Thread by @BiIndia

#EXCLUSIVE | Meet India’s Real Gully Boy: Vidit Aatrey of Meesho is taking the entrepreneurial dream deep inside Bharat

@Meesho_Official @viditaatrey

businessinsider.in/thelife/person…

By @malinibhupta

Shaan Ansari is a 19-year old entrepreneur who lives in the historic city of Panipat, 100 kms north of Delhi, and he may never qualify for any list celebrating under-20 #entrepreneurs, but his story is no less inspiring than #RanveerSingh’s character in Gully Boy.

The pandemic put his father out of work and Ansari out of school. He went scouting for opportunities online that would require zero #investment and found it in Meesho.

Today he manufactures mats from a rented factory, employs 50 people and clocks revenues of ₹30 lakh a month.

.@Meesho_Official's co-founder and CEO @viditaatrey’s dream is to get a million local businesses online so that they expand their markets by selling wares across India, irrespective of where they are located.

In the last two years, this new kid on the block has emerged as a challenger to the Big Boys of #ecommerce.

Meesho - which is a short code for ‘my shop’ - has gotten bigger after the pandemic with 120 million monthly active users (MAUs) in a short span of time.

In the early days, Meesho’s sales were driven by 15 million women resellers, who bought products from the platform and sold it through #WhatsApp & #Facebook groups.

Today, @Meesho_Official has a share of nearly 30% in total daily online deliveries.

Of the 9 million e-commerce orders processed daily, Meesho accounts for 2.7 million, while the two biggies account for 5 million.

Clearly, @Meesho_Official is the challenger that nobody expected would catch up with #Amazon and #Flipkart.

Currently, there are six lakh sellers on Meesho and the #startup wants to take this to one million. Every week #employees join the Meesho Sabha, a meeting where examples like Ansari are discussed at length so that the team does not take its eyes off the goal post.

Even though @Meesho_Official continues with its outreach programme to help sellers, existing sellers have now become brand ambassadors who are helping others get online. The platform offers peer-to-peer learning in several languages for those who want to get started.

Lucknow-based Suman Agrawal used to sell women’s fashion clothing at her boutique but has shut it down after her brand Rudraksh saw sales boom on @Meesho_Official. She currently manages 22,000 orders a month.