Work on the new campaign went on for more than three months. A few weeks before Diwali, it was ready. The ads featured two children conversing in would-be adult voices about shopping on Flipkart. One child was sceptical about online shopping, their scepticism playfully dismissed as ignorance by the other, who pointed out the various benefits of shopping on Flipkart. The tagline ‘No Kidding No Worries’ suggested that one could shop on Flipkart without anxiety, and it was so easy that even children could do it.7 The ads were memorable and created a general feeling of warmth and familiarity about Flipkart. In the weeks and months after the ads were released, Flipkart’s brand was transformed. The company saw a huge increase in traffic and sales. It continued to run the campaign for two years. Internally, Flipkart executives cleverly transposed the message of the ad campaign. Flipkart had once been dismissed as a kids’ enterprise by cynical suppliers, investors and rivals alike. The company had now proved that the kids could hold their own.
The Kids campaign, as it came to be known, was launched towards the end of a spectacular year for Flipkart. The gross sales of ₹10 crore in December 2010 had more than quadrupled a year later. The company was hurtling from one milestone to another, month after month, demolishing barriers, becoming stronger and greedier for more.
Flipkart’s rise had helped spawn an entire startup ecosystem in the country. Naturally, it also attracted critics. Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani continuously predicted that the end was near for Flipkart and other internet startups that burned through investor cash with no concern for profitability. The larger corporate world was similarly dismissive. But in its early years, the most vociferous Flipkart critics were from within the startup ecosystem. Prominent among them was Mahesh Murthy, the chief of Seedfund, a venture capital firm. There were many others. They had valid and irrefutable reservations about the poor economics of e-commerce, as evidenced by the fact that Flipkart’s soaring sales were offset by its losses. It was commonly believed that this trend would continue for many years. Sceptics also thought it was futile to invest in a business that would some day have to compete with Amazon. While these reservations were legitimate, Flipkart was mocked for being a ‘copycat’ of Amazon, one of the most innovative companies in the world. This analogy would come to be well established. It also happened to be nonsensical.
Selling goods to people was not an idea for which Amazon deserved credit. It wasn’t even the first company to think of selling products online. What made Amazon inventive was that it discovered, through trial and error, a series of business innovations that made buying online a habit for a majority of Americans, and Amazon the country’s most compelling shopping destination which remained indispensable to its customers through constant improvements to its service. In effect, Amazon had invented the rules of e-commerce. Even if a new competitor entered the field, that company would have to operate within the paradigm Amazon had created. Flipkart had done the same thing in India. There was no doubt that it had taken inspiration from Amazon. But e-commerce in India had few similarities with the retail space in the US. The innovation of cash on delivery, the creation of unique warehousing and logistics processes, the introduction and implementation of the product returns policy, the unique methods of managing everyday dealings with customers, and dozens of other smaller inventions particular to the Indian ecosystem, are what comprised the paradigm of e-commerce in this country. Here, Flipkart had set the rules of the game. Amazon’s entry later and its adoption of these ways and means would validate just how innovative Flipkart had been as a company.
Sachin had come up with a pithy counter to the ‘copycat’ argument. A venture capitalist who had remained sceptical about the company had once told him, ‘So what’s the big deal about Flipkart – you’re just copying Amazon.’
Sachin had replied, ‘Haan, theek hai. Tu kar ke bata de.’ Yeah, sure. You show us how it’s done.
11
SETBACK
In 2011, every experiment at Flipkart seemed to yield gold. Every successful initiative made the Bansals more confident, prompting them to think bigger and grander. A few months after raising $20 million from Tiger Global, they decided to seek as much as $150 million from new investors. Sachin had already set his sights on a valuation of $1 billion. For a company that was barely four years old, it would be an extraordinary achievement. Future Group, the largest retail chain in the country, had taken nearly two decades to get there.1 Even other prominent entrepreneurs like Dhirubhai Ambani, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji had built their corporate empires over decades.
The company also began to look at acquisitions seriously. Until then, it had bought just one startup, a book discovery tool called WeRead. In late 2011, Flipkart finalized the acquisition of Mime360, a Bombay-based startup that provided music-streaming software to record labels. The deal was part of Flipkart’s plan to sell digital services such as music and e-books. Flipkart executives were also eager to work with the Mime360 team which was led by two product–engineering experts, Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari. Ankit Nagori, who was in charge of Flipkart’s digital business, had met Sameer and Rahul through common contacts at the record labels. Ankit was in negotiations with them to source content for the launch of Flipkart’s digital products category. Used to meeting executives at publishing houses and record labels that were proudly Luddite, he was floored
