Just because a business might decide to extend itself into a new vertical doesn’t mean its customers want it to. The following infographic provides a break up of market share by booking volumes and medicine orders across 3 platforms: Practo, 1mg & Lybrate.
Each of these businesses operates in more or less the same space. They will all book an appointment with the doctor for you and try and sell you the medicines you need. But that’s not how they started.
Practo & Lybrate started with the aim of booking an appointment with the doctor for you and then started offering medicine delivery because why not. For 1mg, they made the same journey from the opposite direction.
Interestingly, their customers still use them for the first use case they set out to cater to, i.e. appointment booking in the case of Lybrate and Practo and Medicine Delivery in the case of 1mg. Most of the data we found seems to reinforce this user tendency — to use one platform for one major use case.
For Example: Uber could roll out Uber Eats but you’d probably still use Swiggy or Zomato to order food.
If you’re running an early stage company or invested in one — it’s worth asking the question — should we be doing this? Is it something customers want from us or is it something we want to sell to them?
Zomato or Swiggy could just as well begin to provide food delivery on trains (there certainly seems to be demand for it) but it probably wouldn’t be worth the pain and distraction it could cause.
I suspect a lot of such decisions get taken because of arguments made in favour of vertical & horizontal integration or juicing the same customer & infrastructure for more.
But the benefits of any such move take time (& money & patience) to accrue- all rare commodities in the life of an entrepreneur.
Thanks for your time,
Ashish
- Team KG
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You can reach me on ashish@kalagato.com
