Why does Sajith Pai say India is three markets, and what does that do to your GTM?
Sajith Pai of Blume Ventures writes the Indus Valley report, and his India1, India2, India3 framing exists because treating India as one market quietly kills go to market plans. India1 is roughly 110 to 130 million people across 25 to 30 million households at around 9,000 dollars per capita, English comfortable and white collar, which he calls a Mexico inside India and about 9 to 10 percent of the population. India2 was about 100 million people coming online through Jio in his 2021 framing and had expanded to around 300 million by the 2024 report, an Indonesia inside India, monetising through tiny digital transactions. India3 is the remaining billion or so. The go to market consequence is the whole point: India1 is reached through search based discovery, premium positioning and convenience, while India2 needs friction free interaction models, social commerce, group buying and content driven discovery instead of search. As he puts it, few products enable universal use cases across India1 and India2, so business model and monetisation have to be chosen per segment. His fintech example makes it tangible: Smallcase serves India1, Avail Finance India2, Kaleidofin India3.
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3 resources, 1 India-specific, 3 link-checked.
✍️ Essay
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The canonical essay, and the one that actually spells out different discovery and monetisation playbooks per segment rather than just sizing the segments.
The updated segment sizes plus the caveat that matters most for planning: consumption growth is not income growth, so a rising transaction count is not a rising customer.
How the report is actually assembled and what the 2024 edition covers, which is the usable route in given the report's own home page blocks unauthenticated readers.
