Bet you found some surprises here dint ya? Yes, I’m sure you’ve all got an opinion on Ola vs. Uber and Flipkart vs. Amazon. As we’ve noted before — Ola has a lot to work on but its products and positioning are somewhat better suited to India. They’ve got buses, autos and now e-ricks. As a brand, it’s also less daunting
Could Umber’s premium brand positioning be turning users away?Maybe but more likely, people in tier 2 & 3 cities are probably downloading the app only to find that Uber doesn’t serve their market. Yet.
The foot print of these apps is YUGE. SHAREit (owned by Lenovo) claims to have over a 100 million users in India alone. Their reach and market share figures validate those numbers. Xender of course, claims to have 50% of the market in 2016, we respectfully disagree. Still a 3rd of the pie is nothing to scoff at.
Is it time to throw out the rule Book? Trip Advisor’s losing the least customers! I was pretty stunned. I would’ve expected it to be high considering it’s geared to cater to vacation travellers rather than business travellers. This data throws up a few compelling questions.
- Are travel patterns changing in India?
- Are people moving from need based travel to leisure?
- Or is this just the peer reviews and its associated snow ball effect?
Most first time entrepreneurs don’t think about things like CAC or Retention cost when they initially startup. These things hit you like a rude shock usually around the time you realize you weren’t quite as smart as you thought and maybe you need some advice or if you have limited cash — need to pivot.
So if you’re going to start a company — maybe give this one thing some really hard thought. Different sectors have different metrics. Certain sectors inherently need more capital than others.
- Do you have access to adequate capital?
- Does your investor realize how much you’ll need?
- Will they be willing to continually fund your CAC?
Actually, even investors should be asking themselves this question.How much funding will this company to make the bet come true? It’s easy to pump a bit of money and then hope like hell that a larger fund will come in to the cap table at a higher valuation. But you’d get better odds on a coin toss. That’s not just me being a smart ass — its math.
Thanks for your time,
Ashish
- Team KG
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You can reach me on ashish@kalagato.com
