Superapp strategies

Uber wants to be a superapp. What does that mean?

Recently, Uber announced it wanted to be the superapp of the west. That led to a flurry in the Twitterverse about Superapp strategies and the right way to build a Superapp. I also observed folks conflating Superapps and Platforms, or attempting to differentiate between them. So I decided to clarify how I differentiate between them. YMMV.

This post started with me responding to this tweet:

As someone who’s been closely involved in building a Superapp, I had a point of view:

tl;dr

A Superapp strategy utilizes market driven growth to scale the business.

A Platform strategy utilizes product driven growth to scale the business.

Superapp play != Platform play

Eventually, if the business survives scaling to meet market demand, a Superapp can become a Platform to continue driving growth.

Let’s dig in with more IMOs.

Superapp strategies work in blue ocean, growth stage markets. You’re in one of these markets when your problem is scaling the business to meet demand, not scaling demand to grow the business.

When this starts happening, diversify.

Forget research, UX and all the other 1st world product advice. Focus on launching as many MVP products that increase utilization of your core asset base as quickly as you can. Often, the hard question here is what is the core asset?

See which of them grow despite all odds. Double down.

I’m pretty convinced that going 0–1 on a superapp strategy is going to be hard to impossible in mature, saturated markets, unless you already own a platform which allows you to amortize cost and increase utilization by launching products.

Also, a 4 wheeler fleet is *not* such an asset to build a superapp on. You can’t load balance and improve utilization for car driver by getting them to delivery food or parcels. The delivery costs will always be beaten by cheaper transport.

Payments as a superapp strategy’s foundational asset is questionable to me — how do you improve utilization? Payments made sense as a horizontal product on top of an existing foundation (like a 2 wheeler fleet) because it makes all the other apps in the superapp easier to use.

From a market PoV, India isn’t a blue ocean for a bunch of reasons — all well understood models (ride-sharing, food delivery, paymets etc etc) already have multiple, large, established players. Ditto the US and most first world markets. A superapp play in these markets would depend on entirely new verticals opening up creating blue oceans.

I find it interesting that once Uber says it’s going the Superapp route, it’s suddenly a thing. Until now it was all “Oh that’s only possible in China”.

What’s being missed is that it was possible in China at a point in time when there was a blue ocean and growing demand. Ditto with us in Indonesia back in 2015/16. There’s a right time/place/market for these things.

Saturated markets with slow growth in demand is *not* superapp territory IMO. That’s where you stick to the old playbook — do one thing, do it well, scale, platformize.

Equally mind boggling to me is the idea of building a superapp with a platform architecture and open API’s as the Day #1 strategy. If a 2 sided marketplace (eg. Driver/Consumer) is hard to boot up, a 3 sided marketplace (eg. Driver/Consumer/Merchants) is 10X harder.

Basically if done the usual way — do one thing well, improve UX over time, drive up engagement until critical mass is hit, then platformize and diversify — then every Western platform like GOOG, FB, AMZN can be called a superapp. But we don’t.

In the early days of Gojek (mid 2015 to mid 2016) we had bitter arguments with Nadiem internally at Gojek over the hyper diversification of the product portfolio without slowing to invest in research, UX etc. But we were basing our argument on strategies from Western products.

Nadiem was right.

As long as the demand holds, improve utilization of the core assets by diversifying products until you have a superapp.

Launch launch launch.

Of course there’s a price. TANSTAAFL. But it worked for us.

To give you a sense, from mid-2015 to end 2016 at Gojek we pretty much

* Launched a new product every month
* Grew completed txns 1000X
* Reduced downtimes 1000X

All this with a distributed Indo-India team. Was wild times.
#Superapp is a early stage growth strategy for blue ocean markets. #Platforms are a late stage growth strategy and drive growth in red oceans.

Eventually of course, Superapps mature into platforms, with open APIs and tons of 3rd party apps participating. But that’s eventually.