How Indian Startups Began Building for Indian Problems, Not Just Copying the West

Aviral Bhatnagar’s A Billion Bets: The Making of India’s Startup Ecosystem traces a crucial shift in Indian entrepreneurship—from adapting Silicon Valley ideas for the local market to building companies around problems that were distinctly Indian.

India’s startup story is often told through valuations, unicorns and huge funding rounds. But the more important change happened earlier, when a new generation of founders began asking a different question: What problems exist specifically in India, and what would a product look like if it were built around those problems from the beginning?

That shift is explored in Aviral Bhatnagar’s book A Billion Bets: The Making of India’s Startup Ecosystem.

Bhatnagar’s account begins from his own experience as a young venture-capital professional in the late 2010s, a period when India’s startup ecosystem was becoming more mature but venture investing was going through a difficult phase.

His experience also offered him a close view of how founders, investors and new business models were changing the country’s entrepreneurial landscape.

From “X for India” to distinctly Indian ideas

According to Bhatnagar’s account, India’s earliest modern startup wave, particularly between 2007 and 2015, often drew heavily from business models that had already gained traction in Silicon Valley.

The shorthand frequently used by investors was “X for India”—take a proven Western model and adapt it for Indian consumers.

That approach helped establish the first generation of internet businesses, but the ecosystem gradually began moving beyond straightforward imitation.

By around 2015, founders were increasingly building products around local behaviour, infrastructure constraints and unmet consumer demand.

The examples became more diverse.

ShareChat focused on regional-language social networking.

Meesho built a commerce model around social resellers, including women using messaging platforms to reach customers.

Moglix targeted business-to-business commerce for industrial products.

Rapido approached urban mobility through motorcycle taxis.

PhonePe built a digital payments business in an increasingly mobile-first India.

Razorpay focused on payment infrastructure for businesses and startups.

Groww entered digital investing.

Infra.Market addressed procurement in construction.

And PhysicsWallah, founded by Alakh Pandey, used online content to make exam preparation and educational material more accessible.

The common thread was not that these companies invented completely new categories. It was that they adapted products to Indian consumers, businesses and constraints.

Local behaviour became a source of startup ideas

The significance of these businesses went beyond the sectors they entered.

They showed founders that local behaviour itself could be a competitive advantage.

Meesho, for example, recognised the potential of social selling and the purchasing influence exercised within Indian households. ShareChat addressed the huge audience of internet users more comfortable consuming content in languages other than English.

PhysicsWallah identified another gap: students seeking affordable and accessible educational preparation.

PhonePe’s opportunity emerged from a country rapidly moving toward smartphones and digital payments.

These companies were not simply taking an existing Silicon Valley product and changing the branding.

They were trying to understand how Indians actually lived, shopped, learned, communicated and paid.

That became an increasingly important startup-building philosophy.

A funding slowdown created room for new investors

The shift in startup ideas coincided with a tougher funding environment.

As some established venture investors became more cautious, new funds began moving into earlier stages of company building.

Bhatnagar highlights the emergence of funds including Venture Highway, Stellaris Venture Partners, Pi Ventures and Fireside Ventures.

Their focus varied.

Fireside concentrated heavily on consumer businesses. Pi Ventures looked toward deep technology. Stellaris developed a broad early-stage technology portfolio, while Venture Highway backed startups at an early point in their growth.

This created a new layer of capital for companies that were too young—or too unconventional—to fit the investment profile of more mature businesses.

In a difficult fundraising market, pre-seed and seed investing became a laboratory for new ideas.

Venture capital started betting earlier

The new generation of funds also reflected a broader change in India’s venture ecosystem.

Investors increasingly accepted that the largest opportunities might not be obvious at the beginning.

A company could start with a narrow customer group and eventually expand into a much larger market.

That idea became particularly visible through investments made by firms such as Y Combinator and Indian early-stage funds.

Startups including Razorpay, Groww and Meesho attracted early backing before their eventual scale was obvious to everyone.

The lesson was important for investors: early-stage funding is often a bet on the founders’ ability to adapt as much as it is a bet on the original business plan.

Direct-to-consumer brands opened another door

Another important development in the period was the rise of direct-to-consumer, or D2C, brands.

The model had gained attention internationally, including through companies such as US mattress startup Casper. Indian founders began adapting the concept to categories where traditional retail had long dominated distribution.

Mamaearth became one example of the new consumer-brand generation.

The company initially focused on a specific product category and later built a much broader consumer business.

For investors, such companies represented a different kind of opportunity from horizontal e-commerce marketplaces.

They were not necessarily trying to own the entire shopping experience. Instead, they could start with one product, build trust with a particular audience and expand into adjacent categories.

The small market was often much bigger than it looked

One of the recurring themes in Bhatnagar’s account is that what initially looked like a niche market could be the entry point into something much larger.

A product designed for new mothers could ultimately become a broader personal-care or consumer brand.

A social-reselling network could become part of the wider e-commerce ecosystem.

A payment tool created for startups could eventually serve thousands of businesses.

This reflects a familiar startup pattern: start with a narrowly defined problem, build a strong position and then expand into neighbouring markets.

Management thinker Clayton Christensen described a related idea through the concept of disruptive innovation, in which businesses can initially focus on segments that established companies consider unattractive or insufficiently profitable.

Over time, those seemingly modest segments can grow into major markets.

India also learned that startups do not always follow straight lines

Some of the most instructive stories from this period involve startups that changed direction.

Shiprocket, for example, evolved from its earlier focus toward logistics and e-commerce enablement.

Unicommerce developed software intended to help online businesses manage inventory and operations.

The broader lesson is that a startup’s first product is not necessarily its final business.

A young company begins with a hypothesis about what customers need. Once the founders gather real-world information, that hypothesis can change.

That is where the famous startup concept of the pivot comes in.

A pivot is not necessarily a failure

In Bhatnagar’s account, pivots are treated as a normal part of building startups rather than evidence that the founding idea was worthless.

The reasoning is straightforward.

Founders begin with incomplete information. They may understand a problem correctly but misjudge the best product. They may identify the right customer but build the wrong business model. Or they may discover that a neighbouring market is substantially larger.

Technology history offers plenty of examples of companies that changed direction.

YouTube was originally conceived differently from the video platform it became. Slack emerged from a company whose original product was a game. Instagram evolved from an earlier mobile concept. These examples are often cited to illustrate the same principle: the eventual business can look very different from the original hypothesis.

But pivots are rarely completely random.

The most useful ones often remain close to the founder’s accumulated knowledge, customer base or underlying problem.

Why founders still matter more than the first idea

This is where the venture-capital phrase “back the jockey, not the horse” becomes relevant.

A startup idea can change.

A founder’s ability to understand customers, respond to evidence and make difficult decisions is harder to replace.

Investors therefore often evaluate not only the business model but also the people building it.

A founder who refuses to acknowledge that a product is not working can waste years pursuing a weak hypothesis.

A founder who recognises new evidence and changes course may discover a much larger opportunity.

That requires both intellectual flexibility and emotional honesty.

Home services offered an early lesson in survival

India’s home-services sector also provides an example of how difficult startup markets can be.

The period saw several companies attempt to organise fragmented household services, including businesses such as TaskBob, HouseJoy, Doormint and LocalOye, according to Bhatnagar’s account.

Many did not survive.

UrbanClap, later known as Urban Company, followed a different trajectory.

The contrast illustrates one of the harshest realities of startup investing: a good market can still contain many failed companies.

Competition, financing conditions, execution and timing can determine which businesses remain alive long enough to benefit from market growth.

Used-car startups found another underserved market

The used-car sector was another category that gained traction during the period.

Cars24 and Spinny, both launched in 2015, sought to make buying and selling used vehicles more organised and digitally enabled.

Their emergence also reflected an important change in India’s startup ecosystem: experienced entrepreneurs were beginning to return to entrepreneurship.

These so-called serial or repeat founders brought lessons from earlier businesses, including knowledge of hiring, fundraising, distribution and execution.

As the ecosystem matured, investors had more opportunities to back people who had already built companies before.

E-commerce created an entire layer of supporting businesses

The startup boom was also no longer restricted to consumer-facing marketplaces.

A growing ecosystem of infrastructure companies emerged around e-commerce.

Logistics, inventory software, payments, fulfilment and business tools became businesses in their own right.

This was an important development because successful digital markets rarely consist of just one product.

When e-commerce expands, it creates demand for payment systems, warehouses, logistics networks, software and merchant services.

The companies serving those needs can become large businesses even when consumers never interact directly with their products.

Byju’s and the expansion of EdTech

Education technology also demonstrated how quickly a narrowly focused product could expand.

Bhatnagar describes Byju Raveendran’s evolution from teaching CAT aspirants to building a much broader education business.

The company eventually moved well beyond the original target audience and into school education.

The story illustrates the scale available when a startup successfully identifies a much larger adjacent market.

Other companies, including Unacademy, followed different models within the same broader digital-education opportunity.

The Indian internet was developing rapidly, and founders were discovering new ways to apply digital distribution to sectors that had traditionally depended on physical classrooms, retail stores or fragmented intermediaries.

India’s startup ecosystem began to reflect India’s digital identity

Taken together, these companies tell a broader story.

India was no longer simply becoming a consumer of technology developed elsewhere.

It was becoming a laboratory for products shaped by local conditions.

Low-cost smartphones, multilingual users, digital payments, fragmented supply chains, a large young population and enormous geographic diversity created problems that required locally adapted solutions.

That environment was not necessarily easy.

It was, however, fertile ground for experimentation.

Founders could observe behaviour at enormous scale and build products specifically around those patterns.

The most valuable Indian startup ideas often began with a real problem

The stories in A Billion Bets point toward a common principle in entrepreneurship.

A startup is fundamentally a hypothesis.

The founder believes a meaningful customer problem exists and that a particular solution can solve it better than alternatives.

Everything after that is a test.

Customers may disagree.

Technology may change.

Competition may emerge.

The original market may turn out to be smaller than expected.

Or the founder may discover an adjacent problem that is far more valuable.

The companies that survive are often those willing to learn quickly without losing sight of the underlying customer need.

What India’s founders changed

The evolution of India’s startup ecosystem cannot be reduced to a single moment or a handful of companies.

It was a gradual transition from adapting existing business models to building around Indian behaviour and Indian constraints.

The companies highlighted in Bhatnagar’s book cover payments, education, mobility, commerce, social media, industrial procurement, consumer products, logistics, financial services and construction.

Their businesses were different, but many shared a similar starting point:

There was a problem in India that had not yet been solved at scale.

That insight helped create a new generation of companies.

The larger lesson for today’s founders

The history described in A Billion Bets offers a useful lesson for today’s entrepreneurs.

The objective is not necessarily to invent a category nobody has seen before.

A large opportunity can exist inside an ordinary problem if the market is misunderstood, underserved or inefficient.

The strongest founders often notice behaviour that incumbents overlook.

They start small, learn from customers, improve the product and expand as the opportunity becomes clearer.

And when the original plan stops matching reality, changing direction can be a strength rather than a weakness.

India’s startup ecosystem matured when founders stopped asking only how to reproduce successful models elsewhere and increasingly began asking what India itself needed. That change helped turn local problems into companies capable of serving enormous markets.