Unbox: PMF is Great. The Holy Grail is Business Market Fit

Hi and welcome to the October 2024 edition of Unbox. In this edition, we talk about what lies beyond Product Market Fit; what’s been keeping our portfolio companies busy lately; and bring you some old-school wisdom on building businesses. Dive in.

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“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” – the famous quote attributed to American inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison has resonated for decades with entrepreneurs across the universe.

Failure is common, even inevitable in entrepreneurship. Embracing failure as a learning experience that potentially leads to better outcomes is intrinsic to the startup playbook.

We believe we have an answer to that question. It’s called Business Market Fit. We’ve developed a framework for Business Market Fit to arm startups with the information and insights they need to build sustainable businesses. The framework is built on the principle of evaluating companies on three broad metrics – customer, revenue and unit economics.

Get into the details of the framework and how it works here – Business Market Fit: A Framework for Scaling Efficiently

The Business Market Fit framework is yet another example of our services-led approach to venture capital investing, a method that we’ve honed over a decade. In our previous newsletter we introduced you to our corporate governance framework and we’ll soon share more on the other unique services that we bring to the table for startups alongside capital.

What do our portfolio founders think of our differentiated approach to investing? 

Watch what Jaydeep Barman, founder and CEO of Rebel Foods, has to say.

A quick round-up of developments, news and updates from across the Lightbox portfolio.

Game streaming and esports content platform Rooter is seeing significant traction with Rooter Shop, a marketplace for digital gaming currencies, that it launched a few months ago. While GMV has grown 6.7X over the last three months at a CMGR of 89%, it has also seen a 1.8X improvement in AOV from $5.8 in July to $10.5 in November.

India’s gaming market, by industry estimates, is expected to grow at a 20% CAGR to %7.5 billion and 700 million gamers by 2028.

Nua, the women’s hygiene and wellness brand, is now pulling in 15% of its business from two recent launches – overnight period panties and two variants of overnight sanitary pads. These products have together clocked a CMGR of 40% over the last six months, says Nua founder Ravi Ramachandran.

While it grows, building awareness about women’s wellness remains core to the way that Nua operates. You may recall the company’s collaboration with sexual education company Un-Taboo from a couple of months ago to create awareness around menstrual wellness topics to schools across India. The Nua Un-Taboo initiative has already touched 5000+ young girls across 35 schools.

Internet restaurants company Rebel Foods continued on its growth trajectory. In October, the company’s master franchise with the American QSR brand Wendy’s hit 160 outlets, all within a span of just 36 months. Rebel Foods plans to also add dine-in Wendy’s restaurants in Delhi-NCR, Bengaluru and Hyderabad over the next few months. Read more here.

In other developments at Rebel Foods, the company launched the first offline store for its own brand Oven Story. The 700 square feet outlet was launched in Patna and is the first of a targeted 200 outlets that are planned under the brand across the country. Read more here.

Urban commute company Cityflo signed on three key partners – ICICI Bank, Tata Projects, and Lodha Group – under Cityflo Corporate, the new employee transport solution for enterprises. The vertical now serves 20 enterprise partners and 3,000 employees across Mumbai.

October also saw the Cityflo Dhan partnership roll out the #MadeForTrade campaign across 150+ buses during the Muhurut Trading session. Watch out for several more new campaigns from this partnership.

Zeno Health, which is making high quality generic medicines affordable for all, doubled its revenues on the back of 200 community partners in West Bengal and its assisted ecommerce platform. Further, the company’s private label GoodAid now accounts for 50% of its sales volumes, meaning that every second strip of medicine sold at a Zeno Health store is a GoodAid product. The team just moved into a new office and has been strengthening its senior leadership team. October saw Pinkesh Dhimar join the team as director, brand and communication.

Great Eastern Shipping’s Ravi Sheth dropped into our offices recently for a fireside conversation and shared a bunch of valuable insights on scaling businesses the old school way, how  entrepreneurship has changed over the decades since he started angel investing and more.

More from the session here.

We would love to hear from you. Please reply to this email with your thoughts, suggestions, or just to say hello.