Kunal Bahl & Rohit Bansal on Scale Before Profitability

In August 2015 Bahl publicly told Economic Times that Snapdeal would overtake Flipkart on GMV by March 2016; Snapdeal's market share then stood at 26% against Flipkart's 45% and Amazon's 12%, but by mid-2017 its share had more than halved to roughly 12% as both rivals moved to 35–36% each — the bold claim that framed the bet and the underperformance that disproved it.

Morgan Stanley had rated Snapdeal in 2015 as one of India's most capital-efficient startups on a GMV-to-capital-raised ratio of 3.2 — second only to ShopClues at 3.8 and ahead of Flipkart at 2.4 and Amazon India at 1.0 — a metric that flattered the firm at peak but did not anticipate the model's exposure when funding dried up.

The founders' big strategic bet was to build an ecosystem of apps and services around the core marketplace — FreeCharge ($400M acquired April 2015), Shoppo, Unicommerce, Exclusively, lending and a WeChat-style messenger — modelled on Facebook's bundling of WhatsApp and Instagram, with Bahl arguing that social was the leading indicator for how Indian e-commerce would evolve.