Article · about 12 min read

Indian Startups Take Shortcuts In Chase For Funding

Nikhil Subramaniam · Inc42 Free Intermediate India

This is the local reality check behind the freeloader worry: an India-native account of how growth targets get gamed, with sales teams signing up low-quality users purely to hit incentive numbers. It shows that any reward tied to a vanity metric will be gamed by whoever is closest to the payout, which is exactly the trap a referral bounty can become. Read it as a warning about what you are actually paying for, not a verdict on incentives themselves.

• When an incentive rewards a number (signups, referrals, GMV) rather than real usage, people optimise for the number: Bikayi staff signed up low-quality users just to game the payout.
• Growth bought with subsidies and loose incentives looks great in a deck but collapses the moment the money stops, because you never acquired users who wanted the product.
• The fix is to tie the reward to a signal of genuine value (a referred user who stays active or pays), not to the referral itself.