Swiggy Minis
Launching Swiggy's first SaaS venture for small home businesses
After Swiggy became a super app back in 2020-21, the organization saw an opportunity to offer its tech stack as a SaaS platform, focusing on the unorganized D2C sector in India. I led the creation of Swiggy Minis—a B2B2C platform that helps small home businesses set up stores and links for free, tapping into Swiggy’s customer base.
Why small home businesses?
Swiggy has always led products in terms of logistics and app experiences in India — we built and scaled multiple offerings like food, quick commerce, courier and store marketplaces. We were looking to offer our tech as a SaaS service.
We saw a gap in the market and decided to build a tech platform for Direct to customer (D2C) businesses and “solopreneurs” (single-owner businesses) — who usually sell via Instagram, WhatsApp, or their own Shopify sites.
Problems & opportunities
Our initial studies in the unorganised D2C market uncovered a lot of teething issues faced by both sellers and customers, and we were able to structure those into problem areas and potential opportunities for us to address
Drag the ◀️▶️ slider to see before and after stories
Setting up the Minis team
What started as a small idea from leadership grew into a major charter, requiring a brand new team to execute in an agile manner. We would work with a React native tech stack to provide a better experience than websites powered by Shopify.
I went through 60 profiles, shortlisted 18, took 10 rounds of interviews, and found the perfect junior designer to collaborate with on this exciting venture. 8 months later, i hired a Lead Product Designer to lead the Minis design full time.
Defining the vision
There was a lot of ambiguity, so I had to create a clear vision for both consumer and supply projects. At the time, I was the only designer for Minis and was also handling three other charters—Grocery, Meat, and Courier—so I had to prioritise and carve out time to define the vision.
Over two weeks, I ran brainstorming sessions with the Director of Product, the Co-founder sponsoring the charter, and my VP of design to develop the high-level information architecture for the consumer experience. I made interactive prototypes and shared them with CXO leadership for alignment, as well as with some friends who were running their own home businesses.
Early prototype of the Minis experience
Once the junior designer joined, we worked together to create the first draft of the Minis seller app—the most complex B2B app I had ever worked on. Thanks to his energy and drive, we completed the high-level flows in under 6 weeks. I also updated the consumer app to match the seller setup flows.
After a 4-hour presentation with CXO leaders to present our concept and gather their feedback, we got the green light to start building Minis.
Turning the vision into a roadmap
I outlined my approach and contribution to the charter in order to maximise my influence and drive the direction of the product
Design consumer app flows
Store experience
Ordering via chat
Minis homepage
Mentor seller app designer
End-to-end flow
UX copywriting
Consumer <> seller
Provide support to other teams
Product & tech scope
Product marketing
Seller community
1️⃣ Design consumer app flows
I dedicated 2 days a week for hands-on work on the Minis consumer flows , working closely with consumer app Product Manager & leveraging his dedicated bandwidth to get certain tasks done on my behalf. With this collaborative approach, I completed the consumer app flows with all edge cases in just over a month.
Above: Figma of entire customer flows. Below: Some key screens
2️⃣ Fleshing out the entire Seller app
Given the seller app's complexity and the designer's inexperience with 0-1 projects, I closely guided and mentored him to flesh out the complete end-to-end flows for each module. The Seller team also helped us find sellers for regular user testing and research, creating a strong feedback loop that kept us agile and minimized changes later in the project.
To the designer's credit, we pulled off designs for all the seller app modules in just 4 months. It was one of the biggest feathers in my cap at Swiggy!
3️⃣ Providing support to other teams
As a leader, I also helped guide and influence other teams, leveraging my experience with 0-1 product building to bring clarity to uncertain problem spaces on their part. I attended weekly standups to stay updated on their work, offer insights, and support them wherever I could.
Product
Help them define the MVP scope, ensuring we kept key features non-negotiable to implement
Engineering
Ensure designs were feasible to implement, and unblocked the team whenever needed
Seller & business
Guide seller interactions & helped them provide valuable inputs to guide the product roadmap
Product marketer
Work on overall strategy to engage both sellers and customers, covering everything in-app and off-app
4️⃣ Branding and illustrations
Around this time, I hired a Lead Product Designer to take the Minis consumer appe to launch, and get started on branding and illustrations. While he helped develop the Minis logo in-house, we took the help of our visual designers to create beautiful illustrations for lotties and empty states
Final logo by design, illustrations done by a freelance artist
Launch and impact
The entire project took 6 months of design and 8 months of development on the consumer and seller platforms. We also curated a set of sellers to be featured on Minis homepage in select cities like Bangalore, Mumbai and Gurgaon to entice customers to discover D2C brands. We launched Minis in May 2022 with strong product marketing via partner sellers and our socials.
In the first 3 months, the results were encouraging and supported our decision to offer a SaaS solution for home businesses.
1517 unique stores
created organically
698 orders
totally fulfilled / delivered
218 sellers featured
on Minis homepage
Avg 10.5 mins
to accept customer orders
Thanks to our tireless effort and dedication, the entire Minis team was awarded the Annual Swiggstar for top performing teams across the entire organization!
Momentous occasion for the Minis team!
Minis 1.5
I stepped into a full-time leadership role and mentored my Lead Designer to manage Minis design. We brought in another senior designer for the consumer product, making the team small but agile. We launched features to help sellers attract customers and improved how users discovered stores on the Minis homepage. We also built a desktop site for sellers to manage bulk actions like catalog and order management.
Key features shipped in Seller (🟨) and Customer (🟩) flows
Minis 2.0
Given how well Minis worked for D2C sellers, the leadership asked us to expand the tech stack to support service providers like therapists, nutritionists, and fitness trainers. This meant adding new features like scheduling, personal pages and differentiated seller app experiences.
I stepped in as an Individual contributor for some seller app flows to unblock the two designers, and we finished the design in under 2 months. Minis 2.0 was launched in just 6 months.
Snippets of new flows in Minis 2.0
Latest numbers after 2 months of launch
1500 service sellers
acquired organically
50K sessions
with customer visits to Mini links
33% adoption
of digital products (PDFs)
17% CTRs
on social media section of profile
Key takeaways
Over the course of 3 years, I nurtured Minis from a small idea to a fast-moving 0-1 charter with different growth phases. Launching the MVP and winning the Swiggstar award were the highlights of my Minis journey. In addition, I also learned to handle ambiguity and guide not just my designers but also product and seller teams.
