The 20-year-old who founded a $1 billion company

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Aadit Palicha is the co-founder of Zepto, a company dedicated to home delivery for all types of markets with the promise of delivering in less than 10 minutes. Aadit Palicha launched his venture during the pandemic COURTESY ZEPTO via BBC He triumphed with a classic business formula: finding a solution to a problem. But in the case of Aadit Palicha, there are two things that are surprising: his age, he is only 20 years old, and the speed with which he managed to create a business that today is valued at US$ 900 million (around R$ 4.7 million). billion). Palicha is co-founder of Zepto, a company dedicated to home delivery of all types of groceries with the promise of delivering in less than 10 minutes and which is currently considered one of the fastest growing start-ups in India. “It’s been a pretty crazy ride. We launched Zepto in July 2021 and since then, in about 16 to 17 months, we’ve gone from selling nothing to selling to about $200 million in annual sales. of light growth to sales of US$ 1 billion per year in the third or fourth quarter of 2023”, said Palicha during an interview with the BBC’s Radio Business Daily program. But how did they do it? It all started during the coronavirus pandemic. Palicha and co-founder Kaivalya Vohra shared an apartment in Mumbai and had to deal with the problem of getting food. “During the first lockdown, getting food and supplies was a total nightmare. Most stores were closed and online options took 6-7 days to deliver due to the chaos,” he says. “It was a tremendous effort for both of us to deal with it and when we talked to our neighbors – most of them much older than us – we saw that it was a huge problem for them. So the idea came up: why don’t we deliver food to them? And that eventually became Zepto: a faster, more convenient, more reliable and fresher way to get groceries,” he adds. 10-Minute Delivery One element that sets Zepto apart from the competition is its promise to deliver orders within 10 minutes. What is the secret? The so-called ghost stores (or supermarkets). “We deliver purchases in 10 minutes essentially thanks to a network of micro-stores or ghost stores with which we partner throughout the country”, says Palicha. He explains that when a user opens the Zepto app, he finds a list of more than 5,000 well-organized products, but behind that, what the system does is connect the buyer with the ghost microstore closest to where the order must be delivered. . These warehouses are exclusively dedicated to this function and are organized in such a way as to optimize the entire process of locating and packing the requested products so that this entire procedure is carried out in less than 90 seconds. The order is then placed in the hands of a courier who, thanks to the location of the stores, must cover routes that, on average, do not exceed 1.7 kilometers. “It doesn’t require them to go very fast. In fact, we’re able to deliver fast because of the short distances, not the high speeds.” [dos motoristas]”, says Palicha. The decision to set the delivery time at 10 minutes was not the result of chance, but rather the result of tests carried out with different possibilities and which showed that they could obtain more throughput with this option. “We discovered that the frequency [de consumo] of customers was much higher if you deliver in 10 minutes. There are many cases where delivering in 30 or 40 minutes is fine, but there are some very urgent cases where these times are not enough – when someone needs rice or shaving cream, but immediately – so you get more orders from the same customer with delivers in 10 minutes,” says Palicha. Realizing achievements Currently, Zepto operates in major cities in India and has more than a thousand people working in its offices and tens of thousands of couriers. However, Palicha is cautious when it comes to declaring your venture a success. “We don’t feel like we’re already successful. Only when we are a highly profitable and publicly traded company will I put a flag in the ground and say we are successful. I think we’ve only scratched the surface. In fact, believing that we are really successful is a little dangerous because there is so much more we can do,” he says. “You can feel good about that. My company is valued at $900 million — that’s a lot of money — and I’m 20 years old. But the reality is that — as one of our top investors puts it — a Starting $1 billion is three mistakes away from reaching zero, so until you’ve completed your journey [tornando a empresa lucrativa e abrindo o capital]you can go to zero at any time”, he adds. “If we don’t make a mistake now and continue working as we have been doing, we are facing an opportunity that could potentially change the game in one of the largest markets in this country”, he concludes.

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