The Story of the Indian ‘Premium Rush’
Wilee: [signing a document for pickup] The time is now 5:33.
Nima: It must be there by 7:00. It’s extremely important.
Wilee: Always is. [hands her slip of paper, takes the envelope] Thanks, have a nice day!
Now that might be a scene from the movie but that’s exactly what Dunzo exists for. Yes, Dunzo the slang sounded abbreviation that refers to do, over, and finished.
Founded in 2015, Bengaluru-based Dunzo is your personal concierge — from filling out shopping lists to picking up the charger you forgot at home or delivering your favourite pizza to your office, it does it all.
Dunzo addressed the problem that most time-strapped people face today: the need to get things done. The app, which now has multiple functions, categories, flows, and even a B2B version, started life on WhatsApp. Users would type out what they needed done, and Dunzo would get to work.
Fons Et Origo
It all started one afternoon in 2015 at a restaurant in Bengaluru. Kabeer Biswas, who had completed his earlier startup Hoppr’s transition to Hike, was in the city. He thought how nice it would be “if there was someone who could complete your list of tasks for you — just tell someone what you need finished and it is done.”
That thought led to the first version of Dunzo, a WhatsApp service.
His small room in a duplex became the headquarters of Dunzo. He started spreading the word about the concept to his friends. Kabeer soon started running errands for people on bike and completed deliveries all by himself. People dropped a message on his Whatsapp number and he ensured their task was done. To help him in this task, he hired a few people from an NGO on a part-time basis. This team in June 2015 completed 70 deliveries in just one day. This gave rise Dunzo a popularity boost and in the next three months, the startup received its first major investment.
When Kabeer and his co-founding team, Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri, and Mukund Jha, were testing the market in 2016, they focused primarily on building the partner app.
Dunzo, like any hyperlocal on-demand delivery platform, had to ensure that delivery partners were able to fulfill the orders. So, while the clients used WhatsApp, the message would reach partners via the partner app.
“We chose to build the partner app first because that is where most of the scaling challenges were. Telling the partner which location to go, what product to buy, ensure smooth interactions, track money, and so on,” Mukund says.
The Metamorphosis
It was April 2017 when the Dunzo team built the consumer version of the app. It was time as the orders were growing, and the team realised that they needed their own app to scale.
Mukund says they were “looking at 5x scale then. Now that the need was established, we wanted to move users to our own platform. WhatsApp just wasn’t scalable,” he added.
As most workflows were on WhatsApp, the team decided to build the same interface on their app. It was just Messaging ++. A user would type out a list of what needed to be done, and a partner would complete the tasks.
The app-building process started in 2017 and continued to the end of 2018. By then, Dunzo was touching close to 80,000 orders in a month.
The startup had just picked up $17 million funding from Google, the search engine’s first direct investment in an Indian startup. This shot Dunzo into the spotlight, and it had to iron out the wrinkles in the process.
Cataloguing the World
Unlike a regular ecommerce or food delivery platform, Dunzo dealt with multiple variables. From finding spectacles to onions, the app needed to provide for everything.
“I keep saying this: we are cataloguing all items in the world and are running multiple companies in one. The workflows are different. The app and algorithms needed to be built to catalogue and search everything in the store. It also meant matching the best partner with the user,” Mukund says.
The idea was to improve efficiency. This involved matching demand and supply, focusing on different geographies, ensuring partner positioning in those geographies, and working on real-world flows. An AI-based, text auto-suggesting app could have been a solution for cataloguing, but it had several constraints and other factors were also involved.
The Number Enunciates
The startup reported a total revenue of Rs. 3.5 crores in FY19. Rs. 76 lakh was from “revenue from operations”, and the balance of Rs. 2.7 crores was from “other incomes”.
Dunzo reported a loss of Rs. 169.7 crores in FY19, an increase by 671% compared to a loss of Rs. 21.9 crore in the previous year (as stated by the documents filled with the Registrar of Companies).
The year 2020 looked like a year in which the startup turn around its losses. It raised $ 39 million from Alteria Capital, Google and Lightstone Fund through debt and series E funding.
The Future
Dunzo has garnered massive popularity in the cities it presently operates in and quite understandably as it literally has made the lives of people easy and convenient. In the near future, the company is aiming to strengthen product searches on the app by partnering with different merchants and vendors. The team at Dunzo wants to expand its coverage of physical retail stores on the mobile application. Dunzo is also in the process of expanding its outreach to different tier-two cities.
In May 2020, Dunzo partnered with FMCG major PepsiCo to deliver its snacks brands such as Lay’s and Kurkure to customers’ doorsteps in Bengaluru amid the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic in India in keeping with Pepsico’s ‘Direct-to-Customer’ initiative. In the same month, it also partnered with digital payments app Google Pay to provide grocery and medicine delivery, bike pool, pickup-and-drop, among other services.
As a platform built for delivery partners, merchants, and users, Dunzo’s philosophy has always been centered around all its customers. Dunzo has curated a series of characters inspired by the varied demographic of their users, delivery partners and merchants who have contributed to Dunzo’s rise as a delivery service of choice.
