This video examines a way of asking questions that can drive business success, using the founder of Zepto—an Indian quick-commerce company with more than ₩3 trillion in annual revenue—as its main example. It emphasizes three things: focusing closely on customers, imagining the best possible solution without being constrained by present-day limitations, and then finding a way to make that solution real. It also argues that a lean approach built on listening to customers is essential to growth, whether or not a company already has a brand strategy.

1. How Zepto Began, and Why Questions Matter

Founded in India in 2020, Zepto has grown into a huge company valued at $7 billion, with annual revenue of roughly $2 billion—more than ₩3 trillion. 😮 The company began when two founders who had been admitted to Stanford returned home during the COVID-19 pandemic and started a grocery-delivery project. At first, they simply created a WhatsApp group for people in their neighborhood and delivered groceries to them.

Zepto founder Aadit asked customers questions such as:

"Why did you use our service?"

"Why didn't you use the other services?"

"Why don't you shop for groceries yourself?"

Their answers helped him recognize that people were dissatisfied with the existing options and that no company was truly solving the problem. Zepto itself had a limited selection, high prices, and unreliable delivery times at that stage. Even so, Aadit kept improving the service by repeatedly asking, "What do customers actually want?"

Asking customers directly is especially important for founders who have already been in business for a while and for brands that have settled into their own habits. Many business owners seek advice from peers or successful entrepreneurs but rarely ask their customers. 😥 Yet the direction of a product, service, or brand ultimately emerges from a continuing cycle of asking customers and making improvements.

2. Improving the Business Around a Minimum Viable Audience

Aadit says he did not begin with a grand ambition to build a giant company. He simply wanted to help 30 women in his neighborhood. He created a WhatsApp group, purchased goods from existing stores, and delivered them to the group. Before long, however, he found a problem.

"We couldn't control the customer experience when we collected goods from neighborhood stores and delivered them."

Aadit and his co-founder began buying their own inventory, storing it in an apartment, and delivering from there. That apartment became their first dark store. 📦 Customers responded enthusiastically to the small experiment. The founders moved from a makeshift cardboard storage space to a proper warehouse and discovered that order volume was three to four times higher in neighborhoods served by a dark store. They then committed fully to the dark-store model.

What matters here is that Aadit focused on a minimum viable audience of 30 customers. He did not ask just anyone; he listened to the people who ordered most often through the WhatsApp group. 🗣️ Surveying thousands or tens of thousands of people may look impressive, but a brand with a clear persona can often learn more by developing its offering around a small, precisely defined target group. Those 30 customers offered direct feedback such as, "I wish it were a little faster," or, "I wish there were more products." The effort to address those requests led directly to the dark-store model.

In other words, working through a small group's complaints and needs produced a service similar to B-Mart, the dark-store operation run by Korea's Baemin, and drove Zepto's explosive growth. It demonstrates the value of asking a small number of core customers, "What do you want?"

3. Imagining a Seven-Star Experience Beyond Today's Constraints

Aadit says people in the industry tended to design their businesses backward from supply-chain requirements or financial targets. Those considerations matter, but he argues that the customer must always be the starting point. 🎯 Many companies approach customers with the offer, "This is the best we can do." Zepto started from the opposite direction.

"What do customers want most?"

That question produced the idea of ten-minute delivery. Aadit was influenced by Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky, who advises founders to imagine a seven-star experience instead of stopping at five stars. The exercise is to remove every constraint—even the laws of physics—and ask what the most extraordinarily good experience for the customer would look like. 🤔

Most people remain trapped by practical objections: "That can't be done," or, "This is simply how the industry works." A contrarian founder instead wonders, "Why does everyone else keep avoiding this?" and lets the idea expand. The useful question is: "If every constraint disappeared, everything were possible, and a genie stood in front of me, what solution would solve this problem best?"

The next step is to work backward from that imagined experience and determine how much of it can be made real. Ten-minute delivery emerged from precisely this shift in perspective. The promise later became controversial because of concerns about Indian delivery workers and delivery errors, but it was also one of the main forces behind Zepto's rapid growth.

4. Building Around Customer Value—and Thinking Critically

The central question in the Zepto story is "What do customers want most?" The video argues that business success depends on asking a minimum viable audience, removing constraints long enough to imagine a seven-star experience, and then working out how to realize it. 💡 Zepto, now generating more than ₩3 trillion in annual revenue, is still losing money as it expands. That does not change the fact that it chose customer value as its first priority.

There are reasonable objections to this approach.

1. "It is extremely difficult to know what customers want." 😫

   • That is true if you try to work it out entirely in your own head. A better approach is to ask with the humility of someone who does not already know, try something, gather feedback, and gradually narrow the possibilities. Customers may struggle to describe exactly what they want, but they can readily describe what frustrates them. A founder who genuinely prioritizes customer value will not dismiss those complaints; they will work with customers to resolve them.

2. "Practical constraints make it impossible to give customers everything they want." 🚧

   • Customers do not care whether an entrepreneur is struggling against reality or breaking through it. They have a problem, and they will pay the company that solves it best. They have no reason to account for the founder's private difficulties. The winner is ultimately the person who finds a way past the constraint. Instead of ending with "It can't be done," ask, "If I remove every constraint, what would the best solution be?" Thinking is free, and commercially valuable ideas can emerge from the exercise.

5. How Brand Strategy and a Lean Approach Reinforce Each Other

People who care deeply about brand strategy may assume that a predetermined strategy conflicts with an approach that adapts to customer response. The video argues that the two can reinforce each other. 🤝

• Brand strategy defines and preserves the people the brand exists to serve—its minimum viable audience—and the value it intends to provide them. Those are the constants.
• Everything else, including the product and the way the service is delivered, can evolve through a lean approach: testing ideas in practice, learning from customers, and narrowing the implementation toward what they value.

A café without a brand strategy might change its identity whenever customers respond well to carrot juice, pizza, or some other product. A café with a clear strategy—perhaps a culture built for intellectual and artistic people—can reject a popular pizza if it does not serve its core audience, while continuing to experiment with offerings that do, such as cakes designed like works of art.

The video compares this to courting the particular person you are interested in. The goal is not to accept anyone who happens to like you, but to understand and win over the person you have chosen. 🏹

1 Hectare Company likewise has a clearly defined audience and value proposition as a brand for small businesses. But imagination alone cannot reveal what customers want, so the company has reached its present form through repeated experiments and real-world encounters. The channel's argument is that combining brand strategy with a lean approach is both the most sensible path and the one closest to the essence of business.

Closing

The core of business success is the continuing effort to ask and act on the question, "What do customers want?" 🧐

1. Ask your minimum viable audience and listen closely to their needs and complaints.
2. Remove every constraint—even the laws of physics—and imagine a seven-star experience instead of a five-star one.
3. Start with that imagined experience and work backward to determine how it can be made real.

This approach is useful with or without a formal brand strategy, and it can be especially valuable for early-stage founders. An enduring brand can emerge when a lean approach works alongside a brand strategy that clearly defines whom the company intends to serve. The hope is that we can all build deeper relationships with customers—and stronger businesses—by choosing our audience deliberately and learning from them continuously. ✨