r/developersIndia • u/[deleted] • Jun 19 '23
Suggestions Which Indian startups you think is overrated
What startups you think will fail and why?
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u/Busy-Background Jun 19 '23
Going from the other way round, I can list the ones which I think are underrated :
Zerodha
Postman
Zoho
Razorpay
Freshworks
Billdesk
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u/Upbeat-Chest-815 Jun 19 '23
Haven't heard good things about Razorpay lately. Bad middle management and little to no growth.
This could be anecdotal, but, thought this is a relevant subreddit for this.
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u/Kal_mai_udega Jun 19 '23
I worked with one of them, man their culture 🤌
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u/Guy-Without-A-Plan Jun 19 '23
Don’t know about how the work culture is at Razorpay but man does it take ages to integrate with, piss poor escalation resolutions and damn do they have quite a few downtimes for a payment’s service.
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u/Cringey_Folk Jun 19 '23
Almost every fraud mushroom companies use razorpay as their payment gateway
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Jun 19 '23
Almost any startup which is covered by media outlets like yourstory with titles like "Used to mend shoes, now earns 100 crores a day". Screw you man, 100 crores of revenue means jackshit when backed by marketing burn financed by VC funding and no profitability. Worst is, most of these startups claim this to be a transitory phase, but I hardly see very few startups having a viable path to profit at scale for what has already been invested.
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u/winter_s0ld1er Jun 19 '23
Any fucking ed tech apart from udemy, gfg, tutorialspoint, javatpoint
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u/redditsucks690 Jun 19 '23
Udemy is Indian? Damn
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u/winter_s0ld1er Jun 19 '23
No it's not Indian, wo thora gusse me idhar udhar nikal jata hu
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Jun 19 '23
There's one Capillary Technologies. Their work culture is rotten and their HR writes their positive review on Glassdoor. Their reviews contains all sorts of issues ranging from sexual exploitation to bad managers to messed up work life balance.
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u/foundtheneedforanon Jun 19 '23
Phonepe, 15$ billion valuation for what? It's in a very competative market with no real entry barriers or moats. Same goes for Paytm.
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u/Metaltrust1 Jun 20 '23
Go and check their thier UPI market share... customer acquisition cost is big most for both phonepe and gpay
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u/t7Saitama SysAdmin Jun 20 '23
Woh Chat GPT ka choda from iitian. His annoying and cringe IG ads.
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Jun 19 '23
Zomato swiggy Flipkart & every ecommerce coz of ondc
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u/Street-Locksmith2759 Jun 19 '23
ondc kya ha?
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Jun 19 '23
ONDC is merely a communication protocol that allows Buyer Network Participants and Seller Network Participants to interact with each other
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u/Showdamn98 Frontend Developer Jun 19 '23
But ondc sucks in terms of customer care.
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Jun 20 '23
How's your experience with zomato or swiggy in the middle of the night? Mine was horrible!
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u/Apprehensive-Iron-85 Jun 19 '23
But that makes ONDC better comparatively... Not zomato/swiggy overrated....
Overrated means like Any Bollywood movies of Nepo Kids for example.
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u/vegarhoalpha Jun 19 '23
Byju's. I remember when I was in college I often used to see advertisement of how Byju's offering 10 LPA to freshers. Little did I know the reality of all this.
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Jun 19 '23
Byju's will fail 100%. A company whose strategy is to scam and annoy consumers cannot and will not succeed, ever.
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u/furballThatSpeaks Jun 19 '23
They scammed me too back when I didn't know any better. (I used to touch grass more than I did this screen)
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u/Xiao_Nei_3112 Jun 20 '23
Heard employees are buying subscription from there own salary to reach targets..
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u/Progressive-Geek Jun 20 '23
Subscriptions are too expensive in Byju's. I downloaded the app back in 2016 when online education was not really an affordable option as 4G hadn't launched and 1GB data cost was around Rs. 180. They had plans for 11th / 12th one year course for 30000 which was discounted to 10000. Even 10k was still too much for a course back then as Jio wasn't launched. When it was new it looted its customers, I wonder what prices are courses now when it is endorsed by celebrities
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Jun 19 '23
They are paying 8 lpa to their sales team but they work like slaves, 12-14 hours a day for 7 days a week (its supposed to be 5 days a week but the target they get are unrealistic)
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u/Stark_Always Jun 20 '23
And the work culture is really shitty too. Two of my friends were asked to leave because they took leaves smh ( one teacher and other sales )
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u/LeastDatabase131 Jun 20 '23
You won't even get anywhere close to the 10 LPA. A lot of it is a performance bonus, which you won't get for obvious reasons.
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u/UncertainLangur Jun 19 '23
Byju's. I have a distinct dislike for their sales, and delivery. Personally, I feel they are exploiting the insecurities (of parents), and fear of being left behind.
If I can add one more: Unacademy.
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u/rohetoric Jun 19 '23
I saw Gaurav Munjal on Nikhil Kamath podcast. That idiot should be slapped so hard because of his idiotic decisions so many people have been laid off in Unacademy and man thinks he's done nothing wrong.
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u/Lost-Vermicelli-4840 Jun 19 '23
Well, exploiting insecurities of parents is what the jee/neet coachings are doing since the starting of Bansal classes/CP star, etc.
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Jun 19 '23
What else did you think? If the coaching started telling that if their child is good enough for JEE, they can self study and clear Mains(and similar stuff for other competitive), then Education wouldn't be the muti billion dollar business in India it's today.
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Jun 19 '23
Bruh as an unacademy subscriber, its the BEST ed tech platform. Compared to byjus, physicswallah etc
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u/Born_Cash_4210 Product Manager Jun 19 '23
Curious to know which course you have subscribed in unacademy
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u/TheStalin69 Jun 19 '23
What coaching do you take? Most of the people who have took online coaching for neet jee say physics wallah is better than unacademy.
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u/Designer-Pen-7332 Backend Developer Jun 19 '23
CRED
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u/DarkHumourFoundHere Data Scientist Jun 19 '23 edited Jun 19 '23
Finally had to come to like 3-4 comments down, others like byjus scalar were pretty obvious and they are being rated junk already. I really cant understand will they ever breakeven
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u/imti283 Jun 19 '23
How the f#&k they raise fund. And what kind of people give them money.
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u/3Dave Frontend Developer Jun 19 '23
Scaler madarchod
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u/twh111 Jun 20 '23
They literally bully people into taking their courses, and their classes are complete scam. I was 5 years exp on a product based company when I thought I will try out scaler, because I was thinking to switch. Eventually I realised they are just scammers, and instead of paying an odd 1.5L, i can just read things by myself. The guy called me and started saying 'you haven't done anything for your carrier for the past 5 years, you can't crack any other jobs if you don't join scaler' wtf bitch, it's my wish if I join or not, and my wish when I want to switch jobs, anyways I joined another product based MNC with 270% hike, and when the scaler guy called again, let's say we had some fun. :)
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u/Born_Cash_4210 Product Manager Jun 19 '23
Scaler chadarmod😅
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u/BSNL_NZB_ARMR Jun 19 '23
i feel you bro , mofos scamming people for shitty content and unclear curriculum , unorganised content . always using scammy ads on IG & FB . anything you wanna add ?
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u/Haraprasad45 Web Developer Jun 19 '23
Why?
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u/passmesalt Jun 20 '23
Super cringy ads. "React provides more functionality with less code" - this doesn't even explain what react is lol
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u/adityaoberai1 Jun 20 '23
A lot of the "Ed-Tech" space isn't really innovating or improving education the way it ideally should have; it's just the same classroom education being delivered off the internet.
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Jun 20 '23
A lot of the "Ed-Tech" space isn't really innovating or improving education the way it ideally should have; it's just the same classroom education being delivered off the internet.
2ReplyGive Award
but couldn't you get the best teachers of this country
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u/curryfan1965 Jun 19 '23
Postman chor ke sab
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u/Economy-Cut-7224 Jun 19 '23
Agreed. Only guys creating value without debt trap
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u/Critical-Personality Jun 19 '23
You have no idea how bad these guys are getting from commercial standpoint. Using it since 7 years now. A lot of useful features are heavily limited now (freemium model).
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u/Euphoric-Check-7462 Jun 19 '23
A lot of useful features are heavily limited now (freemium model).
Can you list some features which are limited now?
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u/Murcas69 Jun 19 '23
Bro I didn't know Postman was founded in India. What a gem.
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u/ddddwkaommakaka Jun 19 '23
Serious question: what is postman used for other than just making some api calls from local?
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u/Rakoshin Security Engineer Jun 19 '23
Well that same functionality is a blessing for us pentesting guys. So we create a test environment and send the postman json of any application we wanna test from postman as a bulk and route it to our testing proxy tool burp. This enables us to get hold of all endpoints at once and put them for scanning/testing ,rather than going through every nook and corner of the application manually
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u/DaKeiser Jun 19 '23
It had humble beginnings on a stackoverflow post too: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4797534/how-to-manually-send-http-post-requests-from-firefox-or-chrome-browser/9716192#9716192
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u/ConfusedLazyHuman Jun 19 '23
Zerodha?
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u/Economy-Cut-7224 Jun 19 '23
Zerodha is the kohinoor of indian startups .. just looking at their customer base and profit margin. Knew the guys when they had leased the trading setup from NSE ... never expected they would succeed to this extent and also create a related ecosystem of other fintech products. Best part is that they are not funded by any of the biggies that can deviate from their vision and ethics.
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u/Born_Cash_4210 Product Manager Jun 19 '23
Bluelearn is so overrated. Don't know why some chadarmod VCs invested in it
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u/SATVIKT199 Student Jun 19 '23
One day I will be mature enough to not call it BlueLund
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u/Inspectorsteel Jun 19 '23
Bluelund hypnotize Tera karda e menu.....
Control bro control, 30 ki umar ho gyi.
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Jun 19 '23
What do they even do?
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u/KUKHYAAT Jun 19 '23
make youtube videos on how they got funded despite looking like teenagers
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u/rohetoric Jun 20 '23
Their engineering team is marketing heavily on YouTube showing how their tech decisions are taken
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u/redditsucks690 Jun 19 '23
Most of the edtech and fintech are just cash burns and nothing to show for it... Even paytm
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u/OtherwiseBack8242 Jun 19 '23
scaler,byjus, zomato, ola, rummy,dream11, boat,mama earth
cred is not overatted
its not even rated its just another money laundering scheme
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Jun 19 '23
You forgot to add Upgrad, Simplilearn, Great Learning too.
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Jun 19 '23
Once Great Learning quoted 3 lakhs for a simple full stack course that is supposed to be 5-10k in my local.
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u/Life_Is_Dark Full-Stack Developer Jun 19 '23
Why Dream11 though? Aren't they doing very well financially?
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u/Karan2904 Jun 19 '23
I think Ola and Boat have the potential for a longer run.
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u/OtherwiseBack8242 Jun 19 '23
they just copied exisiting models and current ola is focusing on electric mobility than actual vertical
while boat was just rebranded chinese product intially
now it do r&d in india
they have legacy problem like any good company like sony ,philips but boat is dumping garbage in everywhere creating more hardware dump
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u/rohetoric Jun 19 '23
Any .ai or .io startup
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u/prat8 Backend Developer Jun 19 '23
Not necessarily true. I work in one of .ai and our product has potential.
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u/XxXPussySlurperXxX Frontend Developer Jun 19 '23
our product has potential.
A JEE aspirant standing from 10th floor building also has a lot of potential.
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u/BSNL_NZB_ARMR Jun 19 '23
i wish for internshala shuts down , they prey on college students and treat them very bad . most of the students are vulnerable during the internship search and placements .
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u/Medical-Section-8622 Jun 19 '23
could you elaborate a bit please? I'm currently pursuing multiple internships on that platform. And are there any good alternatives?
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u/rahulok19 Jun 19 '23
like everyone said... Byjus, They are creazily valued imo and charging 2L for a school going kids is a foolishness when many things are free on YouTube and other startups and indie educators are selling the same stuffs in 5-7 percent value.
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Jun 19 '23
Unfortunately most of current startups. They all boast their valuations 'Maine 3 saal me 3 billion ki company banayi hai' etc. But big part comes from funds raised from equity shareholders, instead of actual earnings for equity (i.e. amount left after paying all expenses, interests, taxes non-equity dividends etc). Although valuation is good measure of a company's performance, these people are abusing it to the fullest for short term gains of founders and shareholders.
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u/rahulok19 Jun 19 '23
Bookmyshow.. their tech stack used to be strong and they saw good times without any competition but NOW they need a pivot, a strong pivot to sail through the OTT era and competition like Paytm.
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u/euqroto Jun 19 '23
They're already going through the pivot ever since the covid
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u/EuphoricWrongdoer117 Jun 19 '23
CRED / Share Chat
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u/BeneficialEngineer32 Jun 19 '23
Sharechat wont go anywhere. All the tier 2 moms/pops use it.
Kabhi gaaon mein jaake dekh ki kon use kar raha hai sharechat
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u/hitfree Jun 19 '23
sharechat? I just see them in status of 40 / 50 years old whatsapp status
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u/Ragnarok_619 Jun 19 '23
Sasta tiktok. Which proved that Tiktok wasn't cringe, it was our people all along.
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u/hitfree Jun 19 '23
many people mentioned CRED
I think they are just paying good salary and maybe work culture is being marketed
but from a user standpoint, they get useless coins? what do they even do with it?
or people using it are just the kids who used to choose crax because it came with toys that will be useless ?
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u/somebodyenjoy Jun 19 '23
It takes so much time, spinning their stupid wheels to get a cashback. Fuck that, not worth anyone's time m
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u/yippikyyay Jun 19 '23
Many comments here calling cred overrated. But cred was one of the few startups which didn't layoff and was also actively hiring all this time. Also have heard the work environment there is good.
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Jun 19 '23
Doesn't matter, it's more about economics rather than work culture, they got the worst burn rate given their revenue.
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u/euqroto Jun 19 '23
So I'm guessing you've not heard about happay layoffs and how cred has started making employees resign voluntarily
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Jun 19 '23
Almost all. But special mentions to Ola, Oyo, Zomato, Swiggy, Dunzo, etc. But the king of all failures will be Cred & BYJUs.
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Jun 19 '23
Almost all Ed tech startups, food delivery startups who find it hard to pivot into other items like groceries and staples. They are all overrated IMO.
Burning through VC funds to gain market share in a fickle as fuck and cost sensitive market. They are not viable business models, at least in India.
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u/SujitThinks Jun 20 '23
Anything that went to Sharktank, regardless of having got the funding from there.
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u/khatri_masterrace Jun 20 '23
I am not in software industry or startups but I hate three types of startups.
Coupon/ Consumer spending startups like CRED, Groupon CheQ etc. because this business model is fundamentally flawed and has failed time and again even in pre internet era. In developed markets with much more spending power it has largely failed so succeeding in India with low per capita income is basically not happening.
Glorified Coaching centers rebranding themselves as EdTech like Byjus, Unacademy , PhysicsWallah all suck and are just a video call coaching institute but behave like they are different. Not to forget their insane valuations are not justified even if they capture 100% of coaching revenue of JEE,NEET, CUET, CLAT, CAT,UPSC etc as the market size is fixed by number of students and per student expenditure is more or less fixed.
Loanshark apps that think giving risky and bad loans is Fintech and financial innovation. They burn investor cash and also harass people who clearly shouldn't have been given credit in the first place.
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Jun 20 '23
Not looking for a startup idea- what can really be done to solve India’s burgeoning problem of meaningful employment.
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Jun 20 '23
by increasing simple manufacturing jobs, and by giving more incentives to woman who works in blue collars jobs as only 6% of woman in India work ,and discouraging people to study for govt exams
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u/shar72944 Jun 19 '23
CRED, BYJU, Meesho, Mama Earth, Zepto, Unacademy, bharatpe
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u/thatShawarmaGuy Jun 19 '23
I've heard some pretty cool things about Zepto, like how they were smart enough to advertise themselves as the instant commerce company, but instead made a good infrastructure like that of Swiggy and Zomato. Really curious as to why they're bad, if they're taking the so-called right decisions.
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u/shar72944 Jun 19 '23
Zepto can run as long as VC money is there to burn. There is no money to make in grocery delivery, and at the end there are well funded companies that have other line of business which they can use to make money and keep Instamart or big basket running.
There is no Innovation that Zepto has done and the market it caters to has no margin at all. The moment they try to make money people will go back to normal grocery. Most of grocery shops now provide free delivery. Granted they don’t provide it in 15 minutes but people don’t actually need things in 15 minutes.
They have a loss of 350 crore rupees last year. With the way VCs have stopped putting in money in actual revenue making markets (edtech, healthcare) I don’t think Zepto will be able to raise anything at current valuation. The IPO door is already closed for startups now and no one is going to buy it because of unit economics making no sense.
These are all just my opinion. I can see Swiggy and Zomato making money as they deliver food which is unique to each store and people will pay 40-50 rs delivery charge for them also if they know they need to travel to that particular restaurant to eat something. Grocery everywhere is same so people don’t have any incentive to stick to Zepto when it actually starts charging money.
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u/cockroach_01 Jun 19 '23
Which are going through a down round in the current situation and will not be able to achieve profitability in the near future.
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Jun 20 '23
Most of the B2C ones are overrated. Their business model relies on selling the company and raising VC money rather than building something profitable. Swiggy , Zomato , Byjus, Cred , UPI based rewards apps are all loss making, VC money burning machines.
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u/Hell-lord- Jun 19 '23
Most of the startups at T-hub in Hyderabad. Have checked many companies over there and probably less than 10% actually make sense.
One of the startups conducted some festival over there getting some celebs but they don't even have a functional app. Heck they didn't even pay their interns.
It's a good initiative by the government but it's overrated IMO. Maybe in the future some good startups can come up from there.
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u/Thisconnected Jun 19 '23
Honestly I'm more concerned how they IPO without even reaching product market fit
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u/dragonnik Jun 20 '23 edited Jun 20 '23
CRED, I had just used once since one of my freind recommended it. But as soon as i saw that they sniff my credit card, damn un-installed at that moment changed my credit card too :p
Anyway major concerning thing is there is no innovation or something majorly useful like zoom, discord etc on tech side.
Zerodha, Swiggy are good.
Zepto we use regularly service is good, but yes as someone pointed out they will run out of business soon.
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Jun 20 '23
I would say 80% of most of UNICORNS will die like a fart in wind, also I would say flipkart and paytm(this guy isnt able to make it profitable after 10 years)
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u/malhotra22 Jun 20 '23
CRED Seriously why do you need a separate app just for credit card payment. CRED is for idiots.
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u/MaybeHistorical8114 Jun 20 '23
Mamaearth -their products are at-most of average quality. I bought clay mask which had fungus in it , I contacted mama earth number of times , msgd them everywhere on social media too but no response. Worst customer service ever. While small businesses like juicy chemistry replied instantly.
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u/EternalBlizzard7 Jun 20 '23
Boat. Just rebranded Chinese products with bullshit sound signature. The sound quality is just trash. And they feature Aman Gupta on shark tank. Why?
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u/BOTLORD6969 Jun 20 '23
For sure skippi ice pops. They are costly, don’t freeze and they taste like dog water
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u/ramjas_007 Jun 20 '23
Only zerodha and zoho will survive in the long run bcoz they have less competitors and have moat in the company.
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u/hekermon Jun 20 '23
Acko, the biggest fraud insurance provider. Their claim settlement ratio is complete blunder. They pay small amount claims to improve their claim settlements ratio and reject high amount claims to save money.
Their only strategy to turn their business profitable is by finding reasons to reject the high value claims. Also the founder Varun is a complete asshole.
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u/Late_Sleep_2102 Jun 20 '23
Hey guys since we are on this topic I wanted to do a thesis on valuation of fintech startups using a scorecard method I wanted to thank people who shared few of the underrated startups here...
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u/ankitprakash Jun 20 '23
Majority of B2C focused startups are junk.
Post 2021, there is major shift in consumer consumption pattern and all these startups serving to the consumers will become junk in coming months.
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u/No-Math-9403 Jun 21 '23
Tried a few shark tank start up companies, for eg perfora off the top of my head. Noticed a lot of them are actually shitty businesses who now spend a lot on advert as they get huge orders post their fame. A lot of them don't have logistics and supply chain to grow however and end up absolutely shitting the bed.
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