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Delhivery Business Model: How Delhivery Makes Money

When one thinks about the early 2010s ecommerce revolution in India, or even the relatively recent D2C (direct to consumer) boom, the logistics industry; which was the backbone of this revolution, is seldom spoken of. One of the reasons is that the backend operations are usually less visible and the other is that logistics is largely considered a boring industry. But this boring Indian logistics industry was pegged at $200 billion as 2021 and is expected to grow exponentially in the future.  Delhivery, India’s largest and fastest-growing fully-integrated player by revenue in Fiscal 2021, realized that the Indian logistics industry...

Udaan Business Model: How Udaan Makes Money

When the startup world thought about digitizing commerce in India, it first pursued the B2C sector. And this is evident in the fact that companies, like Flipkart & Amazon, which went on to disrupt commerce in India by nudging people online were mostly focussed on reaching consumers directly themselves(first-party sales) or focused on empowering businesses to reach customers through their third-party marketplace model.  But this model of doing businesses failed to recognize or choose to ignore that India is market driven by small and medium scale businesses that source products from each other, leading to the presence of a huge...

Firefox Business Model: How Firefox Makes Money

Over the last three decades, we have been through two browser wars, and we are likely on the cusp of the third one.  The first browser war ended with Microsoft's Internet Explorer defeating Netscape Navigator, becoming the market leader in 1998. The second browser war ended with Google Chrome dethroning Internet Explorer, becoming the market leader in 2012.  A key player of the second browser war, Firefox's browser market share peaked at 32.21% at the end of 2009.   As of Dec 2021, Firefox has a market share of 3.91%, coming in fourth after Chrome Safari & Microsoft Edge. With a market share of 63.8% & 19.6%, Google...

Patreon Business Model: How Patreon Makes Money

In 2013, Jack Conte was just another YouTuber Creator among a sea of them. Today, he is the CEO of Patreon, the world's leading creator platform, using which creators around the world have earned more than $3.5 billion as of 2021. How did he go from being a YouTube Creator, without technical chops, to heading the world's largest creator platform?  Well, Conte’s story is as much his as it is Patreons’. So, let’s look into Patreon’s founding story.  And post that, we will also walk you through a bunch of other stuff -- like how exactly Patreon works, business model pivots,...

PharmEasy Business Model: How PharmEasy Makes Money

The decade of 2010s will go down in history books as the decade the internet access proliferated across India. At the beginning of the decade, 92.57 million people were using the internet across the country. By the end of the decade, the number had swelled to 749.07 million. The imminent rise in Internet usage led to the growth of innumerable Internet startups and disruption across industries. One of the first major industries to witness disruption was retail.  The founding of Flipkart in 2007 led to a wave of new online shoppers. The Amazon entry in 2013 and the rise of competitors...

GetUpside Business Model: How GetUpside Makes Money

A few years after its founding in 2016, GetUpside has grown to become one of the leading platforms in the cashback segment in the United States. Users have earned $100 million in cashback until writing this piece, and merchant partners have made more than $200 million in incremental profit using GetUpside.   The cashback segment was an already crowded space, so GetUpside is a business worth studying. In this blog, we go through GetUpside’s founding and growth story, understand how GetUpside makes money, and discuss its future expansions plans. But before we do that, let me briefly walk you through how...

Spotify Business Model: How Spotify Makes Money

The advent of the internet and the subsequent rise of tech companies, as it did with all other industries, changed the music industry. Amazon changed the way we shop. Netflix changed the way we consume entertainment. Uber changed the way we book cabs. Similar to Amazon, Netflix & Uber; Spotify changed the way we listen to music.  In the process of disrupting the respective industries they chose to target, each of these companies — Amazon, Netflix, Uber & Spotify  — altered the behavioral design of the society and upended the economics of the industry.  In the last two decades, online music...

Google Business Model Case Study

If Google were a country, its 2019 revenue of $162 billion would make it the 60th largest economy in terms of GDP, surpassing 135 smaller countries, according to IMF data. Considering that Google had 118,899 full-time employees as of Dec 2019, its $162 billion revenue translates to a GDP per capita of $1.36 million. (You get GDP per capita by dividing a country's economic output by its population). In Q4 2019, the United States of America had a GDP per capita of $65.420. Comparing the GDP per capita of a country to the GDP per capita of a company is by no means an apple...

Instacart Business Model: How Instacart Makes Money

You want to watch a blockbuster at 3 am while the cable airs commercials, Netflix allows you to do that. You want a cab at your house without waiting for a cabbie to spot you, Uber allows you to do that. You want food delivered from a restaurant at the tap of a button, Doordash allows you to do that.  We are now living in a period where goods and services can be accessed instantly. However, until recently, grocery delivery was still a problem that no company had successfully. And this is where Instacart spotted an opportunity in 2012. Instacart is...

Zomato Business Model: How Zomato Makes Money

While Zomato was started as a simple restaurant listing directory in 2008, the company has come a long long way since then venturing into multiple business segments, making the business more diverse than a Zomato user interacting with the business would think it to be. In this blog, we will try to demystify Zomato’s business model. But before we do that, let's take a look at its founding story & how the company has evolved over the years to establish better context. Zomato Founding & Growth Story The only person who has always been involved in the operations of Zomato is the...