Tag: marketplaces

Dunzo and Urbanclap

I realise that Dunzo and Urbanclap (and many other apps) grew in a particular way. Initially they weren’t sure of the exact problem that they were solving, and instead focussed on a particular “problem class”.

And then over time, based on pattern recognition and segmentation/cluster analysis of the kind of problems that people were using these apps to solve, they started providing more targeted solutions that made better business sense.

Dunzo started off as a “we’ll do anything for you” app. People making fun of the company would talk about a Dunzo executive who would come home, collect your bean bag, get the beans refilled and bring it back to you, and only charge for the beans.

I’m pretty sure that there were many other such weird use cases in which people sort of abused Dunzo in its early days. However, most of the users of the app, I’m guessing, used it for sending packages across town, and to fetch stuff for them from shops and restaurants. And now, four years down the line, Dunzo highlights these specific streamlined use cases in the app, and has figured out a good way of charging for each of them.

It’s similar with Urbanclap. While I didn’t use them in the early days, I used their competitor HouseJoy. I used the app to request for “a plumber”. A plumber duly arrived and did all sorts of odd jobs in our apartment building, some of which were dangerous. And then at the end we paid him in cash, and he told us that “if someone from the app calls, tell them you paid me only 200 rupees” (we had paid him 2000).

Soon, after being a marketplace for all sorts of odd jobs, Urbanclap and its ilk noticed patterns and started specific services. So last week we got someone from Urbanclap to “repair our water heater” (this had a fixed fee on the app). It is another set of such specific services that UrbanClap offers.

I may not have said much new in this post, but it’s basically a crystallisation of some of my thoughts of late – sometimes it’s okay to not have a particularly precise business plan as long as you know what problem class you’re tackling. If you manage to get funded and are willing to burn money, you can learn the best set of problems from the market (within your identified class).

It’s an expensive process for sure, since until you figure this out you’ll be spending a lot of time and money doing random shit, but if you and your investors are willing to bear this kind of expense, it might be worth it.

The worst thing that can happen to you, though, is that after you’ve burnt your company’s money in learning about the market’s precise problem statement, another well-capitalised firm moves faster than you to address this specific market. The question is how well you can put to use your learnings from the early period for later on.

Market depth, pricing and subsidies

A few days back I had written about how startups should determine how much to subsidise their customers during the growth phase – subsidise to the extent of the long-term price. If you subsidise too much initially, elasticity might hit you when you eventually have to raise prices, and that can set you back.

The problem is in determining what this long-term sustainable price will be. In “one-sided markets” where the company manufactures or assembles stuff and sells it on, it is relatively easy, since the costs are well known. The problem lies in two-sided markets, where the long-term sustainable price is a function of the long-term sustainable volume.

A “bug” of any market is transaction costs, and this is especially the case in a two-sided market. If you are a taxi driver on Ola or Uber platform, the time you need to wait for the next ride or distance you travel to pick up your next customer are transaction costs. And the more “liquid” the market (more customers and more drivers), the lesser these transaction costs, and the more the money you make.

In other words, the denser a market, the lower the price required to match demand and supply, with the savings coming out of savings in transaction costs.

So if you are a two-sided market, the long-term sustainable price on your platform is a function of how big your market will be, and so in order to determine how much to subsidise (which is a function of long-term sustainable price), you need to be able to forecast how big the market will be. And subsidise accordingly.

It is well possible that overly optimistic founders might be too bullish about the eventual size of their platform, and this can lead to subsidising to an extent greater than the extent dictated by the long term market size. And some data points from the Indian “marketplace industry” show that this has possibly happened in India.

Having remained credit card only for a long time now, Uber has started accepting cash payments – in order to attract customers who are not comfortable transacting money online. This belated opening shows that Uber perhaps didn’t hit the numbers they had hoped to, using their traditional credit card / wallet model.

Uber has problems on the driver side, too, with an increasing number of its drivers turning out to be rather rude (this is anecdata from several sources, I must confess), refusing rides, fighting with passengers, etc. Competitor Ola has started buying cars and loaning them to drivers, perhaps indicating that the driver side of the market hasn’t grown to their expectations. They are all indicative of overestimation of market size, and an attempt to somehow hit that size rather than operating at the lower equilibrium.

So an additional risk in running marketplaces is that if you overestimate market size, you might end up overdoing the subsidies that you provide to build up the market. And at some point in time you have to roll back those subsidies, which might lead to shrinkage of the market and a possible death spiral.

Now apply this model to your favourite marketplace, and tell me what you think of them.