Entrepreneurs like Sanjiv Bikhchandani of Naukri, Murugavel
Janakiraman of Matrimony, the Bansals of Flipkart; VSS Mani of
Justdial, etc. deserve massive admiration. What they have achieved is more like conquering Everest. Good to know that once they have climbed the peak, the environment also helps protect "their" turf. From a blog post by Dev Khare of Lightspeed Ventures (emphasis mine):
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Many of India's successful startups have navigated a maze of challenges, creating leading brands and sustaining for long periods of time. Correspondingly, it is much harder in India, relative to the US/Europe, for competition to unseat leading brands.
...Startups need large markets (Rs 2500cr+ or $500 million+) to get large and succeed. This is hard to find in India, perhaps due to early consumer demand, unorganized markets, regional differences or foreign substitutes. For example, digital advertising is a roughly $400 million annual business here, with mobile at 10% of that. To access and maintain growth, almost every new startup here needs to increase their focus on creating and evangelizing their category versus just focusing on their own startup's growth.
Some examples of overcoming this challenge include:
Many brands in India are created from execution reliability at scale rather than product differentiation. Brands in India are disproportionately more valuable as they represent a trusted provider of products or services - think about the enduring value of the Tata brand in multiple unrelated categories. As one consequence, I believe more startups should think about brand-building here in India relative to if they were in the US.
- spending large amounts of capital to create a category (eg ecommerce, OTA, wireless telecom).
- expanding into adjacent markets (eg Info Edge, which expanded from jobs into matrimonials, real-estate, education etc.).
- building or piloting in India and transplanting to the US (eg Zoho)
- aggregating several emerging markets outside India, perhaps before proceeding to Western Europe and the US (eg InMobi, iFlex, Subex).
- attacking a large spend base (eg Micromax for hardware, Cafe Coffee Day for coffee/tea/snacks, BillDesk for bill payment).
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