One month with Udipi-esamudaay

If you have been following my newsletter, you might have heard about esamudaay.

I am being hosted in Udipi by Esamudaay and I have the honour to work closely with the co-founders on GTM strategy.

There is esamudaay the parent and the Udipi-esamudaay the product. I am working with the Udipi a bit more. Udipi-esamudaay is a delivery app on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. But behind the app is a grand vision of digital Swaraj.

The idea that the community owns the data rather than some Giant corporation is the core belief behind the product. In its first iteration to the layman, it would look like a delivery app. But where it is different is the intent of localising data to enrich the community.

But before we lose ourselves in lofty ideology let’s hit the ground and that’s literally what happened.

The app got grounded and they have paused all operations as of January 2025. They are planning a comeback but it’s the case of once bitten twice shy. 🙈

What went wrong? 😑

Ravi Haldipur the co-founder told me this on the first day I met him -

We needed 10k deliveries every month to break even, but we were doing about 2k deliveries. (Not even close to their 10k figure.)

I asked Suraj one of their BD man, what problem they were trying to solve.

He went into a long list of problems the merchants face with Zomato and Swiggy and I was perplexed 🧐, so they consider their customers as businesses. That was the single most revealing insight into why the business failed.

Merchants are looking for more customers first rather than to reduce their delivery costs. Zomato and Swiggy can take a fat margin as they are discovery + delivery apps!

Udipi-esamudaay in my opinion knew this very well, but to find more retail users for their merchants was far far difficult than finding businesses to onboard. But they followed what they could do rather than what they were supposed to do to win 🏆.

Madaari ka khel (Monkey's dance business model)

I wanted to quote this example -

Your boss fires you, but he says Wait I have an idea 💡. I have a monkey 🐵 which I can give you, you stand at the town square (tiger circle ⭕️ in Manipal), and make sure you have a tall enough stool on which the monkey 🙈 can dance.

Now instead of teaching the monkey to dance, you take the easier route out, you start building the tall stool. You make the most beautiful stool, but the most critical problem to solve first is to make the monkey dance to chikni chameli or Dhil dhak dhak karne laga!

So, I am not sure if the founders took to building the high stool first. IMHO - I think they focused on the stool first. Anyone knows that merchants are not happy with delivery apps so onboarding merchants was the easy part.

Also, being hyperlocal is the worst model one can come up with when you have a complicated product because you just cannot afford to hire talent at that market size. They reasoned that the community would support and drive users. The merchants who never 👎 did Zomato or Swiggy said they chose the esamudaay app cause it was local. So they won the community game, but how will weak merchants who themselves rely on Swiggy and Zomato, or Blinkit drive users? I met merchants who said they got a lot of their customers on esamudaay, so that helped but not to an extent, and missed the expectations of esamudaay by a long shot.

Now it is the second innings, Udipi-esamudaay is gearing up for a relaunch. The day declared is the 26th of January 2026.

Why am I cheering for esamudaay?

Maybe I like underdogs, maybe I want David to kill the Goliath. But the bigger reason is that I also believe in community, but I am not sure how Esamudaay will pull it off.

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