Scaler Pod - The Software Engineer's Podcast · Scaler Academy

SCALER POD 12 ft.Sanjeev Barnwal, Founder, Meesho | Scaling India’s True E-commerce Marketplace

·1 hr 7 min·4 clips

A Meesho sale once pushed 4.2 lakh requests per second and exposed a Redis shard hotspot.

Sanjeev starts by describing what a day looks like in his role at Misho. He tries to get up before seven. Three days a week are set aside for exercise, usually weightlifting and endurance work. The remaining days go to reading books or blogs. His workday usually starts around 9:30 or 10. He says he is lazy about getting going, so a meeting at 10 a.m. is what pushes the day into motion. That appointment gets him into the office and started. Once that happens, the rest of the day becomes easier. The company is in a hyper-scaling phase, so there are always fires to deal with. The discussion then shifts to what the company first was. It began as a way to help individual shopkeepers sell online. The product let users create a storefront, list product pictures, connect payment gateway options, and manage basic order flow. Many of the early users were housewives running their own online boutiques through WhatsApp. They would share links in Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups, then handle fulfillment themselves. Sanjeev says that was the company's first version. The interview returns to the technical realities of those early years. The host asks about integrating with platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook. Sanjeev says the challenge was not really Facebook integration itself. Graph APIs had already shown up by then, and by around 2015 there were fairly decent Graph APIs available for sharing posts to groups, to a wall, and even to WhatsApp. The bigger limits were in the details. Sharing multiple pictures with different text for each image was difficult, and WhatsApp's sharing constraints were still a problem. The conversation closes with a lesson about mentorship. Sanjeev says that finding the right mentor matters a lot. A mentor one level or two levels ahead can make a real difference. Without that guidance, people still learn, but they lose time. The overall tone stays practical and reflective. It is a career conversation grounded in product building, platform constraints, and the realities of scaling a young company.

As heard by us

A CTO routine opens into a practical account of Meesho's early marketplace and scaling constraints.

Scaler Pod frames Sanjeev Barnwal's routine as a window into Meesho itself: a CTO who begins with exercise or reading, kicks the day into gear with a morning meeting, and spends the rest of it putting out fires in a hyper-scaling company.

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Why you'd press play

See how Meesho's first version grew around shopkeepers selling through WhatsApp and Facebook groups.

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