SUMMARY
Murthy said that D2C businesses need to focus on their interactions with customers and learn from the feedback received
Speaking at Inc42’s The D2C Summit 3.0, Murthy also advised that economic downturns are a great time to build businesses as hiring is easier and CAC lower
D2C brands today have the opportunity to figure out the way to offer personalised, customised, and individualised experience to customers
There is more to a business than just funding and D2C brands need to focus on customer experience to grow, said Sandeep Murthy, partner at venture capital firm Lightbox, at Inc42’s ‘The D2C Summit 3.0’.
Economic downturns are a great time to build businesses as hiring is easier and customer acquisition cost is also lower, he added at a session named ‘Surviving The Economic Downturn – Building A Recession Resilient D2C Brand’.
“Funding is not the end of your metrics… I think, what customers say, what customers do, how you interact with them, whether you actually have a proposition that brings them back on a regular basis are the things that matter more,” Murthy said.
In fact, as per Murthy, customers should be the key focus for the brands to build better. “Everybody should be listening to customers, should be understanding what feedback they are getting, should take that, and evolve and iterate,” he said.
The challenge lies in finding the customer pain and the right product-market fit, and both the entrepreneurs and investors are trying to find if they have enough customer empathy to know what is the actual issue to solve.
“I think that in a time where perhaps spending aggressively on acquiring new customers may be challenging…focus on existing customers and really create that love, make them the advocates of your business and empower them to go out there and want to tell other people about what you’re doing,” he added.
Speaking about automation and its implementation in the business, Murthy said that while automation is not bad, it is important to implement it with customer empathy.
Murthy believes that the opportunity today is to figure out how a brand can deliver a very personalised, customised, individualised experience like an offline store would in an environment that is online and on a massive scale.
“That happens by putting the brain in the entire system. And that brain has to be layered with some aspect of humanity, just assuming that the robot will do it is not going to be the answer…Humanity has to exist within it, empathy has to be there,” Murthy said while further elaborating how some brands fail to cater to customer needs in time due to poor usage and excessive dependence on automation.
During the session, Murthy also touched upon several other points including D2C brands’ IPO potential, their roles as Metaverse becomes more mainstream, the importance of having trust in the differentiation factors of one’s business, and more.
The first day of ‘The D2C Summit 3.0’ saw founders of some of the top D2C brands discussing a range of issues about D2C brands – overall brand building, operating, and scaling them as profitable ecommerce businesses, addressing logistics and marketing issues, among others.
As per an Inc42 analysis, the Indian ecommerce sector saw a 38% funding decline in Q2 2022 from the previous quarter amid the funding winter. However, D2C brands raised $1.3 Bn in the first six months of 2022, the highest among all ecommerce sub-sectors. There are over 180 funded D2C startups in the Indian startup ecosystem.
The Indian D2C segment’s total addressable market (TAM) opportunity is expected to cross $302 Bn By 2030, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24% between 2021 and 2030.
