AskMe

» see askme.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

askme was an indian product, on an indian payments stack, with a delivery network built out of mumbai and delhi. in 2010 i was twenty-six, on a ttnet adsl connection in ankara, and the only askme story that would have crossed my feed was the 2016 shutdown coverage on yourstory and businesstoday. the rest of the company's life ran in a market i did not have a debit card for.

the parent company was getit infoservices, originally a yellow-pages-style business that pivoted into local search. sanjiv gupta ran it. malaysian billionaire t. ananda krishnan's astro holdings took roughly 95 percent of the equity through a series of rounds. that single-investor structure became the thing that decided how the company died.

between 2013 and 2015 askme rolled up four adjacent businesses on top of the search base. askmebazaar for general e-commerce, askmegrocery for groceries, mebelkart for furniture and bestatlowest for grocery price comparison. then askmepay for payments. five products on five teams in a country where flipkart and amazon india were already winning every category that mattered. cash burn ran near $10 million a month. orders dropped 90 percent in february 2016.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

the indian e-commerce funding window between 2014 and 2016 was unusually open. tiger global and softbank were writing big checks across the category alongside sequoia. flipkart was the obvious leader, snapdeal was the obvious second, and the rest of the field was venture-funded experiments. astro decided that one indian conglomerate could run search and goods and groceries and furniture in parallel.

getit had a yellow-pages directory business that had been quietly profitable for years. the askme rebrand around 2010 was supposed to lift it into the local-search market alongside justdial. the multi-category pivot starting around 2014 was the part that broke the math. five businesses, each subscale against its category leader and all sharing one cost structure.

~ the cracks ~

this part you had to be in the region for, and i was not. by early 2016 the financial picture was visible to anyone reading the indian tech press. net losses had climbed from around rs 54 crore in 2011 to rs 300 crore by 2015. the promised round of fresh astro capital was not coming. minority shareholders alleged astro owed rs 300 crore in committed but unpaid funding. that is the disclosure that ended any chance of a bridge from elsewhere.

the leadership response made things worse. cfo anand sonbhadra stopped showing up to the office in june 2016. ceo kiran murthi stopped answering calls around the same time, while founder sanjiv gupta went off the grid shortly after. anyway, by the time the 19 august 2016 announcement landed, the company had already been in functional shutdown for weeks. employees who arrived for their morning shift were told to go home.

~ the day it died ~

the 19 august 2016 shutdown took out the entire group at once. askme search, askmebazaar, askmegrocery, mebelkart, askmepay. yourstory put the headcount loss at around 4,000 across the brands. the websites went down or stopped accepting orders inside the same week. there was no graceful wind-down comparable to the aol brasil exit a decade earlier. the brand simply switched off.

sanjiv gupta resurfaced months later through court filings. astro and the minority shareholders entered a multi-year legal back-and-forth over the unpaid commitments. the askme infrastructure stayed dark, the domain limped on for a stretch as a shell page, then got recycled. the indian tech press treated the collapse as the cautionary tale that closed out the 2014-2016 indian e-commerce bubble.

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