We didn’t realise it back then, but Gmail was the OG social network. 

So when Google decided to build Buzz as a way to nudge users to do activities they were already doing on Facebook and Twitter, but natively in Gmail—a place where these activities seemed most natural, well… most people thought it would work. 

Except it didn’t. 

Just 18 months later, Google announced the end of Buzz. The entire product was shut down, and after some more efforts to build a social network, Google finally gave up. 

Earlier this week, Reliance and Meta made a big announcement. 

Both companies had been collaborating to work on something fairly revolutionary. In their press release, they described it as “the first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp”. The idea was that it would enable users to browse products on JioMart, add them to a cart, and make a purchase, all without having to leave WhatsApp. Both Meta and Reliance stressed how this would revolutionise the way millions of businesses across the country connected with their consumers while also bringing simplicity and convenience to their shopping experience.

This ticks all the boxes. 

I’m sure the Product team’s reasoning is watertight.

And yet, I have my doubts. 

I don’t expect it to be a complete disaster like Buzz (which was plagued by multiple privacy concerns and lawsuits), but I predict it won’t be the revolutionary gamechanger people expect it to be. This is going to be a middling product, at least for the next couple of years, and it’ll be much longer before we truly know its fate. 

JioMart will find it hard to sell groceries via WhatsApp. 

And if you think about it, the reasons are quite obvious.

Let’s dive in. 

A good place to start would be to examine the market of online grocery shoppers in India. 

First, let’s start with the size of this market. 

Size can be described in many ways, but I prefer to look at users who consistently buy groceries online. Many people may buy something online as a one-off, either to claim a deep discount or because they watched an ad featuring their favourite 90s celebrity. As I’ve said before, the metric that’s quite revelatory is the number of people who buy every month, also called as monthly transacting users. 

Let’s go player by player. 

Thanks to Zomato going public, we know that Blinkit has around 2.5 million monthly transacting users. Dunzo says it has around 5 million monthly customers. Swiggy has a grocery service called Instamart. We don’t know its monthly transacting customers, but in an interview last week, it claimed that Instamart has been used by 9 million users over the past two years. So I’m guessing that its monthly transacting customers is somewhere around 3-4 million. One report pegs BigBasket to have somewhere around 9 million monthly users. This seems to be on the higher side, but fine, let’s run with it. The same report says that JioMart has 5 million monthly customers too. Again, that seems high, if you ask me. Zepto has not reported this number yet, so I’m assuming it’s on the lower side. Maybe a couple of million.

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing up all of this is to demonstrate how shallow the online grocery market is right now. These are not cumulative numbers, and I think there’s a pretty good chance that the people who are using one service also occasionally use another—just like how people who order food from Swiggy also order from Zomato. 

All said and done, across all these apps, I think that the number of monthly online grocery shoppers in India is somewhere around 10-12 million users. 

Unsurprisingly, this is more or less the size of India’s California users—the ones who are right at the top of the Indian internet user pyramid. 

All of this brings me to this question: 

Who exactly are the users whom JioMart is hoping to win using WhatsApp? 

Surely, it can’t be these California users, who are already buying groceries online using one or more of these apps I’ve mentioned earlier. It’s unreasonable to expect these users to abandon them and move to JioMart exclusively just because it now has a WhatsApp integration. 

So I’m assuming that JioMart is hoping to capture the users lower in the pyramid. 

This is how I described them in an earlier edition. 

And while we understand India’s California users very well (they are just like you and me), we know very little about these other sets of users. We don’t know much about what they want, how they think, and what’ll make them buy groceries online.

But one person knows more than we do.

Last month, The Ken launched a brand-new interview podcast called First Principles. In it, Rohin interviews leaders about how they think, their mental models, how they make decisions, and their core beliefs. In the pilot episode, the guest was Kabeer Biswas, CEO and co-founder of Dunzo. It’s a captivating conversation. Somewhere around the 23rd minute, Rohin asked Kabeer what it took for consumers to form habits. 

In other words, Rohin was asking Kabeer about what made an occasional user into a monthly transacting user. 

Kabeer had an interesting answer. He described the four vectors of online grocery shopping, i.e Speed, Quality, Price, and Selection. According to him, if you needed to capture the top 2-3 million users in the country, you needed to sell convenience.  

But for the next 50 million customers, it was something else entirely.

But if you look at what Meta and JioMart are doing, they don’t seem to be selling either a category or a behaviour or a compelling use-case. 

Just look at it and judge for yourself.

JioMart and Meta’s message to directly appeal to millions of people who have never bought groceries online is to use a painfully contrived use-case about paneer makhani in a chat. And the best category they could think of that would appeal to this section of buyers was… bananas. 

I am not convinced JioMart or Meta actually get it. 

A lot of analysts have pointed out that the reason this is a gamechanger is because WhatsApp’s ubiquitous reach grants JioMart immense distribution. This is true. But most conversations about product-market fit focus a lot more on the product, and less on the market. In fact, the market is taken for granted, waiting for the right product to come and claim it. 

But what if the market itself does not exist? 

What if it exists, but is shallow?

Also, when it comes to the product, I think expecting users to start buying stuff on WhatsApp is not as straightforward as it looks. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean that people will start using it. Distribution is not a reason for new behaviour. 

And nobody knows this better than WhatsApp. 

In April this year, when WhatsApp enabled UPI payments, its potential market size increased to 100 million users. For a long time, a lot of people believed that once UPI arrived on WhatsApp, it would be a game-changer. And yet, despite an aggressive cashback promotion lasting for months, forget stealing market share, it couldn’t even dent the fortunes of existing players. In July, its market share was about 0.1% in terms of transaction volumes. This was down from 0.4% in June. 

Why do we think JioMart will be any different? 

If you ask me, JioMart going on WhatsApp is a story. But it’s a story not about the future of grocery shopping in India, but of Jio and Meta. 

Both these companies are going through a significant transitory phase. Jio is making the switch from ideation to execution. Jio Platforms, after a big-bang launch, has been slow to take-off. The JioPhone isn’t here yet, and the project has been racked by delays. Meta was one of Jio’s original backers, investing nearly $6 billion in Jio a couple of years back. Over this year, Meta’s stock is down by over 50%. I’m sure it’s desperately hoping to show some results. Or at least tell a compelling story. 

But one thing is certain. 

There’s a buzz in the air.