When Blinkit founder Albinder Dhindsa ran out of cookies to go with his morning coffee one day in May 2021, he placed an order on his own app, Grofers. The cookies arrived even before he finished making the coffee — the result of a quick-delivery pilot adopted by the company in April. And, when he bragged about it to his mother at breakfast, she just shrugged. Dhindsa checked her phone to see that in just a week, his mom had placed over twenty orders, simply ordering things as she needed them, receiving them in minutes. In June, Dhindsa shot off a mail to the staff, announcing: “Effective immediately we are shutting down our traditional online grocery business. We will master ten-minute grocery delivery or we will die trying.”
In December, the company was rebranded Blinkit. Writing in his autobiography Buildit, released Wednesday by HarperCollins, Dhindsa says “Speed wasn’t a feature anymore – it was the product.”
In a post-pandemic world, Dhindsa took a bet on quick commerce, transcending from a value proposition Grofers offered, to one of efficiency. At that time, the next-day delivery business was doing sales of around Rs 400 crore a month, while quick delivery stood at Rs 20 crore, albeit growing at a much faster pace.
So Dhindsa decided to go all in, shutting a business of next-day delivery doing Rs 4,000 crore in annual sales, and focus only on ten-minute delivery. “This was a big gamble,” writes Dhindsa. “We had stumbled upon an answer that was way better for our customers than anything else we could offer, and we had to find a way to make it happen. ‘Everything in 10 minutes’ became a motto and an obsession internally.”
10-Minute Obsession
But the going was not easy. It never was. Writing about the early days of Grofers, Dhindsa rues how big Indian businesses showed no inclination to invest in a growing business. “The reason for this is that the public markets tend to punish any significant investment in loss-making ventures and that meant almost negligible investment levels from the top fifty listed companies into future businesses, except where it was their primary business,” he writes.
“The concept of disruption is lost on large businesses who have always seen their scale and access as a moat in the Indian ecosystem,” he rues.
The shunning happened even within the tribe. After Blinkit was acquired by Zomato in 2022, Dhindsa was summoned to a meeting with investors in early 2023 to argue why a loss-making Blinkit made good sense. “Zomato’s share price, which used to be Rs 145…., had tanked to a mere Rs 42…The investors were very adamant that Zomato divest the Blinkit business,” he writes.
Battle Against Disruption Skeptics
But Dhindsa stayed the course, and finally Blinkit turned profitable for the first time in March 2024.
He even points out that quick commerce fuelled the growth of digital payments in India. Writing about the initial lack of trust in e-commerce, he says: “For us (in 2015), 30 per cent of our customers preferred to pay with cash on delivery…quick delivery (in ninety minutes then) was able to tap into something different for the customers where the time factor helped them to overcome their fear and lack of trust…The reduction in number of cash transactions was proof that the need for trust is reduced when delivery is faster.”
Sharing insights into the retail business, Dhindsa also reveals how women are hard-to-please customers, shunning discount coupons for trust. “We realized coupons had a much lower impact on the behaviour of our female customers. Women shoppers in India were looking for the issue of trust to be solved first, before any incentives worked for them…In the battle for fear or greed, fear won for most of our female customers,” he writes.
The book reveals many more such insights into building a business in India and the retail ecosystem, covering issues like gig workers, consumer behaviour, geographical dynamics, etc. “This book is not a ‘how-to’ manual for overcoming the challenges of entrepreneurship in India, but a realistic picture of the ‘why’ and ‘what could work’,” writes Dhindsa.