Good Morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

I’m Uddantika, and I’m back with another episode breakdown. But before that we have some very exciting news, and it’s all because of you!

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Two by Two has been named one of Apple Podcasts’ top subscriber shows in India! Check it out here.

Every listen, every share, and every debate you spark in the comments is what keeps us going. We get to dive into these conversations week after week because you show up for them. Thank you for being part of this journey with us.

Now, onto the newsletter. 

Have you ever bought anything from Meesho?

When we asked our panelists this on Two by Two, the answers were telling. Most had not, but their domestic help had. Their friend’s mom had. And that’s exactly the point. Meesho isn’t trying to be Amazon or Flipkart. When I think about ordering from Meesho (which, admittedly, I haven’t done yet), I imagine needing something specific, like a budget kurta or an everyday accessory. It occupies a different space in my mind entirely.

This week’s episode wasn’t just about understanding how Meesho got here. Our hosts, Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan, brought in two experts to pull out a crystal ball and ask: “Can these counterintuitive strategies that brought Meesho this far actually take it further?” Joining the conversation was Adarsh Menon, a partner at Fireside Ventures and former Flipkart executive who spent eight years building some of their key businesses, like Shopsy. He was alongside Ganesh Nagarsekar, founder of GSN Invest and former investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, who recently wrote an insightful analysis of Meesho’s DRHP.

And if I had to pick one analogy from the discussion that captures Meesho’s entire playbook, it’s this: imagine heading into a desert with no water bottle. Sounds crazy, right? But that’s essentially what Meesho did. They stripped away commissions, embraced scarcity, and designed an entire business model around those constraints.

Some excerpts from the conversation:

Here’s where Meesho broke the rules. While competitors were optimising their commission structures, Meesho went to zero. Not reduced commissions. Zero.

Ganesh described Meesho as “a logistics giant masquerading as an e-commerce platform”, and once you see the numbers, it’s hard to disagree. Over three years, Meesho drove down its cost per delivery from Rs 66 to Rs 52.

But here’s something that Adarsh kept emphasising that I think gets overlooked: Meesho is a data science company masquerading as an e-commerce company.

The episode left me thinking: Meesho has already defied conventional wisdom multiple times. They’ve proved that the middle-class Indian market isn’t shallow—it just needed the right business model to reach it. But as they go public and face new pressures, can they maintain the culture of efficiency and customer obsession that got them here?

So here’s my question for you: If Meesho can crack the cash-on-delivery problem, keep scaling Valmo, and maintain zero commissions, what’s actually stopping them from becoming India’s largest e-commerce platform?

You can listen to the entire episode here.

Continuing our new section featuring listener critiques and alternative takes, we turn our attention to last week’s episode on “The numbers behind OpenAI, Gemini, and Perplexity’s deals with Phonepe, Jio, and Airtel.”

Our hosts attempted to reverse-engineer the economics of AI companies bundling premium subscriptions with Indian telcos. They were joined by Chandrashekhar Vattikuti and Prakash Deep Maheshwari to decode whether these deals make financial sense.

Here are two distinct perspectives from our subscribers:

A finance student shared their view, “To be honest, I believe these Google-Jio deals are just part and parcel of the $4.5B investment from 2020. The goal was always pushing users to 5G, not just buying a stake. 

You’re right that 10 million power users are too expensive to maintain. But Google doesn’t want power users; they want data points for AI and storage dependents. They are betting that once users get hooked on that 2TB Drive storage, they’ll be forced to subscribe. I believe the incremental revenue from those users will be more than the CAC [customer acquisition cost].”

Gautam Gupta shared his experience with Airtel’s bundled Netflix subscription, which kept auto-reactivating despite multiple attempts to unsubscribe through the app. Each time he canceled, the service reappeared within 24 hours, charging him Rs 381 monthly without his consent. After months of complaints to Airtel’s management went unaddressed, he raises a provocative question: could telcos be inflating their activation numbers and ARPU through aggressive auto-renewal practices? 

Whether this is an intentional strategy or a conveniently ignored tech glitch or just Gautam’s bad luck, it adds to the episode’s assumptions about how many users genuinely engage with these bundled services versus how many are simply trapped in subscription loops.

If you liked the episode or have thoughts or arguments to share, please email us at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you.

Until next week,
Uddantika

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