demand to grow the business.

When this starts happening, diversify.

Forget research, UX and all the other 1st world product advice. Focus on launching as many MVP products that increase utilization of your core asset base as quickly as you can.

See which of them grow despite all odds.

Double down.

I'm pretty convinced that going 0-1 on a superapp strategy is going to be hard to impossible in mature, saturated markets, unless you already own a platform which allows you to amortize cost and increase utilization by launching products.

Also, a 4 wheeler fleet is *not* such an asset to build a superapp on. You can't load balance and improve utilization for car driver by getting them to delivery food or parcels. The delivery costs will always be beaten by cheaper transport.

Payments as a superapp strategy's foundational asset is questionable to me - how do you improve utilization? Payments made sense as a horizontal product on top of an existing foundation (like a 2 wheeler fleet) because it makes all the other apps in the superapp easier to use.

India isn't a blue ocean for a bunch of reasons - all well understood models (ride-sharing, food delivery, paymets etc etc) already have multiple, large, established players. Ditto the US and most first world markets.

A superapp play would depend on new verticals opening up.

I find it interesting that once Uber says it's going the Superapp route, it's suddenly a thing. Until now it was all "Oh that's only possible in China".

What's being missed is that it was possible in China at a point in time when there was a blue ocean and growing demand.

Ditto with us in Indonesia back in 2015/16. There's a tight time/place/market for these things.

Saturated markets with slow growth in demand is *not* superapp territory. That's where you stick to the old playbook - do one thing, do it well, scale, platformize.

Equally mind boggling to me is the idea of building a superapp with a platform architecture and open API's as the Day #1 strategy. If a 2 sided marketplace (eg. Driver/Consumer) is hard to boot up, a 3 sided marketplace (eg. Driver/Consumer/Merchants) is 10X harder.

Basically if done the usual way - do one thing well, improve UX over time, drive up engagement until critical mass is hit, then platformize and diversify - then every Western platforms like GOOG, FB, AMZN can all be called superapps. But we don't.

Platform play != Superapp play

At the time (mid 2015) we had bitter arguments with Nadiem internally at Gojek over the hyper diversification of the product portfolio without slowing to invest in research, UX etc. But we were basing our argument on strategies from Western products.

Nadiem was right.

As long as the demand holds, improve utilization of the core assets by diversifying products until you have a superapp.

Launch launch launch.

Of course there's a price. TANSTAAFL.

But it worked for us.

To give you a sense, from mid-2015 to end 2016 at Gojek we pretty much

* Launched a new product every month
* Grew completed txns 1000X
* Reduced downtimes 1000X

All this with a distributed Indo-India team. Was wild times.

#Superapp is a early stage growth strategy for blue ocean markets. #Platforms are a late stage growth strategy and drive growth in red oceans.

Eventually of course, Superapps mature into platforms, with open APIs and tons of 3rd party apps participating. But that's eventually.