Meesho (A Y Combinator Backed Startup)

The Business

Meesho is creating the next big e-commerce distribution channel via homepreneurs selling on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. Meesho boasts a strong network of 50,000+ homepreneurs spanning across 500 cities in India.

The Crunch

“The leadership team wanted everyone in the organization to know their numbers and have ready access to data. I was in need of a tool that would solve my data bottleneck and scale with our accelerated growth” – Chushul, Head of Data Analytics

All functions especially category, product, and customer experience teams were heavily dependant on the Data Analytics team for insights on all core metrics. Meesho’s data rested mostly on MySQL, Mixpanel, and Facebook. With data residing in multiple disconnected silos, data collation, transformation, and manual report generation were increasingly becoming a pain. Additionally, creating reports on excel would take hours if not more to churn data, limiting the productivity of the Data team.

“It was impossible for someone who does not understand SQL or Advanced Excel to see the data without the help of Analytics team. We wanted to snap out of this bottleneck.” – Chushul

The Fix

After extensive research, the Data team decided figured that to be able to run complex queries on data and build deeper insights, they will have to:

1. Set up a Data Warehouse
2. Set up a robust ETL solution

At the back of the head, they also knew that this system had to be implemented light of costs, skills, and people.

Meesho set up their data warehouse with Redshift which is now their single source of truth. The option to build a custom ETL solution in-house was ruled out as it came with a lot of overheads. The team did not want to move the focus of engineering from core objectives. Meesho decided to look out for a modern ETL solution that would extract the data from siloed sources, transform them on the fly and move into Redshift. Hevo simplified their data integration process with its ready connectors and hassle-free data movement experience.

“Bringing in Hevo was a boon. Our data moves seamlessly from all sources to Redshift, enabling us to do so much more with it.” – Chushul

Once Meesho settled on Hevo, it took them less than 10 days to set the ball rolling. Chushul, Meesho’s Head of Data himself was able to set up the pipelines without any engineering bandwidth as the set up included only a handful of easy steps: connecting the sources to Hevo, writing relevant transformations, and finally mapping the output to Redshift.

“Hevo is very flexible compared to other tools we evaluated. It allows us to handle all exceptions and custom use cases effortlessly.” – Chushul

Hevo streamlined the data pipelines at Meesho, directly impacting the data visibility across all business users. With a front-end reporting tool (Metabase) all teams track their core metrics and create custom reports in real-time on the data made available by Hevo.

“By making the data available in real-time, Hevo has enabled us to improve Data centricity across the organization and our seller partners. Our meetings are shorter and faster now! (Wink)” – Vidit Aatrey, CEO

The After Effect

“Over 40 users generate and track core business metrics on a daily basis. Report generation hardly takes a few minutes and this ensures that all that decisions made are data sound.” – Chushul

Since the implementation of Hevo, the data team focuses on generating extensive reports on customer and seller analytics. The freed up bandwidth is being used to focus on predictive analytics projects that can bring in futuristic insights to the table.

“I love Hevo’s support. Having worked with so many third-party tools, interacting with Hevo has been one of my most seamless experiences.” – Chushul

With a recent Series C funding, Meesho is on its way to becoming India’s largest e-commerce distribution network. Hevo is proud to be a part of this voyage by contributing our bit to help them be more data-driven.