How to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Cross-Border Brand

About this episode

Kiran Kotla didn't set out to build a marketplace. He set out to fix something broken. As an Indian living in the Bay Area, he tried importing specialty products from India and got slapped with a surprise customs bill. His shipment got stuck with no one to call. The infrastructure that should have made cross-border commerce simple simply did not exist. That personal frustration, combined with a front-row seat to how unicorn startups are built across two Silicon Valley companies, became the foundation for Distacart.

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In this episode of Brewed, Kiran walks through what it actually takes to build cross-border commerce infrastructure, from having their offices raided by 20 Netherlands customs officers who suspected drug smuggling, to navigating RBI regulations, to discovering that more than 30 percent of their customers are not Indian at all. He also shares the full story of Distacart's app journey, from a progressive web app that felt like a browser to a native experience that took app-attributed revenue from 7 percent to 22 percent in nine months.

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This conversation is for Indian brand founders thinking about going global, DTC operators who want to understand what cross-border compliance actually involves, and anyone building a business that needs to shrink distance as a category.

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What you'll learn

• The Dista story: from a broken customs experience to cross-border infrastructure
• Distance commerce: the new category Distacart is building
• The Netherlands episode and what cross-border compliance actually looks like in practice
• The four compliance blind spots every brand going global ignores
• Why your home playbook will not work abroad
• The 30 percent insight: your international customers are not just diaspora
• Why Amazon does not work for most Indian brands
• The app channel journey: from progressive web app to native
• Push notifications and the retention flywheel
• The broader lesson: eat your own dog food before you sell the infrastructure

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The complete breakdown

1. The Distacart story: from a broken customs experience to cross-border infrastructure

China's cross-border direct-to-consumer commerce is over 300 billion dollars a year. AliExpress, Temu, Shein. Brands with global reach, a clear category, and infrastructure that works. When Kiran Kotla looked at the Indian equivalent of that ecosystem, he found almost nothing.

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The personal experience that triggered it was simple and frustrating. Living in the Bay Area, he tried importing specialty Indian products that were prohibitively expensive to buy locally. The first attempt resulted in a large unexpected customs bill. The second time, his shipment got stuck with no clear information on why, no one to call, and no system to resolve it.

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"People try to ship a product across the border, but if it comes, it comes. Otherwise it doesn't. No one knows what the regulations are. No one knows how to make it economically effective and compelling for a customer sitting outside India."

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Kiran had spent fifteen years in Silicon Valley, including as a founding engineer at two multi-billion dollar unicorn startups. He had seen how great companies are built from the inside. He now had a problem he understood personally and the technical background to build something around it. Distacart began as a marketplace, a testing ground to understand how much demand existed for Indian products internationally. What it has become is closer to a cross-border operating system for Indian brands trying to reach the world.

2. Distance commerce: the new category Distacart is building

The name Distacart comes from distance. The mission is to shrink it.

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Kiran's framing for what Distacart is trying to create is useful for any brand thinking about international expansion. Just as quick commerce emerged as a distinct market category with its own infrastructure, playbooks, and consumer expectations, he believes distance commerce deserves the same treatment.

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"Think of us like a cross-border operating system for any local brand to expand globally. Any brand, just like they expand on Amazon or their D2C and quick commerce, should also consider distance commerce."

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The product suite reflects this: Distacart is the marketplace for Indian products across 40-plus countries. DistaX is the cross-border D2C and mobile app platform for brands that want their own storefront internationally. DistaMarkets helps brands expand across global marketplaces through a single integration. The umbrella brand for all of it is DistaGlobal.

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The long-term vision is an anywhere store: a world where a customer, no matter where they live, can purchase products from anywhere across the world as seamlessly as they would from their domestic market.

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3. The Netherlands episode and what cross-border compliance actually looks like in practice

The chapter of Distacart's story that nobody warns you about when you start thinking about cross-border commerce involves 20 customs officers, a hotel stakeout, and an early morning raid.

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One of the products Distacart was shipping contained an ingredient from a plant species that was listed as endangered in the European Union. They did not know this. The Netherlands government notified the Indian government. The assumption was that something illegal was being smuggled. Officers hid in a hotel nearby, came in early the following morning, and raided the Distacart offices.

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"They thought it was some drugs export that was happening. That was a kind of experience we had to go through."

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Distacart walked the officers through their entire system, every process, every compliance step they had taken, every adaptation they had made as regulations evolved in practice versus what was written on government websites. The relationship with regulators that came out of that experience turned out to be one of the most valuable things the company built. Cross-border compliance cannot be navigated by reading documents. It requires relationships with the actual regulatory bodies, learning in real time when what the rules say and what the rules mean in practice diverge.

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They have since received notices from regulatory bodies about metal content in products, plant species in ingredients, and restricted ingredient combinations. Each one was a lesson the theory never prepared them for.

4. The four compliance blind spots every brand going global ignores

Kiran breaks cross-border compliance into four areas. Most Indian brands understand none of them fully when they start.

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The first is export and import declarations and certifications. The second is tax collection in the destination country. It is a common assumption among Indian brand founders that because they are based in India, they do not need to collect sales tax in the US. That is wrong. Depending on economic nexus thresholds, a brand may need to register for sales tax in every US state, and equivalents exist in Canada, Australia, and across Europe.

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"Don't take taxation easy. Don't take UI compliance easy. Don't take RBI and money inflow easy. And don't take customs declarations easy. That applies for every founder across the spectrum."

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The third area is the reconciliation of foreign currency received against goods shipped, which involves working with the Reserve Bank of India. The fourth, and the one that surprises founders most, is UI compliance. In the US and Europe, accessibility regulations require that a colorblind person be able to browse a website using a screen reader. Distacart was sued in New York for not complying with this. GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and now state-level privacy laws across the US carry significant penalties for non-compliance.

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These are not problems that only affect large brands. They affect any brand that has grown to a visible size, raised capital, or built a public reputation. Ignorance is not a defense.

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5. Why your home playbook will not work abroad

The single most important thing Kiran tells any Indian brand thinking about international expansion: the consumer behavior, the preferences, the payment methods, the trust signals, and the expectations on the other side of the border are not the same as they are in India.

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This applies at the macro level and at the granular level. UPI, the payment infrastructure that has become invisible in India, does not exist elsewhere. Showing a shipping fee of 3,000 rupees on a product that costs 500 rupees will stop a conversion in any Western market immediately. Emailing someone without their explicit consent, or sending an SMS during their night time, carries regulatory consequences that can run into millions of dollars.

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"Don't think that your domestic playbook will work in the international space. The things that people in India care about are extremely different from what people care about outside India."

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Each market cluster has its own operating logic. Western countries and modern English-speaking economies form one group. The Middle East has different preferences and sensitivities. Southeast Asian economies like Malaysia and Thailand have their own patterns. Each requires its own playbook, its own localized checkout experience, its own payment options, and its own approach to trust-building.

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The brands that succeed internationally are the ones that invest in understanding each market specifically rather than assuming that what works domestically translates.

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6. The 30 percent insight: your international customers are not just diaspora

The assumption most Indian brands make when thinking about international expansion is that their audience abroad will be the Indian diaspora: NRIs, people of Indian origin, families who want products from home.

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The Distacart data says otherwise.

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"More than 30 percent of our customers are of non-Indian origin. Indian products made in India are now gaining global prominence. Don't think that your audience is just Indian people living abroad."

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This changes the brief for any brand thinking about international marketing. If you build your positioning, your creative, and your targeting around Indian diaspora as your only audience, you are excluding a significant and growing segment of customers who have no Indian origin but are drawn to Indian wellness, beauty, clothing, and food for exactly the same reasons any consumer seeks out a product: it solves something for them.

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The second implication is equally important: people are increasingly less focused on where a brand originates. If the brand is solving a real problem and making a difference in their lives, the country of origin matters less than the quality of the product and the clarity of the promise.

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7. Why Amazon does not work for most Indian brands

The standard advice for any brand trying to sell internationally is to list on Amazon. Kiran's view of that advice is specific and grounded in the economics.

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Amazon prioritizes products stocked locally in Prime warehouses. If a brand wants to sell from India without pre-positioning inventory in the destination market, visibility on Amazon is extremely limited. The listing fees, storage fees, and fulfillment fees for brands that do stock locally eat into margins to the point where profitability becomes very difficult.

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"I would like to think that any brand trying to sell on Amazon would make more money if they deployed the same capital into a money lending business."

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The structural problem is also cultural. On Amazon, multiple brands compete for a customer's attention. A customer who does not find the Indian brand they were looking for will simply move to a domestic alternative. There is no intent specifically to buy Indian products. On Distacart, customers arrive with that intent already formed.

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The long tail is the other major gap. Amazon visibility requires local inventory stocking, which means only the best-selling products get prioritized. The bottom 90 percent of a brand's catalog effectively does not exist. On Distacart, brands can list their entire catalog and fulfill every order directly from India without pre-positioning inventory anywhere.

8. The app channel journey: from progressive web app to 22 percent of revenue

Kiran understood early that a mobile app was not optional. Within the first year of Distacart, he had already started building toward one. The journey from that realization to a genuinely effective app channel took three providers and several years.

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The first attempt was a progressive web app. It was faster than nothing and cheaper to build, but the experience felt exactly like browsing on a mobile browser. Transitions between screens were slow. The expectation any user brings to a native app was not met.

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"Despite the fact that you can say that you have an app, the experience is pretty horrible. What is the point in creating an app that would not behave like any other app?"

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The second provider was inexpensive and offered basic functionality. The third was a hybrid approach, mixing native SDK rendering with iframe-based screens, which was better but still left friction that Kiran could feel as a user. Support from both providers degraded as they scaled. One had a security incident. The other was charging a high percentage of sales on top of a high monthly retainer while consistently failing to deliver on requests.

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Moving to Appbrew, app-attributed revenue went from 7 percent to 22 percent in nine months. The internal target is 80 percent, with the belief that a large majority of purchases happening on a native app is the foundation of a strong retention flywheel.

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"To build a long-term sustainable business, we feel that we need to have a large audience coming from app."

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The specific feature that made the transition meaningful for a multi-country marketplace: the ability to show a completely different home screen, currency, shipping rates, and delivery timelines to users in different countries, all within the same app infrastructure.

9. Push notifications and the retention flywheel

Kiran's framework for push notifications is built around the customer lifecycle rather than the campaign calendar. The goal is to be useful at each stage of a customer's journey, not to push offers toward people who are not yet ready to receive them.

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The baseline notifications that he considers non-negotiable: an abandoned cart push, a welcome series, and order status updates at every stage of fulfillment. The last category is the one he emphasizes most strongly.

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"Before customers reach out to you, if you send a push notification with the most recent information about their order, they would really love you for it."

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A customer who has placed a cross-border order is naturally anxious about delivery. If a delay happens and the customer finds out from a proactive notification rather than by chasing the brand, the trust impact is significant. The brand demonstrates it knows what is happening and is already communicating about it. That is a retention behavior, not just a notification behavior.

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Beyond the lifecycle flows, Distacart treats app users as premium customers. Campaign offers for mobile users are released earlier and last longer than those for web users. The incentive structure signals to the app customer that their choice to install the app and give permission for notifications is valued.

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The insight about sessions: approximately 42 percent of all app sessions at Distacart start from a push notification. That number reframes what a push notification actually is. It is not a marketing interrupt. It is the front door of the app experience for nearly half of all visits.

10. The broader lesson: eat your own dog food before you sell the infrastructure

There is a principle Kiran returns to when explaining how Distacart thinks about productizing its technology for other brands: never sell infrastructure you have not proven by running it yourself.

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"When I go to any brand customer of ours, the moment I tell them that I have this infrastructure, I want them to feel confident that I'm also using that infrastructure for myself."

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The marketplace, Distacart, is both the business and the test environment. Every compliance system, every localization feature, every cross-border fulfillment flow, every push notification framework has to work for Distacart's own customers before it becomes a service offered to others. That sequencing is what gives the infrastructure credibility.

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The AI layer that sits across the entire stack follows the same logic. Agents crawl regulatory websites across countries to monitor for changes that affect what can be shipped where. AI generates country-compliant product descriptions to avoid violations in markets with strict advertising and labeling laws. Personalization models adjust what each customer sees based on their country and behavior.

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The vision for where this goes: an anywhere store, where a customer in any country can browse and buy from any other country as seamlessly as they shop domestically. Distance as a friction point removed from commerce entirely. That is what the name has always pointed toward.

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The complete episode transcript

Abhijeet: Hi Kiran, good morning. Welcome to the Brewed podcast. From where are you joining?

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Kiran: I'm joining from Mountain View, California.

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Abhijeet: Great, thank you for taking out time with us. We have known each other for like two years and every day the more we learn about you, it's an enriching experience for me as a fellow founder. We just love to know about your journey, starting from BITS Pilani to Silicon Valley and then coming back to India. Any brand founder would get an inspiration from knowing your journey. How does it start? Who is Kiran? What is he trying to achieve?

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Kiran: Thanks for the introduction. I graduated from BITS Pilani with a bachelor's in computer science. After that, I came to the US for my master's in computer science at Texas A&M University. Right after that, I moved to Silicon Valley, the heart of the startup ecosystem in the US. It has been a privilege to be part of the Silicon Valley startup journey for the past 15 plus years. I had an opportunity to see how unicorn startups are built from a front-row seat because I was a founding engineer in two successful unicorn, multi-billion dollar startups. It's an extremely enriching and awesome experience to be part of all of this. After working at two successful startups, I felt I could leverage the experience and expertise I had gained. I also wanted to do something that contributes to the Indian economy. I was trying to apply my background in technology in a way that can benefit India. I realized that Indian exports are not as streamlined as that of China. If you look at China's cross-border direct-to-consumer commerce, it's over 300 billion dollars a year, with the likes of AliExpress, Temu, and Shein leading. But when you think of the Indian export ecosystem, there is no such name that you hear of. With a country as capable and talented as India, I felt that people just needed a platform to showcase their manufacturing prowess. Something in the core tech infrastructure for cross-border expansion is lacking for Indian brands. So we started first with a marketplace as our testing ground to understand how much market potential there is for Indian brands.

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Abhijeet: What was the trigger? What was the one single moment that made you say this is the problem I'm going to solve?

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Kiran: I had a few experiences trying to buy products from India because Indian products in the Bay Area are quite expensive. I tried importing them from India. One time I was slapped with a huge customs bill. Another time my shipment got stuck with no clear information on why, no one to support me, no one to tell me what was going on. I felt it was a completely broken ecosystem. People try to ship a product across the border but if it comes, it comes. Otherwise it doesn't. No one knows what the regulations are. No one knows how to make it economically effective and compelling for a customer sitting outside India to buy Indian products at an affordable price without huge customs bills or huge delivery charges. That personal pain, combined with the broken ecosystem, compelled me to use my technology background to solve this problem.

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Abhijeet: How do you define Distacart or Dista Global? If somebody has to imagine the brand, how should they think about it?

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Kiran: The name Dista stands for distance. We are trying to shrink the distance in cross-border commerce. Just like quick commerce emerged as a new market category, we are trying to create a distance commerce category. Any brand, just like they expand on Amazon or their D2C or quick commerce, should also consider distance commerce. Think of us like a cross-border operating system for any local brand to expand globally. India is our primary focus but eventually once we have solved the problem in India, we don't want to confine ourselves to one market. The technology we are building is agnostic to a country. Our goal is to create this category called distance commerce.

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Abhijeet: Tell us the founding story about you and your co-founder Vamsi.

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Kiran: Vamsi and I are classmates from BITS. Vamsi was one of the first few employees of a decacorn company called Nutanix, where he was a founding engineer. He helped scale that company significantly and then joined another unicorn startup where he was one of the first few engineers and built and managed a lot of teams. With him as a co-founder, I felt we could actually solve this problem together. He has a deeper and broader technology experience across artificial intelligence, cloud technologies, and more. Just as two techies trying to solve a problem is never sufficient, we also needed someone with operational experience. That is where our third co-founder, Rajesh, comes in. I have known him since my childhood. He has a lot of experience managing cross-border shipping and fulfillment, having worked in multiple companies in UAE and other countries. He runs the operations in India and Vamsi and I manage the tech, marketing, and all the other aspects from the US.

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Abhijeet: Tell us the story of the first few months when you were testing Distacart. Take us through those memories.

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Kiran: It has always been a roller coaster. In the beginning you have a lot of doubts. Will it fly? Will it work? Will it make sense for customers? But once you start seeing some initial sales, that gives you an adrenaline rush. Making customers pay the first dollar out of their wallet without knowing who you are, having trust and faith in you, that was the biggest challenge. There was a time when I was handling all the customer support calls myself because there was no customer support team. Vamsi and I had just put some tech together. I was running some marketing campaigns. We had three or four people in India who had rented a small space. They were sleeping in one room and fulfilling orders in another room. Customers were blasting me because there was a delay in an order. It was a lot of chaos in the beginning, but I also got to learn a lot from what customers care about and what they wanted. If not for those initial days in the trenches trying to understand what customers really want, I don't think we would have built the solid foundation for what has become a global marketplace for Indian products.

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Abhijeet: How does Distacart manage cross-border logistics and compliance across 5,000 brands and 40 plus countries?

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Kiran: For a company that does domestic commerce, logistics is a big challenge. But in a cross-border setup, that gets amplified exponentially. On top of the complexities in procurement, fulfillment, and logistics, you now have to cross multiple countries while ensuring all regulations are followed, both when exporting out of India and importing in the destination country. And we handle this in 40 plus countries. Cross-border regulations are not clearly well-defined. What is written in a document is not the same as what applies in practice. We really had to learn from what reality was telling us versus what the theory said. There were scenarios where we got notices from various regulatory bodies about specific ingredient mixtures not being allowed, or more metal content than permitted in a product. In one specific case, an ingredient in one of our products was apparently part of an endangered plant species. That became a huge issue for us. The European government, I believe it was Netherlands, notified the Indian government and they thought we were smuggling. They raided our offices with about 20 customs officers who had been hiding in a hotel and came in the morning. They thought it was some kind of drug export. That was an experience we had to go through. We showed them our entire system, walked them through our entire process, showed them how much effort we put in trying to comply with regulations. That experience of establishing relationships with regulators actually made it easier for us to solve these problems, because it is very difficult to do this without proper relationships with various regulatory bodies. We also had to work with the Reserve Bank of India to understand regulations around when money from another country comes in and exports go out. That is what has helped us build the system we have.

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Abhijeet: What are the things that brand founders are ignoring when it comes to cross-border commerce?

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Kiran: I will start with things that apply commonly across all categories and then add more layers for the more regulated ones. The basic stuff: you need to understand export and import regulations in terms of declarations and certifications. Then there are rules in the destination country in terms of collecting taxes based on product categories and economic nexus. Then you need to figure out the right way to get products shipped out of the country and receive foreign currency while reconciling it with the declared value. And the fourth one is UI compliance. In countries like the US and Europe, people take regulations very seriously. GDPR, CCPA, and now almost every US state has its own privacy law. We got slapped with a lawsuit in New York for not complying with accessibility regulations. A colorblind person should be able to browse your website using a screen reader. A founder sitting in India will fly under the radar when small. But if you are a decent-sized brand or you have raised capital, these become real risks. Feigning ignorance is not going to help. When you get sued, you can't say you didn't know about it. Don't take taxation easy. Don't take UI compliance easy. Don't take RBI and money inflow easy. And don't take customs declarations easy. That applies for every founder across the spectrum. For more sensitive categories like beauty and ingestibles like Ayurveda and homeopathy, the regulations get more complicated. Heavy metal content, restricted ingredients, endangered species issues. There was a company that got sued for 4 million dollars for not registering and paying sales tax in the US. If you don't understand all of this, I suggest you don't enter the market because the risks outweigh the rewards.

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Abhijeet: What are the consumer insights you can share for brand founders building from India to the world?

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Kiran: One important thing: don't think that your domestic playbook will work in the international space. The things people in India care about are extremely different from what people care about outside India. You can group countries broadly into Western English-speaking and European economies, Middle Eastern countries, Southeast Asian economies like Malaysia and Thailand, and then South America and parts of Africa. Each has its own behavior, preferences, and expectations. You need to understand that each country should have its own playbook. Payment types are completely different. UPI doesn't exist outside India. You need to offer local payment options. A lot of Indian brand founders just enable their payment gateway without understanding that people might prefer different options or that not every credit card is an international credit card. You need to show local checkout experiences for maximum conversion probability. People find it trustworthy when you collect taxes and show them upfront clearly. Custom duties should not be a surprise when an order is delivered. And remember, you cannot email someone without their consent. You cannot send an SMS during their nighttime. The penalties are extremely high. These are the blind spots I would urge Indian brand founders to understand before they enter the market.

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Abhijeet: What are the hot categories you are seeing strong demand for on Distacart?

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Kiran: One privilege of operating a marketplace is that you get to see the trends that are emerging. One important insight first: more than 30 percent of our customers are of non-Indian origin. That is a very surprising fact. Indian products made in India are now gaining global prominence. Don't think that your audience is just Indian people living abroad. If the brand is solving a problem and making a difference in people's lives, they are willing to give it a try no matter where it originates from. Don't create a customer persona assuming it is an Indian origin consumer if you are selling outside India. That is one major insight. In terms of categories: Indian wellness, the Ayush brands, Ayurveda, Yunani, Homeopathy, is gaining a lot of global prominence. People are looking for holistic ways of managing their health. That is one area where we see more than 30 percent non-Indian origin customers. The second category is Indian beauty. There has been an explosion of Indian brands entering the beauty and nutraceutical space, some of them competing with global brands like L'Oreal for prominence. And the third is clothing, not just Indian ethnic clothing but the Indian manufacturing ecosystem more broadly. Indian clothing manufacturing is extremely rich and there is a huge opportunity to make that quality available to global customers who don't need to pay the premium they currently pay for products manufactured in India but sold under Western brand names.

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Abhijeet: What does Distacart offer that Amazon cannot?

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Kiran: The major value proposition is this: if you are selling on Amazon, they give you a lot of push if you stock inventory locally, in the US or UK or Australia. So your best-selling products can get visibility if you pre-position inventory. But what do you do with the long tail? There is no way to list the bottom 90 percent of your products and expect any visibility on Amazon. On Distacart, people come with the intent of buying Indian products. They know they are looking to buy from India and they know Distacart has the largest collection of Indian products. So it doesn't matter whether it is a best-selling product or one from the long tail. It is always going to be findable. And we do not require brands to store any inventory in various locations. Brands can use the same inventory they use to sell in India and fulfill international orders directly from India. On Amazon, even if you list as a fulfilled-by-merchant seller, you don't get visibility. Amazon always pushes brands stocking inventory locally. And the fees, listing fees, inventory fees, fulfillment fees, are extremely high. You barely make any money. I would like to think that any brand trying to sell on Amazon would make more money if they deployed the same capital into a money-lending business. The recovery cycles are long and the margins after all the fees are barely 5 to 10 percent.

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Abhijeet: How has your app journey evolved and what has been the impact on revenue?

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Kiran: Within one year I realized that an app was something I had to start with. We started with a progressive web app, which is better than nothing, but it's essentially just a browser kind of experience. It was okay but it was a start. At some point we had outlived the progressive web app and wanted to move to a proper native app. We started with an inexpensive option, around 30 to 40 dollars a month per platform. Of course you get what you pay for. Very basic, very limited support. From there we moved to a provider called Plobal, whose value proposition was better because they offered unlimited integrations. Initially they didn't have many customers so the support was good. But as they scaled, their attention towards us declined. On top of that, there was a security incident that made us uncomfortable with continuing. Then we moved to Tapcart. Tapcart had a mixed app framework combining native SDK and iframe-based rendering, so it was a little better. But the support was poor. They would always reply to emails but things would not get done. They were strictly enforcing annual contracts and charging a very high percentage of sales as a success fee, on top of high monthly retainers. As we scaled, that percentage of sales commission started hitting us badly. That is when I reached out to Abhijeet, who I had been in touch with for about a year. I felt we had probably outlived Tapcart. When we were with Tapcart, app-attributed revenue was barely 7 percent. Since moving to Appbrew, over the last nine months, we saw app sales increase from 7 percent to almost 22 percent. It will likely be above that this month. And this is happening while our overall revenue is also growing. Our internal target is to get to 80 percent of purchases coming from app. We strongly believe that mobile app is one of the major channels for building long-term sustainable retention. Even after close to one year, I have never felt that Appbrew is treating us less seriously than they did on day one. That is what I like the most.

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Abhijeet: What are your thoughts on progressive web apps versus native apps?

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Kiran: That is exactly what we started with because it is easier to manage one website while rendering the same thing on a mobile app. But I can tell you that despite being able to say you have an app, the experience is pretty horrible. For an end customer, it is almost like browsing on a mobile browser. Slow screen transitions. It doesn't provide the kind of experience anyone has come to expect from using a mobile app. What is the point in creating an app that would not behave like any other app? Within six months I felt that a native experience is far better than the web browser experience. And even a hybrid approach, which is what we saw with Tapcart where some screens were rendered through web and some were native, still left a little friction. In today's world, where attention spans are still reducing, you do not want to give people even one second of reason to move away. A native mobile app environment makes the most sense for that.

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Abhijeet: How is app customer behavior different from web, and what insights has it unlocked?

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Kiran: The first thing is that most of your loyal customers tend to use the mobile app. Anyone who wants to use your service again and again, whoever wants to stick with you, would want a native experience. If they are a repeat user with strong brand loyalty, they will install your app because it is the fastest way to do what they want. They clearly know what they want to order, click a few buttons, and they are done. They want to track their order. They subscribe for push notifications. It becomes a breeze. In a few minutes, often less than one minute, they can place an order and track it without needing to check email or dig through a browser. All our best customers are on the app and best customers tend to spend more, stick longer, and make more repeat purchases at higher order values. But even beyond loyalty, we have noticed that the time from app install to a second order is much faster than on web. And the most interesting insight: people who use mobile app as well as browser both, their lifetime value is significantly higher than people who use just the web browser. It is almost three times higher. That was unexpected. And that is an insight Appbrew actually made us aware of through their analysis of 1.5 million app users across their brand base.

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Abhijeet: What push notification learnings can you share with other brand founders?

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Kiran: Appbrew comes with good out-of-the-box push notification capabilities and has shared a lot of best practices. For any brand or marketplace, some of the basics I strongly recommend: an abandoned cart push, a welcome series, and order status updates at every stage of fulfillment. The order status notifications are the most important. Customers, once they place an order, are always eager and anxious about receiving it. They are thinking about how to get what they ordered, not yet thinking about placing another order. Before they reach out to you, if you send a push notification with the most recent information, they really love you for it. We have automations set up to send notifications at various stages of order processing. We also send replenishment reminders for consumable products where customers need to reorder. Those are the lifecycle-based notifications. Beyond that, whenever we run a campaign, we send it to app users first because we consider them premium customers. The offers for mobile users last longer and are released earlier than those for web users. That is how we incentivize app users and signal that we value their choice to install the app and give permission for notifications. These are the push notifications that have worked well for us.

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Abhijeet: What is the long-term vision for Dista?

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Kiran: Distacart.com is our marketplace for Indian products across the world. DistaX is our cross-border expansion platform for D2C and mobile apps. DistaMarkets helps brands expand across global marketplaces with a single integration. DistaGlobal is the umbrella brand for all of these. We are also running a small marketplace called DistaUSA for global products delivered to India, which is performing really well and shows us that there is significant demand for global products within India too. The reason we started experimenting with it is because our true long-term vision is to be an anywhere store. Not an anything store, but an anywhere store. A world in which a customer, no matter where they live, is able to purchase products from anywhere across the world as seamlessly as they would from their domestic market. I want Dista to be the infrastructure that facilitates that. Just like Amazon built all their solutions for amazon.com and then productized those services, we want to eat our own dog food first, prove everything works in production through our own marketplace, and then make that infrastructure available to other brands. When I go to any brand customer of ours, the moment I tell them I have this infrastructure, I want them to feel confident that I am also using it for myself. That is coming from a position of strength.

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Abhijeet: How is AI changing what Dista is building?

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Kiran: AI changes the game completely. We use AI actively across various aspects of our technology and the day-to-day lives of our employees. We have agents doing tasks across marketing, website development, customer support, finance, and a lot of other areas. But the core use is in operating the platform itself. We have to always stay up to date with changing regulations across multiple countries. We have agents that crawl the latest information about changing regulations. That would not have been possible without AI. Web crawlers exist but an agent running and smartly parsing information from multiple sources is completely different. Incorporating those regulatory updates into our technology automatically and making it available to all our brand customers is one of the major use cases. We also use AI to generate country-compliant product descriptions so we do not violate laws in the countries where products are being sold. And we use AI for personalization, creating custom experiences for customers based on their country and behavior. So many applications that I find it difficult to list them all. I would like to think our entire stack is almost powered by AI.

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Abhijeet: Two brand founders you admire?

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Kiran: I will have to think hard about this. I am not a big fan of reality TV shows, but I think one brand is Kylie Jenner's. The way she leveraged her familiarity as a celebrity to build a multi-billion dollar brand at such a young age creates a playbook for a lot of celebrities trying to capitalize on their equity. She built a brand she probably did not know anything about and created something huge. That is certainly admirable. For the second brand, I would go with Honasa, which is the parent company of Mamaearth and other brands in India. They created a category. Until they started out, the whole good-for-you, safe-for-you, organic approach was not popular in the Indian market. They took that approach, sulfate-free, paraben-free, natural ingredients, and no brand had done that in India before them. And I really admire how they chose to stay independent rather than be acquired by a conglomerate, went on to create multiple brands, acquired other brands, and by doing that became a conglomerate themselves. They were one of the very first adopters of cross-border and international commerce before anyone else in India did it. Among the modern Indian brands that are not legacy conglomerates like Hindustan Unilever or Godrej, I think Honasa is the true modern brand that has built its own house of brands. And beyond creating the category, they have inspired a generation of founders to build businesses with meaningful outcomes.

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Abhijeet: Thank you Kiran. We really enjoyed this conversation. Distacart is very valuable for the whole DTC ecosystem and for bigger brands. The most important learning for me is that it is not only the Indian diaspora. Thirty to forty percent of the people whose problem statement resonates with an Indian brand are using Dista to buy Indian products. That is a very powerful insight for any brand going global. We will take your address and ship you some of our Armenian coffee from Seva Coffee. Thank you for sharing all of this.

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Kiran: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

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