Meesho’s IPO and the Customers Nobody in My Class Admits They Are

Ask my classmates where they shop online and they name premium apps. Look at their order history and you find Meesho.

A huge IPO for an unglamorous company

Meesho’s IPO was priced at ₹105 to ₹111 a share, and investors bid for roughly 80 times the shares on offer. For a company that rarely appears in conversations about cool brands, that is remarkable demand. It tells you that investors see something in Meesho that its own customers sometimes prefer not to talk about.

Meesho is a marketplace for very price-conscious shoppers, mostly outside big cities. It sells ₹200 kurtis, ₹150 phone covers and kitchen items at prices that make premium apps look expensive. It built this by refusing to charge sellers commission, which brought in lakhs of small manufacturers who could not afford to sell elsewhere.

The gap between what people say and do

I ran an informal survey in my BBA class of 60 students. When I asked which shopping app they used most, almost nobody said Meesho. When I asked them to check their order history for the last six months, more than half had bought something from it. Phone covers, hostel bedsheets and cheap earrings came up again and again.

This gap matters for investors. A brand that people use but do not boast about can still be a very large business. Most of India does not shop like a college student in Bengaluru. It shops like a family in a small town buying a ₹300 saree for a wedding, and Meesho was built for that customer from the beginning.

What the price really says

High oversubscription does not prove a company is a good investment. It shows that demand for the shares at that price was much higher than supply. Some of that demand comes from people hoping for a quick listing-day gain rather than owning the business for years. The real test comes later, in whether Meesho can make steady profits from advertising and logistics while keeping prices low.

Still, the IPO taught me something useful about markets. Investors are not paying for how a company looks on social media. They are paying for how many people use it, how often, and whether it can eventually earn money from them. The customers my classmates would not admit to being are exactly the ones the market just valued in crores.