siliconindia | | February 20179alities about India and see India as it is. They are not building clones of Ameri-can companies and operating in markets almost 1/10th the size. They are defining their markets more expansively, either by offering broader solutions than their U.S. counterparts or by defining their addressable markets to include custom-ers outside of India.Cardekho, a CapitalG portfolio company, is a great example of doing something like this. They are building the equivalent of five companies in the U.S. There are a number of offline and online companies building solutions separately for new cars, used cars, car financing and car auctions. Some of these companies have been around for decades. In India, Cardekho does not face this entrenched competition and can leverage its resources to pursue all these opportunities together. The advan-tage of defining the market expansively is not just a larger market and bigger business opportunity but a stronger val-ue proposition for consumers, dealers and auto OEMs.Another example of thinking out-side the box is to pursue international customers. Zoho, a B2B SaaS compa-ny, pioneered this strategy. They deter-mined that they can sell to small and medium sized through the same online channels as their competitors in the U.S. and benefit from operating costs that are 20-30 percent lower. Our portfolio company, Chennai-based Freshdesk, has built a very successful business us-ing this sales and marketing playbook to compete with the leading software com-panies in the U.S. By pursuing markets outside India from day one, they are not restricted by the size and operational challenges of selling to Indian SMBs.Indian consumer companies are also competing abroad. Zomato, for exam-ple, has expanded to Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Indi-an consumer Internet businesses have the benefits of high quality tech talent similar to that employed in the U.S., but have more experience with the dynam-ics of businesses in developing markets. In particular Indian entrepreneurs are comfortable with a mobile first strategy, have a greater facility managing multi-ple languages, have built workarounds to imperfect payment systems, and have more experience dealing with inconsis-tent data speeds. Our portfolio compa-ny, Practo has pursued this strategy and has successfully launched its healthcare tech platform in Philippines, Singapore and Brazil.The main message to Indian entre-preneurs is to respond to this financial market by taking an expansive mindset and thinking outside the box. Tracking startups in the U.S, Europe and China is a good exercise but should not be the basis for a business plan. Clones of successful U.S. and Chinese com-panies in India are typically restricted to serving only the top 60-70 million consumers. They are also likely to un-dershoot the opportunity by missing unique customer needs or untapped market opportunities. It makes more sense to expand the potential market by making use of the unique opportunity India presents.
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