Smile Bhateja

Many D2C brands dont realise this, but the cheapest courier rate is the most expensive saving in e-commerce. Shadowfax just said in its quarterly results that same day / next day delivery options are upto 20% more expensive than standard shipping. I would pay that premium every single day. Our data across crores of orders shows that every single day of reduction in transit time reduces RTOs by 4%. That is gold. Here is the math 👇 Assuming Rs 1,000 AOV, 50% margins, Rs 60 of standard shipping cost and 3 days of current transit time. With same day / next day, Rs 60 shipping becomes about Rs 70, so Rs 1,000 extra per 100 orders. But delivering 2 days sooner cuts RTO by 8 points. That's 8 more sales (Rs 4,000 margin) and 8 fewer return trips (about Rs 500). Spend 1000, get back 4500. It’s a no brainer, even without adding the benefits in customer satisfaction, life time value and working capital. So if you are building a D2C brand, figure out how to maximise your SDD / NDD share today ✅

Some things I believe - consumer tech (sorry, AI) is back - consumer companies in India will be larger than B2B/deep-tech ones (they will be large too dw) - the entire consumer stack will get remade in the next 5 years - this'll be across the board -> like technology means the top 0.1% and the average user have the same phone and the same coca cola, they'll soon have the same services, knowledge and leverage -> so better and more shopping, investing, learning and healthcare for everyone Now's the time to build for consumer, so we're hosting something fun with a bunch of founders and operators building at the edge Come hang out and debate what the future looks like next week cc: @basbhaimomo @soaibgrewal @177pc @LightspeedIndia @ActivateSignal

I regret to inform you that a lot of problems in life are solved by waking up early and working out.

Was trying to incorporate a Pvt. Ltd., and apparently you have to spend INR 50k to 1L every year just for compliance 🥲

Happy to share that we came first at Amazon Propel, Season 5. Amazon Global Selling Thanks to the entire @AGlobalSelling for the programme and the backing. This belongs to the the entire team behind Dr. Water. @SmileBhateja | @sumxxt | @Harsh_3vedi

introducing muse wonder our new frontier model. state-of-the-art at personal agents and professional agents. our largest and most capable model yet—rivals the big bois

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

BTW Jev only launched 3 weeks ago and just raised a $870M Series A at a 7.5B valuation. Insane growth, congrats team!