For many direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands in India, growth has become a more delicate calculation.
Customer acquisition is expensive. Discounts eat into margins. Returns on digital ads fluctuate. Yet, much of the ecosystem still depends on the same global platforms for visibility and scale.
For Umair Mohammed, the problem is where brands are spending from.
“Ecommerce brands are paying from the wrong part of the P&<,” he said. “If you are not impacting the right parts of the P&<, it is very hard to build a large business.”
Umair has built and sold a martech company before. He has come away sceptical about what software alone can solve.
Today, as co-founder of Nitro Commerce, he is trying something different.
Lessons from selling software
Mohammed spent over seven years building Wigzo, a marketing automation and customer engagement platform serving SMB and mid-market ecommerce brands. In 2021, the company was acquired by Shiprocket.
With the exit also came a reality check.
Marketing software, he realised, often competes for a small slice of a brand’s budget.
“If you look at the P&< of a consumer brand, martech is a very small slice,” he said. “Even at scale, you are asking for a share of a very small budget.”
Advertising sits elsewhere on that statement.
“Ad is such an important part because it directly impacts the top line,” he said. “It is a very different conversation than selling software.”
That distinction pushed him to rethink the model itself.
Chasing growth
Nitro Commerce positions itself as a marketplace linking brands to ad inventory across apps, quick commerce platforms and streaming services.
A big chunk of its earnings today come from ad budgets.
“The real money does not lie in taking a percentage cut of the existing business,” said Umair. “The real money lies in getting them growth and taking a percentage of that business.”
The company said it works with over 2,000 D2C brands and more than 150 supply partners. The focus is India for now. Mohammed places the business at roughly Rs 5 crore in monthly revenue.
Aggregation is central to the pitch. Many consumer apps are building ad businesses but operate with small teams. Reaching thousands of brands one by one is difficult. Brands, meanwhile, are looking to spread risk.
“Aggregation in this space is the only way it will grow,” he said. “How would a single platform go to 2,000 brands themselves?”
The opacity problem
For Umair, the tension in digital advertising is not cost.
Over time, he argued, large platforms such as Meta and Google have automated decision making to a point where marketers see less of what drives outcomes.
“They have taken the controls away,” he said. “Opacity means their simple task is to get you sales. The best way to do it is to double down on retargeting.”
That may lift short term returns. It does little for new customer discovery, he said.
He prefers to separate the two. A lower return on new users can still make sense if it builds a base that buys again.
“Your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) on repeat could be 8x and on new acquisition could be 1x,” he said. “That is fine. You are building a base.”
Building new rails
Nitro is also adding tools beyond media buying. One of them uses language models trained on a brand’s catalogue to answer shopper queries on websites.
According to Umair, many first time buyers drop off when basic questions remain unresolved.
“We saw a lot of sales being lost because of that,” he said.
The system now handles thousands of queries daily across early users.
The company is also developing a plug-and-play rewards engine for apps that want loyalty programmes without building sourcing teams internally. The aim is to create new supply and tighter links between brands and consumer platforms.
“I do not see development stopping for the next two, three years,” he said. “It is about building depth.”
A measured second act
International expansion is on the roadmap, starting with Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Umair is cautious about how to enter.
“You do not have to sell the platform on day one,” he said. “You just need to find one thing they are willing to buy at a price point that makes it a no brainer.”
He calls it a wedge.
Start narrow, build trust, expand later, he says.
The longer term ambition is to build what he describes as a third advertising layer alongside global giants. He is careful not to overstate the present.
“Currently we are maybe 1 per cent there,” he said.
For a long time, e-commerce infrastructure in India has been shaped by software tools and large ad platforms. Umair is betting that the next phase may look different.
“It should not be about external capital,” he said. “It should be about growth that makes sense.”
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