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We saw fear driven adoption in 2020 and will see convenience and value driven growth in 2021. Consumers have experienced the benefits of product discovery and the ease of access to a breadth of products, that will make going back to the “old way” seem like moving into the Stone Age. Read on to see what we think will change and what won't
Fear and greed are big drivers of action. For half a decade, businesses spent billions of dollars trying to motivate change through greed. They offered deal after deal and covered page after page of newspapers trying to get consumers to change behavior and shop online. Then along came COVID and pulled on the string of fear. Fear of infection caused by interaction. Consumers no longer needed crazy offers to try to buy online, they simply needed to know that they wouldn’t get sick. And so now everyone is transacting online. E-commerce order volume increased by 36% in the last quarter of 2020. People are buying more than just books and electronics online. They are buying essentials, medicine, fashion, food and everything in between. India’s e-Grocery market witnessed a 73% CAGR over the past year.
We saw fear driven adoption in 2020 and will see convenience and value driven growth in 2021. Consumers have experienced the benefits of product discovery and the ease of access to a breadth of products, that will make going back to the “old way” seem like moving into the Stone Age. Investments in technology and fulfillment infrastructure has driven a 1.5X jump in NPS across categories. The 1.1 million digitized consumer are making growth equitable by helping SME and homegrown brands scale.
This massive fear driven behavior change has enabled businesses to achieve scale commensurate with the market sizes they have been going after. Pre-COVID, businesses suffered from an imbalance in capital raised vs revenue scale. This has now changed. Rebel Foods is now a $150MM annualized revenue company operating in 7 countries with 3500 internet restaurants across 395 kitchens. Melorra has scaled to $50MM in revenues with the lowest CAC we have ever seen in the business. Scale is larger, profitability metrics are better, customer acquisition cost is lower. Things in India happen Gradually then Suddenly. We are in the Suddenly part now and the party is just getting started.
Like many parties thing are going to get crazy. We are going to see a flurry of IPOs. New age companies are going to buy out old world businesses. Traditional businesses will double down on product and distribution expertise while beginning to invest more aggressively in new technology enabled channels. Fundamental financial analysis will give way to exuberant optimism. With war chests of capital available, companies will continue to invest in creative ways to optimize labor and automate processes. All of this will happen in the backdrop of an ongoing pandemic that will continue to accelerate the fear driven shift in consumer behavior. Over the past year and a half the pandemic has had a positive effect on businesses and the operational efficiencies they have come to realize are here to say. Changed behavior that is delivering benefits at both a consumer level and a business level, are going to continue. All of the changes and growth that we expected to see in the consumer tech space for the past decade are now happening and at Lightbox we are excited to be one of the hosts of this great Indian technology party.
Look for an empty work station, a chair and get ready to go
Creativity involves a certain amount of rebellion. The best thing a brand can do is to drive a product’s strategy through a market efficiently by provoking conversation and creating desire. Your fans represent the character, vibrancy and future of your brand.
Tips from Photojojo on how to scale a brand online. One big learning: hire your fans!
Good design deepens the connect between and brand and its user and that makes it good business.
There is a need to balance teams with tastes tactfully keeping technology on top to give a deep insight into a customer’s buyer journey, every mouthful of the way
This is now the fourth year I’m writing my predictions for Tech in Asia. I’m more excited about this coming year than I’ve been about any of the last few years has tech is finally reached a tipping point.
At Lightbox we’ve always tried to use tech to build interesting businesses. Companies that understand what Indian consumers want as well as they understand their household budgets. We ran our annual day at a modern art gallery in Colaba, with our CEOs as well as a few founders from our network to lead the discussion.
When we first met to discuss starting a fund, one of the things that we all had in common was that we were entrepreneurs. We had launched our own companies, gotten rejected by investor after investor, produced good and bad products and experienced failure after failure. We were start up warriors and had the battle scars to prove it.
That’s what Embibe taught me over the last four years, as an investor and advisor.
At long last, we decided we needed a new name. “Faasos” will remain the brand for our wraps and we will continue to put massive focus behind growing the brand. But we felt the company needed a name that would signify what we were doing as a team instead of being restricted to the name of one of our many brands. So, as of last week and much deliberation, we changed our company name to “Rebel Foods”.
This quarter was rather eventful. We grew a lot more comfortable living and working in the midst of a pandemic. COVID provided us with a new lens to look at some sectors. We deep-dove into some of the major trends in the Indian startup ecosystem and consequently met some promising, relevant startups.
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