Made tough choice to close fast-fashion delivery startup Blip: Co-founder Ansh Agarwal
Blip offered 30-minute doorstep delivery of the latest fashion apparel and accessories in Bengaluru, and its closure highlights the broader strain on early-stage innovation for startups, as they face harsh funding realities, despite promising growth narratives of the quick commerce space.
In the backdrop of cautious investor sentiments and fierce competition, new ventures, overall, struggle to scale up and face operational challenges within the country's evolving startup ecosystem.
Among the prominent startups that have shut down over the last one year are Koo, touted as an Indian replica of Twitter, now X (that blamed failed attempts at partnerships and harsh funding winter for its closure), and Nithin Kamath-backed edtech Stoa School.
"Update: We are shutting down Blip after building for over a year. We have finally called it a day. While we continue to believe in this space, bootstrapping the business with limited capital made it extremely difficult for us to participate in the market," Agarwal wrote in a post.
The Blip model, being different from the rest, did a lot of first-in-market implementations that took its own time to convince stakeholders. It affected a go-to-market strategy and "slowed things considerably down for us", he said.
"The result of limited working capital and failure to implement our go-to-market in an efficient manner, it didn't make sense for us to continue, and hence, we had to make a difficult choice to shut blip down," he said.
Agarwal conceded that he personally continues to believe in the space and understands the need for verticalisation of quick-commerce in general.
"Sadly, it won't be us. I am extremely proud of what we did at blip. Being first in the market and changing the narratives with the resources we had kept me awake at night, but it was all worth it," he further said.
Thanking co-founder Sarvesh Kedia, Agarwal said he couldn't have asked for a better partner, one who could take anything thrown at him, with rigour.
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