After Twitter's Parag Aggarwal, a new Indian CEO will sit on YouTube's throne!

From schooling in London, to university in Pennsylvania, Harsh Jain grew up with fantasy football. When he came back to India, fantasy games were non-existent.

When IPL was launched in 2008, Harsh was stoked. He and his friend Bhavit Seth started working on building their very own fantasy game!

When Dream11 started out, the gaming industry experts all declared it to be the worst idea ever. And, they weren't wrong. Why? Well, there are several reasons:
1. Harsh had borrowed money from his parents and he was quickly running out.
2. Dream11 was running as a free app with ads

3. Finally, instead of focusing on the fantasy game element, they created a bunch of different features like blogs, forums, casual games and more!

The cluttered app, plus no incentive for players had the initial team tanking.

For a while, Dream11 became a side project and Harsh had to focus on his services business. But, after they saw some success there, they came back to Dream11. After dumping all the extra features & making Dream11 into a paid app, the team was set on a track to fantasy game domination.

But, how does Dream11 work?
Well, here's a short explanation:
Players join different contests for a particular live game by paying entry fees. The money from all these players makes the total money pool.

75% of this money is distributed to the winning players and the rest 25% goes to Dream11. This is ofcourse in a case when Dream11 is able to fill all the spots for a contest.

This model has resulted into very strong unit economics for Dream11. So much so, that, after spending a massive Rs 222 crores on IPL ads, Dream11 makes the money back in half an IPL season!

Amazon made $469B in 2021 & it's now worth $1.42 trillion dollars!

Guess who Amazon's biggest rival is?
Walmart? eBay? Target? — Nah!

It’s the 2006 startup, Shopify, that even now makes just 1% of Amazon's revenue! But, how? Well, let's find out!

First, let's understand the difference between Amazon & Shopify!

Amazon => Retailer (wholesale products) + Marketplace (3rd party sellers)
Shopify => It is a platform that allows e-commerce companies to go online

Amazon has complete control over the marketplace, while Shopify simply facilitates contact between sellers & consumers
But, Shopify makes $4.6B in revenue, that's 100x less than Amazon's revenue.

Let's break down their GMV to figure out why Shopify can compete with Amazon:

GMV => Gross Merchandise Value => the sum value of all the products & services sold by a particular platform.

Amazon's total GMV in 2021 => $610B

Out of this
a) Amazon Retail's GMV => $220B (36%)
b) Third-party GMV => $390B (64%)

Now, Shopify's GMV in 2021 => $175B

If we just consider third-party sales, then Amazon's GMV is twice as large as Shopify. So, clearly, Amazon is in the lead.

But, the insight is not in the numbers, it's in the trends.

Shopify's GMV was 45% of Amazon in 2021. Only 3 years ago it was 25%.

So, Shopify is growing & that too, quickly!

The trend shows that traditional marketplaces are not the only option for merchants anymore.

The D2C businesses are also a viable option in 2022.

Amazon also has other problems. But, it's never wise to underestimate Amazon.

Now, in the past, Amazon has tried to buildd a startup similar to Shopify, but both times it failed. It has now acquired Shopify's competitor Selz! So, let's see how things go!

EaseMyTrip was founded by 3 brothers — Prashant, Nishant and Rikant Pitti. One day, the youngest of the 3, Rikant, found out that their father was getting scammed by their travel agent, so he started booking plane tickets for his family only.

Seeing that many bookings were coming from a single account, the airline company contacted the brothers and suggested they start a travel agency. So, Nishant and Rikant launched their mom & pop travel agency called Duke Travels.

Working as a travel agency for 7-8 months helped the brothers understand all the problems travel agents go through, so they built their second startup - a B2B company for travel agents called EaseMyTrip.

EaseMyTrip became a mediator between agents and airlines. So, all agents would sign up on EMT instead of connecting with different airlines. And, EMT would share 5% of their 6-7% commission with these agents.

But, they were barely breaking even with their thin 2% margin. On top of this, the brothers knew that with better technology, people will soon transition from booking tickets through agents to booking tickets by themselves online.

So, they made a major transformation from a B2B company to a B2C platform! Now, being a B2C business, EMT didn't have to share 5% of the commission with the travel agents!

Today, 87% of EaseMyTrip's revenue is generated from its consumer side of the business, while only 10% is accounted for by agents.