Another unicorn with a lot of money trampling over smaller players like MilkBasket, Doodhwala, DailyNinja, Supr Daily by burning cash to fund freebies and win users?
This was anticipated, anyway – we buy groceries and vegetables regularly from BigBasket and morning milk from Doodhwala. It was just a matter of time the former included a morning delivery slot and demolished what was merely a spin-off idea.
The deliver-in-the-morning is just a spin-off of the larger deliver-at-home idea. A Big Basket does deliveries too, in time slots we choose. It won’t take long for them to add a before-7am slot too and work the back-end to enable that.
But what seems awkward is the way they are going about undercutting the other players, by literally throwing money at customers to win them over. I can’t blame customers – any money is good money. Who’d say no to 10/20 days worth of free milk, no matter what the cost was, and how much one is earning?
(PS: We did, however 🙂 Had a discussion with my wife if we should switch from Doodhwala and she said things are going perfectly fine with Doodhwala, so why change! And this, despite the fact that we order from Big Basket almost 2-3 times a week.)
In fact, Big Basket had a day-long stall-of-sorts at our apartment complex to communicate the value proposition of this launch! Between my wife and I, we were wondering why a Big Basket-uniformed guy was sitting on a chair at the apartment all day on Sunday, while his usual task would be to deliver and move on as quickly as possible, to other deliveries!
Even this so-called awkward is not new. This is precisely what any and every well-funded-by-VC start-up does to gain a foothold and kill all existing, lesser-funded players.
This is the law of the start-up jungle, I suppose – kill or be killed, at any cost.
Related: (where we continue to buy milk from)