India: greenfield to 10x revenue in six months

Cemre Akkaya · Head of Marketing & Revenue, Desertcart (cross-border ecommerce, 60+ markets)

The situation

India was live but going nowhere: default global pricing, no local demand generation, a funnel built for other markets. The classic international-expansion mistake, assuming the home-market model transfers.

What I did

Treated it as a fresh launch instead of an underperforming market. Re-derived pricing from local willingness to pay rather than FX conversion. Rebuilt the acquisition mix around channels that actually work there. Localised the funnel end to end, from ad creative to payment options, and set weekly experiment cycles so the model corrected itself fast.

The result

10x revenue in six months from the greenfield baseline · sustainable unit economics, not bought growth · playing alongside a UAE margin rebuild that lifted gross margins 15%

Why it matters for your business

First international launches fail on transferred assumptions: acquisition costs, pricing, and retention all behave differently in market two. I have run this launch pattern across 20+ country entries at Desertcart and, before that, 10 European markets at British American Tobacco.

cemreakkaya.com · linkedin.com/in/cemreakkaya