agree, since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space, most unicorns in India are just companies that already exist in some form in USA. In India, the execution of a business is the hard part by far, and not the novelty of the idea.
> ...since India is like 5-10 years behind USA in the tech space
The fact that the tech scene in the West (which is the place where most things happen) is white-male dominated and likely outranks Indians by a factor of 10x (?), which means, as a group, they're likely to accomplish 10x in a lot of metrics.
Also, India is roughly 5x / 10x behind the US in tech salaries too (amidst high inflation and weakening currency), resulting in the infamous brain drain to the West (where they then make things happen, if they catch a break).
This idiom is referring to the maturity of their tech industry at a high level, not their tooling (though that could be a minor part of it).
As an example, a country with paper-only tax filing might be said to be a decade behind a country with easy online e-file. It’s referring to the difference in technical capabilities, capacity, and/or innovation.
I guess they're trying to say that things like Uber, Amazon, Door Dash, AirBNB, Venmo etc. have a strong foothold in USA, but in India there's a lot of "home grown" alternatives that have beaten the US big tech to adapt to the Indian market. eg. Ola, Flipkart, Paytm, etc.
I feel that a reason for this is the cheap human labor available in India, which naturally allows manual-powered processes to scale much more easily in India compared to tech solutions. Also, given the sheer size of the market, even building CRUD apps backed by manual labor for more and more niche use-cases can still garner a lot of users (but revenue per user is still quite low). And note that there is nearly no upside to actually replace the manual component or build state of the art tech solutions because labor costs are relatively small and non-prohibitive
dude no. most foreign apps won't work in india bcz we don't like to pay for apps.
"people come to india for dau, not arpu" ~ kunal shah on the knowledge project [0]
tiktok executed perfectly bcz they were optimizing for dau but even flipkart is doing better than amazon here. many apps just won't work bcz they don't understand. see how netflix lost by asking to pay?
people don't understand india as much as they think they do so i'd suggest you to watch the video below as it covers actual india from an actual indian who understands it.
