Two teenagers started a WhatApp group to help their neighbours with groceries during the Covid lockdown. Years later, they were running a multi-crore business. This is the story of Zepto.
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00:00And it was a crazy idea for two kids sitting in Bombay
00:02They basically said we'll give you 40 lakhs for free and like no questions asked
00:05Just take 40 lakhs if you're building something interesting
00:06And we were like, wow, that's amazing
00:08Like we were just like, that's crazy
00:09We just walk into as many of these Kirana stores
00:12Yeah
00:12And try to convince them to join as a sender
00:14Out of 10 of them, 8 will tell you to like
00:16I don't know if I
00:16To f*** basically
00:21And two of them will say, okay, fine, I'll download your app
00:23And by the time you walk out, one of those two is deleted
00:30I think as kids, both of us had dads who were engineers
00:44Sort of pushed into that world pretty early on
00:46That's how we bonded as well
00:48KB is always a lot more technical and smarter than I was
00:51So he built out the actual interesting stuff
00:53I just did the talking
00:55And yeah, but we used to work on things together
00:58By the time two of us were 17, we said, okay
01:01Like, how do we make a career out of this hobby?
01:04Like, how do we build for a living?
01:07I mean, basically towards the end of school
01:08We said, how do we build a career out of building?
01:12And we figured that, you know, from the Y Combinator YouTube videos
01:15And like the sessions that we used to see online
01:17We realized that this is community of people in Silicon Valley
01:20That basically build for a living, right?
01:22And we said, how do we get
01:23What's the best excuse to get there?
01:24What's the best excuse for two Indian kids in Dubai to get there?
01:27Probably go to college there
01:29And so two of us applied
01:30Figured Stanford would be a good excuse to go there
01:34Lucky enough to get in
01:36And so, yeah, that was supposed to be the beginning of the journey
01:38So we were supposed to start in September of 2020
01:40Right
01:41And did you go to college?
01:42No
01:42No, no, we effectively didn't
01:44I mean, so we were supposed to go
01:45So March 2020, pandemic hits
01:49Two of us were supposed to go
01:50Couldn't go
01:51And we said, okay, we can start our college education online
01:56But we had like four precious years in Silicon Valley
01:59So we said, you know, if we're gonna waste a year
02:01Sitting on our laptops in Dubai or Mumbai
02:04It's not really worth it
02:06And so we decided to take a year off
02:08And yeah, that's when we started experimenting
02:10What was the first experiment?
02:12So we came to Bombay, firstly
02:14Like when the pandemic hit
02:16March, April 2020, lockdown
02:19Your local mom and pop shop was disrupted
02:23The online guys were taking seven, eight days to deliver
02:25And it was a pain
02:26And most of our neighbors were elderly
02:28And so we were on a WhatsApp group chat
02:31And we just used to deliver for them
02:32Because we had nothing else to do
02:34And you would charge a fee for this?
02:36Initially, we didn't
02:37That WhatsApp group grew
02:39Eventually, we started hitting that limit
02:41256
02:42Yeah, 256 KB remembers
02:43But yeah
02:45But each person could see what the neighbor was ordering?
02:48Yeah, it was not very
02:50So it's just, I don't know
02:51Maybe 100-200 houses there
02:53So it's just the people within that
02:55And there were three stores nearby
02:57That we would pick up and stuff off
03:00And so that was that
03:00And when it got to a certain point
03:01We said, let's build an app out of it
03:04So we can scale this
03:05And so we built out the first rendition
03:06It was called Kirana Card
03:08And yeah, it was basically a pickup and drop service
03:10And that's how we ended up building it
03:12And started scaling over the course of a couple of months
03:16And that's pretty much all we would do
03:17We were like the customer support executives
03:19We were the delivery partners
03:20And the delivery drivers
03:22We were the guys that, you know
03:24Packed the orders for the store
03:27And we used to do that for like 60-70% of the time
03:28We've got some crazy stories
03:30We applied to this thing
03:31And we actually met Will
03:33Who was the first investor in the company
03:35We applied to this thing called
03:37A Country Capital
03:38It was a fellowship
03:39And it was a crazy idea for two kids sitting in Bombay
03:41They basically said, we'll give you 40 lakhs for free
03:43And like, no questions asked
03:44Just take 40 lakhs
03:44If you're building something interesting
03:46We would just go to a different neighborhood in Bombay
03:48Like one day it'd be Parel, or Pawai, or Borivali, or Kulaba
03:51And we just walk into as many of these kirana stores
03:54And try to convince them to join as a seller
03:56Trying to sell software to like a banya
03:58Is probably the best crash course in sales that anyone can get
04:00It's unbelievable
04:01Because 10 out of 10 of them
04:028 will tell you to like
04:03I don't know if I
04:04To f*** basically
04:05Two of them will say, okay, fine
04:06I'll download your app
04:06And by the time you walk out
04:07One of those two is deleted
04:08They're deleted
04:09Yeah
04:09Right, and so
04:10And they would give us feedback though
04:11On like what they need to improve
04:13In 2020, how much did you sell?
04:15We hadn't launched the customer side yet
04:16Yeah
04:17We launched it in January
04:18Like the
04:1921
04:20Like with the app basically
04:21Okay, 2021, how much did you sell?
04:22So by
04:24Within 30 days of launching
04:2530 to 40 days
04:26We got to about $300 a day
04:28Okay, so 2021 end
04:312022 financial year
04:33How much did
04:3420, FY21
04:35Yeah
04:36Nothing, like probably a couple lakhs
04:3722?
04:38And yeah, from July 21 to
04:41Today
04:42Like about 24 months
04:44Went from about zero to
04:45To like today north of 5,000 crores in sales
04:49So crazy
04:50That was crazy