Building India's Next Billion Users With Desi Data And Global DNA

Every few years, a new headline declares that India’s internet economy has finally been “unlocked”. But what’s quietly unfolding this time around isn’t just a milestone, it’s a reset. The next billion users aren’t just logging in. They’re subscribing. They’re paying. And more importantly, they’re compounding.

This shift isn’t loud, but it’s foundational. From how India pays to how India aspires, we’re seeing deeper signals of change. And the startups that succeed next won’t just scale products; they’ll reimagine who they’re building for, how those users transact, and what true retention looks like in a country this diverse and layered.

India is not saturated. If anything, we’ve only scratched the surface!

Much of the initial focus from founders and investors has centred on India’s urban, English-speaking, metro-based users—those with disposable income and ease with digital platforms. But it’s the next wave of users, those living outside Tier I cities, accessing content in vernacular languages, spending intentionally rather than impulsively, that represent the real market expansion. And contrary to popular belief, they are not unwilling to pay. They have not yet been adequately catered to.

Too often, the ecosystem assumes that only the top of the pyramid converts. But the reality is simpler: the bottom never had the right form factor. Products weren’t optimised for their realities—language, bandwidth, device specs, pricing models. The result? A perception that this segment doesn’t transact, when in truth, they were simply excluded by design.

As investors, we see founders applying metro-first logic to a non-metro opportunity. It doesn’t work. What’s needed isn’t a watered-down version of a premium product but a reimagined product entirely—one that starts with the user’s context and scales from there.

We keep saying India is diverse. Yet somehow, we expect all of India to use the same app, in the same way, at the same price point. That’s not just bad business, it’s bad math. For years, trust, not willingness, was the real bottleneck in Indian internet commerce. That’s why cash on delivery (COD) became the default. People wanted the product first, the reassurance of tangibility, before they parted ways with their money. Digital payments weren’t just a tech problem; they were a psychological one, too.

That’s no longer true.

The rise of UPI AutoPay has quietly rewritten India’s payment story. What once required manual effort, failed transactions, or jumping through multiple hoops is now frictionless. Subscription-based products, previously unviable because of low trust and high dropout rates, are now scaling with velocity. Startups like Jar, Seekho, and Stan are showing how UPI AutoPay unlocks a new monetisation layer.

We’ve moved from a COD economy to a “set it and forget it” economy; from one-time hesitation to recurring conviction and one-tap payments.

And this shift doesn’t just change how products are paid for, it changes what products get built. Suddenly, entire categories that were seen as unmonetisable—such as habit-building apps, niche content plays, and micro-transaction-driven platforms—are all viable.

But building for India isn’t just about hyperlocal. It’s bringing quality to local insight.

The demand is real. The India Stack is robust. The user base is growing in both size and sophistication. But to capture this, Indian founders need to adopt first-principles thinking in design, onboarding, retention, and monetisation. Founders who treat the next 500 Mn like a low-ARPU (average revenue per user) experiment will lose to those who treat them like their most valuable customer segment, just with a different set of constraints.

This is where global DNA comes in, not as imitation but as discipline. Founders need to move away from what has worked in the West—the mindset of Airbnb for India, X for India—to solving real problems and combining this with local cultures. The obsession with customer retention, monetisation levers, and the ratio of customer lifetime value (LTV) to customer acquisition cost (CAC) become crucial. When these are combined with desi intuition, with language nuances, shared devices, price sensitivity, and emotional design, it becomes a force multiplier.

And the need for this mindset is backed by data. Nearly half of India’s internet users today are rural, and a vast majority of new users come online through low-cost android devices. They’re mobile-first, bandwidth-conscious, and increasingly vernacular. Voice-based searches are growing at over 270% year-on-year, and only a small fraction of the Indian population is fluent in English. For this audience, English-heavy, high-spec products aren’t just a poor fit; they’re exclusionary.

Similarly, retention tactics that work in mature markets often fall flat here. In India, attention is fragmented, trust is hard-earned, and data costs, while low, still influence behaviour. Founders need to think about onboarding in the absence of email, payments without credit cards, and brand-building without big media spends.

Winning teams today aren’t the ones blindly applying Western playbooks, nor are they glorifying the jugaad model. They’re straddling both worlds. The founders who’ll win the next decade are building in Hinglish, pricing in rupees, and thinking in CAC-LTV ratios.

This hybrid mindset isn’t a compromise. It’s a competitive edge.

At the pre-seed and seed stage, there’s no formula. But there are signals, and those signals are evolving. We’re looking for:

• Not just scale, but sustainability
• Patience with monetisation but obsession with user insight
• Distribution prowess beyond paid growth loops
• A clear wedge into non-metro India

If your product is built for India, but your user profile looks like a Bengaluru-based product manager, you’re doing it wrong.

The next billion users won’t just consume content. They’ll create wealth, shape culture, and define what aspiration looks like in this decade. They’re already here, paying, referring, subscribing, and staying.

That’s how we are moving from a demographic dividend to a digital dividend.

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