Blume Beacon: Scaling D2C brands, HealthifyMe's fit check, and Blume Podcast Snippets
Blume Beacon is a collection of curated long reads from Blume's editorial desk
Welcome to another edition of Blume Beacon. With Blume Beacon, we promise to deliver a curated list of tech content that informs and questions right to your inbox. This week, we have a mix of eloquent long reads and engaging perspectives that are sure to catch your fancy.
So, what’s in store for this edition?
An instructive deep-dive into scaling a D2C brand on Amazon and Flipkart
How an Excel sheet became a multi-million dollar business - the story of HealthifyMe (Blume Fund II company)
The importance of looking at PMF as a ‘habit’
An Introduction to the Blume Founders Fund
Some Independence Day special snippets from the Blume Podcast
The Atomberg Way: Scaling your D2C brand on third-party marketplaces
If you’re a direct-to-consumer business (D2C) founder, you probably have a love-hate relationship with marketplaces. Horizontal marketplaces like Amazon or Flipkart thrive on overwhelming buyers with hundreds of brands when they search for any product. Effectively, the person who is losing out then is a D2C founder
Yet, it’s also true that marketplaces are a more profitable channel than others for most brands because not only do they already have a large customer base, but because businesses don’t have to pay repeatedly to acquire customers, they have a lower CAC.
Then, how do you scale your D2C brand on third-party marketplaces? To get to the bottom of this, Blume’s Disha Sharma put herself in the position of a D2C founder and tried reconstructing the questions that would come up at every stage of a company that is in the process of listing itself on a marketplace. She spoke to Arindam Paul, CBO of Atomberg, a home appliances firm that just raised $90 Mn and has scaled to $100 Mn in annual sales, on how to stand out in a crowded market. Check out what she found here.
The HealthifyMe Story: Why You Should Tidy Up Your Fitness Habits with an AI-coach
When we ask ChatGPT to make a diet plan, what we often don’t realize is that the meticulous line-up of healthy meals that it suggests is without any input from a healthcare professional. That in itself is a health hazard. And that’s also what HealthifyMe, an AI-led healthtech platform, wants to correct. The 11-year-old healthtech startup is different from a generic chatbot trained on internet data in that it brings together the best of both worlds: an expertly trained AI coach and the experience of healthcare professionals like nutritionists and fitness trainers to guide users to live a healthy life. In this illuminating deep-dive, Blume’s Disha Sharma makes a case for the life-changing magic of relying on an AI coach to make your life fitter.
Why We Created the Blume Founders Fund
In the last 12 years, Blume has proudly supported over 150+ companies and 300+ founders, cultivating a strong network of founders from across the country in the process. But as one of India’s largest homegrown funds, we have always felt the need to do more than just invest in 25-30 companies in a fund cycle. We were limited by the guardrails of our framework, and we didn’t want it to be that way.
BFF aims to forge long-term relationships with exceptional founders, leveraging Blume's platform strength and network while maintaining its distinctiveness from our Core Investment program.
Enter the Blume Founders Fund (BFF). Operating separately from our core investments, this fund typically invests between $50k and $250k in companies with a solid connection to Blume. The idea for the fund is to ensure that we continue investing in relationships, which we consider our superpower. To find out more about how BFF works and our journey to date, read this piece by Sarita Raichura, who leads the BFF program.
Snippets from the Blume Podcast: The India Story
Independence Day might be over, but we believe in the India story day in and out at Blume. Interestingly, in the 2nd season of the Blume Podcast, a number of guests spoke about their views on India’s future and how far we have come as a country. It made sense that we did a quick roundup of these stories in case you haven’t caught up with these episodes yet.
In our debut episode, Lenskart’s Peyush Bansal spoke about how building factories in India is the next logical thing to do for them as they want to serve the next few hundred million customers from India and build a supply chain that can live up to it.
“Our decision to build this massive factory in Rajasthan, and we hope to build many more, didn't come because we felt that India was ready for manufacturing, and it's the next cool thing to do. We did it because Jio happened, and we said, look, why was this company able to grow that much so quickly?
In our second episode, Raamdeo Agrawal of Motilal Oswal spoke about the power of compounding of India as a country. As per him, very few countries and very few enterprises can scale up the way it is possible in India. He pointed out how it took us 75 years to reach a $3.5T GDP, but it will take only eight years to double it to $7T.
But a unique story will be revealed in an upcoming episode featuring Dinesh Agarwal of IndiaMart, whose journey of building India's first publicly listed Indian B2B marketplace coincidentally began on Independence Day.
“So I waited for the internet to be announced in India. On the 15th of August 1995, the Prime Minister announced the Internet from Lal-kila. On that very day, I told my manager to transfer me back to India. By October, 1995, I was in India without any plan, but I knew that I wanted to do some business in India for Indians to be able to use technology.”
In this episode, Dinesh Agarwal spoke about the importance of supporting Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the next phase of India’s growth. He emphasized that SMEs are crucial for the country's future as they provide employment and income for people who are not engineers or MBAs. If SMEs are neglected, the country could become a "hell" because there are limited employment opportunities, such as labor in fields, available to these individuals. Agarwal believes that inefficiency is one of the biggest employment bases in India, and gainful employment for all is how we will be independent again.
PMF as a Habit: In Conversation with Jar’s Nishchay AG
In the fourth conversation of the series,
chats with Nischay G, co-founder and CEO of the fintech startup Jar, about Product Market Fit (PMF). According to Nischay, a company needs to achieve PMF not just at the product level but at every feature level. His perspective becomes even more interesting when you consider his definition of PMF, which he says happens when the output of a system is non-linear/expanding. To find out what he means by that, check out the full conversation here
Look Back in Bangers (Revisiting Stories from the Past)
The definition of a ‘product manager’ and that of a ‘product-driven organization’ has really evolved over the last few years. In fact, PM as a title is often different from PM as a role, and that depends on the type and stage of the company. For example, at pre-seed, a PM’s job is often a combination of project, program, and product management. Post Series A, the PM role can become a ‘high leverage’ role. Even then, decision-making remains the single most important function of a product manager. While it is easy to fall into the trap of outputs, such as metrics and shipping velocity, those are often lagging indicators of the decisions made.
In a 2022 knowledge share session organized by Blume Ventures, Kaushik Subramanian, product leader (previously at Facebook), broke down the building blocks of a high-functioning product team for a group of early-stage founders and CPOs. Blume’s Disha Sharma jotted down his secrets to building an empowered product team in this piece. Thank us later!