(The Weekend Insight) - The Shortcut Culture of Indian Startups

In today’s deep-dive, we will look at how many Indian startups became addicted to speed over depth. Discounts were mistaken for loyalty, influencer noise for brand love, and GMV for business quality. The funding winter did not create the weakness; it simply exposed what was hidden beneath the growth story.

For more than a decade, Indian startups were trained to move fast. Raise fast. Hire fast. Launch fast. Expand fast. Acquire users fast. Announce fast.

Speed was not the problem. In a large, under-served market like India, speed can be a weapon. The problem began when speed became a substitute for substance.

Instead of organic growth, many startups leaned on paid hacks. Instead of product depth, they leaned on influencer pushes. Instead of retention, they leaned on discounts. Instead of trust, they leaned on aggressive sales. Instead of revenue quality, they leaned on GMV. Instead of operating discipline, they leaned on the next funding round.

This is the shortcut culture of Indian startups.

It does not mean founders were lazy. Most founders worked brutally hard. Nor does it mean every discount-led or influencer-led startup was fake. Some of India’s strongest companies have used paid growth, creators, cashback, referrals, and aggressive launches smartly.

The issue is different.

A shortcut becomes dangerous when the startup starts mistaking the growth lever for the business itself.

A discount can bring a customer. It cannot prove loyalty.

An influencer can create trial. It cannot prove product love.

A large GMV number can make a company look big. It cannot prove margin.

A funding round can extend runway. It cannot fix a weak model.

For years, the ecosystem rewarded what could be seen from outside: downloads, valuation, celebrity investors, app rankings, city launches, GMV, social buzz, unicorn tags.

But the real company was hidden in boring places: refund rates, repeat purchase, CAC payback, contribution margin, organic traffic, complaints, customer trust, and retention cohorts.

The funding winter did not suddenly make Indian startups weak. It simply removed the makeup.

Buying growth before earning love

The easiest way to grow a consumer startup in India has always been to pay the customer.

Cashback, coupons, free delivery, referral bonuses, wallet credits, first-order discounts, subscription trials. Every category has used some version of this playbook.

In the early days, it makes sense. A discount can break inertia. Cashback can create a first digital transaction. A free trial can reduce fear.

The problem begins when the first-order incentive gets confused with product-market fit.

Paytm’s wallet era showed this clearly. Cashback helped Paytm become one of India’s most visible consumer internet brands. It trained millions of Indians to transact digitally. But it also raised the key question: were users loyal to Paytm, or to the incentive?

Snapdeal faced a similar problem. At one point, it looked like one of India’s big ecommerce players. It had scale, funding, visibility, and heavy discounting. But ecommerce is not just a demand business. It is logistics, seller quality, returns, category depth, and trust. Discounts helped create GMV, but they could not fully replace the operating depth Amazon and Flipkart were building.

Food delivery had the same tension. Zomato and Swiggy eventually became durable habits, but the early market was trained through discounts, free delivery, subscriptions, and restaurant-funded offers. The category matured only when the companies began adding delivery fees, platform fees, restaurant ads, subscriptions, and more disciplined unit economics.

Quick commerce is the current version of this question.

A 10-minute delivery of milk, bread, coriander, Maggi, ice cream, or phone chargers is genuinely useful. The use case is real. In dense urban pockets, quick commerce may become one of India’s most important retail formats.

But the shortcut question remains: how much of the habit is convenience, and how much is subsidy?

Dunzo offers the warning sign.

Dunzo had love. In Bengaluru, it almost became a verb. But when it moved deeper into quick commerce, the economics became brutal. Its losses widened sharply, and Reliance eventually wrote off its investment.

That is the danger of the speed shortcut.

The customer may love speed. The investor may love speed. The media may love speed. But the P&L may not.

Replacing product depth with influencer noise

The D2C boom created another shortcut: if you cannot yet build a loved brand, build a visible brand.

The playbook became familiar.

Launch a clean-looking product. Create premium packaging. Get influencers to post. Run Meta ads. Put the founder on LinkedIn. Add a celebrity investor. Offer 20% off. Push reviews. Call it a community. Raise a round.

None of these tools are bad. Influencers help discovery. Paid ads help sampling. Founder storytelling can create trust. The problem is when the surface becomes stronger than the product.

Many Indian D2C brands looked much larger on Instagram than they were in the customer’s kitchen, bathroom, wardrobe, or repeat purchase cycle.

A shampoo brand could trend because creators posted reels. A protein brand could look loved because fitness influencers promoted it. A beauty brand could appear premium because the packaging looked global.

But brand depth is tested after the first purchase.

Does the customer reorder without a discount?

Can the company grow when Meta CAC rises?

Does the brand have direct traffic, or only paid traffic?

Does the consumer remember the brand after the campaign ends?

This is where many D2C companies struggled.

The Good Glamm Group is a sharp example. Its content-to-commerce thesis was ambitious: own media, own creator-led distribution, own beauty and personal care brands, and use content to drive commerce.

On paper, it looked like a modern digital consumer conglomerate.

But roll-ups are hard. Integration is hard. Repeat purchase is hard. Cash discipline is hard. The company later went through restructuring, layoffs, salary delays, asset-sale discussions, and lender pressure.

The lesson is simple: content cannot automatically become commerce.

Attention is not a purchase. A purchase is not retention.

Retention is not profit. Profit is not cash flow.

Trell had a similar lesson. It built around lifestyle discovery, creators, short video, and social commerce. But creator-led attention did not convert easily into durable monetization. The company eventually went through large layoffs and a strategic reset.

The influencer shortcut works beautifully at the top of the funnel. It creates noise, trial, and a feeling that “everyone is using this.” But product depth is built at the bottom of the funnel, where the customer quietly decides whether to buy again.

That decision cannot be outsourced to creators.

Selling fear before building trust

Nowhere did shortcut culture become more damaging than in edtech.

Education is one of India’s most emotional spending categories. Parents will reduce personal consumption before cutting a child’s education. If they believe a course can improve their child’s future, they will find a way to pay.

That made edtech powerful. It also made it vulnerable.

BYJU’S was not born weak. Its early product was genuinely differentiated. It made learning visual, animated, and aspirational at a time when Indian tutoring was largely offline and dry.

But during hypergrowth, the centre shifted. The story became less about learning depth and more about sales velocity, acquisitions, celebrity campaigns, international expansion, and valuation.

That is where the shortcut becomes dangerous.

A parent is not buying a T-shirt. A parent is buying hope. If that hope is sold through pressure, fear, or confusion, the damage is not just financial. It is emotional.

WhiteHat Jr sharpened this problem. It sold coding to children through a future-readiness narrative: the future belongs to coders, and your child should not be left behind. The pitch was powerful, but the company became controversial around advertising claims, teacher quality debates, and whether parental anxiety was being monetized too aggressively.

The deeper issue in edtech was this: many companies confused distribution with outcomes.

Free classes created reach. Star teachers created excitement.

Sales teams created conversion. EMIs created affordability.

Celebrity campaigns created trust signals. Pandemic lockdowns created urgency.

But the real metrics were harder.

Did students learn better?

Did parents renew voluntarily?

Did marks improve?

Did the product reduce anxiety or increase it?

Did the child stay engaged after the sales call?

Unacademy shows a more nuanced version. It built a strong creator-led learning platform with star educators and massive reach. But after Covid, it had to focus sharply on cost discipline, burn reduction, and offline realities.

That is not failure by itself. It is a reset.

The edtech lesson is simple: education businesses cannot be built only on acquisition. They are built on trust. And trust grows slowly.

Confusing GMV with business quality

GMV was the most seductive metric of the Indian startup boom.

It made companies look large before they were financially strong.

A marketplace could say it processed thousands of crores of transactions. A B2B platform could say it enabled massive trade. A fintech platform could show huge payment volume.

But GMV is not revenue. Revenue is not margin. Margin is not cash flow.

GMV tells you how much value passed through the system. It does not tell you how much value the startup kept.

Udaan is a good example. It built one of India’s most ambitious B2B commerce platforms, connecting kiranas, retailers, brands, wholesalers, and manufacturers. The opportunity was real because Indian wholesale trade is fragmented.

But B2B commerce is not simple. It involves credit, logistics, collections, inventory, low margins, and working-capital risk. As Udaan later tightened operations, losses came down, but revenue also declined.

That is the trade-off many growth-stage startups faced after the boom.

If you cut burn, revenue may fall.

If you chase revenue, losses may widen.

If you expand credit, defaults may rise.

If you reduce credit, customers may reduce orders.

The shortcut was not building B2B commerce. The shortcut was assuming transaction scale itself proved business depth.

PharmEasy is another example. It tried to build an integrated healthcare commerce and diagnostics giant. The Thyrocare acquisition gave it scale and strategic depth, but it also added financial pressure. Later, debt stress, valuation cuts, and delayed IPO plans showed how expensive acquisition-led scale can become.

The lesson is not that acquisitions are bad. The lesson is that acquisition-led scale becomes risky if the balance sheet cannot carry it.

Employees cannot be paid with GMV. Vendors cannot be paid with adjusted narratives. Lenders do not care how large the TAM is.

At some point, the business has to convert movement into money.

Expanding before earning the right to expand

The easiest thing to do after raising capital is to launch more things.

New cities. New categories. New verticals. New countries. New apps. New brands.

Expansion creates the feeling of momentum. It gives investors updates. It gives the media headlines. It gives employees a sense of mission. It gives founders a larger story.

But every expansion adds complexity.

Ola’s experiments outside ride-hailing show this temptation. Ola Cars and Ola Dash looked logical on paper. The brand had users, capital, recall, and ambition. Why not extend into used cars and quick commerce?

Because adjacency is not destiny.

Used cars require inspection, financing, inventory, fulfilment, and trust. Quick commerce requires dark stores, SKU planning, delivery density, and ruthless unit economics. These are not side quests. They are full businesses.

Many startups made this mistake during the boom. They assumed that capital plus brand plus ambition could overcome category complexity.

Zilingo became a more dramatic version. It expanded across fashion commerce, supply chains, and geographies, raised significant capital, and later collapsed into a governance crisis.

Expansion does not create control. Sometimes it destroys it.

The best founders know when not to expand. That restraint rarely gets celebrated during boom cycles. But in hindsight, restraint often becomes the difference between a durable company and a funding-cycle company.

PR replacing proof

Indian startup media has often rewarded the easiest story: the funding story.

A company raised $10 million. A company became a unicorn. A company expanded to 50 cities. A celebrity invested. A global fund came in. A brand crossed a GMV milestone.

These stories were not useless. They recorded the growth of the ecosystem. But they also trained founders to optimize for announcements.

A funding announcement became proof.

A valuation became reputation.

A celebrity investor became validation.

A partnership became traction.

A waitlist became demand.

A GMV milestone became business quality.

PR is helpful when it amplifies proof. It becomes dangerous when it replaces proof.

When a company announces a partnership, the real question is: how much revenue came from it?

When a startup announces 10 million users, the real question is: how many are active?

When a D2C brand says it has a community, the real question is: how many people buy without discounts?

When a marketplace announces GMV, the real question is: what is net revenue and contribution margin?

The shortcut culture of startups was also the shortcut culture of storytelling.

Everyone wanted the headline before the evidence.

When capital stopped hiding weak models

The funding winter changed the mood.

Suddenly, the same investors who once rewarded growth began asking about burn. The same founders who once spoke about TAM began speaking about EBITDA. The same companies that once hired aggressively began cutting teams. The same startups that once launched new verticals began shutting non-core businesses.

This was not just a financial correction. It was a psychological correction.

BYJU’S went from India’s most valuable startup to lender disputes, regulatory pressure, unpaid employee concerns, insolvency proceedings, and reputational crisis.

Dunzo went from one of India’s most loved convenience startups to Reliance writing off its investment.

ShareChat, once the dream of India’s vernacular social internet, had to cut losses sharply.

Unacademy moved from expansion to burn reduction.

Good Glamm moved from content-to-commerce ambition to restructuring and asset sales.

Udaan moved from pure scale to tighter operations.

This is what happens when the market stops rewarding speed alone. Companies are forced to answer the questions that were always there.

Can you grow without burning too much cash?

Can you acquire users without bribing them?

Can you retain customers without discounts?

Can you monetize attention?

Can you sell without pressure?

Can you expand without losing control?

Can you survive without the next round?

The funding winter did not kill good startups. It killed the illusion that every fast-growing company was a good startup.

The anti-shortcut companies

This should not become a cynical argument that all Indian startups are shallow. That would be lazy.

India has produced companies that chose depth over drama.

Zerodha built quietly, profitably, and with extraordinary trust. Its real moat was product simplicity, pricing clarity, education, and trust.

Zoho built over decades without chasing private-market theatre. It built products, distribution, culture, and profitability with unusual patience.

OfBusiness focused on B2B procurement and credit with operating discipline. It became important because it solved a hard business problem.

Razorpay built infrastructure. Payments, compliance, developer trust, merchant relationships, reliability, and product breadth are not built through shortcuts.

Nykaa built beauty commerce with inventory depth, brand trust, content, and omnichannel expansion.

Policybazaar spent years building consumer trust in insurance comparison. Insurance is not an impulse category. It requires education, regulation, persistence, and trust.

Urban Company looks simple from outside: book a service professional. But the real work is in training, supply quality, pricing, standardization, and repeat trust.

These companies are not perfect. Every company has challenges. But they show the opposite of shortcut culture.

The opposite of shortcut culture is not slowness.

It is quality of growth.

How to identify a shortcut startup

A shortcut startup usually gives itself away in the way it talks.

It talks about downloads more than active users.

It talks about GMV more than net revenue.

It talks about creators more than repeat purchase.

It talks about cities more than density.

It talks about funding more than customers.

It talks about revenue more than margin.

It talks about brand campaigns more than organic demand.

It talks about partnerships more than revenue impact.

It talks about community more than retention.

The better questions are always less glamorous.

What percentage of users come organically?

What happens if discounts reduce by half?

What is 90-day retention?

What is repeat purchase without offers?

What is CAC payback?

What is gross margin after discounts, returns, logistics, and platform fees?

How much revenue is truly recurring?

How many customers would be angry if the product disappeared tomorrow?

These are not pitch-deck questions. These are company-building questions.

The real cost of shortcuts

The cost of shortcut culture is not borne only by investors. It is borne by employees, customers, vendors, founders, and the ecosystem.

Employees join inflated stories and then face layoffs.

Parents buy courses under pressure and struggle for refunds.

Vendors extend credit and wait for payments.

Founders lose years chasing growth that never becomes durable.

Good startups get judged through the failures of bad ones.

When a few startups overpromise, customers become suspicious of many startups. When a few founders inflate metrics, investors become harsher on everyone. When a few companies delay salaries, talent becomes cautious about joining startups.

The ecosystem pays collectively for individual shortcuts.

Depth over drama

The next decade of Indian startups will not be built the same way as the last one.

Capital will still matter. Speed will still matter. Storytelling will still matter. But they will not be enough.

The new Indian startup playbook will ask for depth.

Not just acquisition, but retention.

Not just GMV, but contribution margin.

Not just creators, but repeat customers.

Not just expansion, but density.

Not just fundraising, but governance.

Not just discounts, but pricing power.

Not just brand recall, but brand trust.

Not just growth, but quality of growth.

This does not mean Indian startups should become conservative. India still needs risk-taking founders. It needs companies willing to challenge banks, hospitals, schools, retailers, logistics networks, software incumbents, and government workflows.

But ambition without depth becomes theatre.

The best startups of the next decade will not be the ones that look the biggest the fastest. They will be the ones that can answer one simple question:

What remains when the shortcut is removed?

When discounts go away, does the customer return?

When influencers stop posting, does the product sell?

When funding slows, does the company survive?

When PR fades, does the brand still matter?

When growth is no longer subsidized, does the business still work?

That is the real test.

For years, Indian startups were rewarded for looking bigger before becoming better. The funding winter exposed the gap. The next phase will reward a different kind of founder: one who is still ambitious, still fast, still bold, but less addicted to optics.

Because in the end, shortcuts can create momentum. But depth creates ‘real’ companies.