Podcast · 1 hr 30 min

Sajith Pai on India's Digital Divides

Shruti Rajagopalan with Sajith Pai · Ideas of India, Mercatus Center Free Advanced India

An economist presses Pai on the data behind India1, India2, India3, so you hear the assumptions get stress-tested. It is useful precisely because it does not take the framework at face value. Listen when you want to understand the limits of the segmentation before you build your own sizing on top of it.

  • The segmentation is a model, and models have edges
  • Income and consumption data in India are genuinely noisy
  • Interrogate your assumptions the way an economist would
Open on mercatus.org ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I size a market for India specifically when data is messy?

Read with it

  1. The single best thing ever written on customer conversations. It teaches you to ask about the customer's life and past... momtestbook.com Book · ~130 pages The Mom Test Rob Fitzpatrick
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  3. Most market sizing advice online is generic TAM SAM SOM filler. This one is written by an investor, backed by a survey of 30... Pear VC Essay · ~15 min read Market Sizing Guide Ian Taylor
  4. Before you build for a home market outside the big startup hubs, you need the real economics, and this is the essay that maps... Sajith Pai (Blume Ventures) Article · ~20 min read The Indus Valley Playbook Sajith Pai
  5. When there is no category report to point at, you have to build the number yourself, and this is the essay that teaches you... Andreessen Horowitz Essay · ~20 min read 16 More Startup Metrics Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, Jeff Jordan
  6. Blume's annual report is the single best data-grounded read on what is actually happening in Indian internet and consumption,... Blume Ventures Article · ~180 charts Indus Valley Annual Report 2025 Sajith Pai, Anurag Pagaria and team (Blume Ventures)
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