Building in Bharat: the leapfrog decade

A vegetable seller in a small town near where I grew up has a laminated QR code zip-tied to her cart. No POS machine, no card reader, no app she had to be sold on. You scan, you pay, she hears a tinny voice from a cheap speaker say the amount out loud, and the transaction is done. She never read a whitepaper on financial inclusion. Nobody ran a campaign to convince her. She switched because the new way was just better — faster than counting change, safer than a cash box, and free.

That cart is the whole story of the last decade in India, compressed into one frame.

We keep telling the UPI story as a policy triumph, or a tech triumph, or a demonetisation accident. All of that is partly true. But none of it explains why a behaviour this hard to change — how a billion people move money — flipped so completely and so permanently. For that, you need a different lens.

The lens: from effort to effortless

The cleanest way I’ve found to think about adoption is the same arc I use for any change worth keeping — what I call DFRM: the journey from effort to effortless. It runs in order: you step into the Discomfort of the unfamiliar, you Focus what little energy you have on the few things that matter, you build the Resilience to stay through the messy valley where the cost is high and the reward hasn’t arrived, and eventually you reach Mastery — where the thing stops costing willpower and just becomes who you are. DFRM is “DeFeRred Mastery” for a reason: mastery comes last. You defer the payoff, you don’t deny it — and you never defer the work that earns it.

The point of that arc, the part most people miss, is its destination. The goal of any discipline is to make itself unnecessary. You push only until the behaviour becomes the easy default — and then you don’t maintain it anymore. You just live it.

Cash to UPI. SMS to WhatsApp. Haggling at the kirana to a ten-minute delivery. Once a behaviour reaches mastery, it stops costing anything to keep.

I’ve written before that you don’t lack willpower — your bad habit just has a better UX. The same truth scales to a country. India didn’t leapfrog because Indians suddenly became more disciplined or more digital-savvy. India leapfrogged because, for a few years running, the new option was so obviously better that staying with it took no effort at all. The discomfort of switching was tiny; the effortlessness on the far side was enormous.

Why the leap was a leap, not a climb

Here’s the thing about leapfrogging that I think we miss. India didn’t have a great card-and-cheque system to upgrade. We had cash, friction, and gaps. When you have nothing good to defend, the distance from the old to the new is enormous — and so is the payoff for crossing it.

A country with deeply entrenched cards and a comfortable banking app had almost no reason to move. The discomfort of switching wasn’t worth the marginal gain. India was the opposite. The vegetable seller wasn’t giving up a smooth experience for a slightly smoother one. She was going from a cash box she had to guard, count, and reconcile, to a sound from a speaker that told her she’d been paid. That’s not an improvement. That’s magic that happens to be real.

This is the uncomfortable lesson for builders, and I’ll say it plainly because I’ve gotten it wrong myself: a weak existing solution is an advantage, not an obstacle. The harder the old way, the shorter the discomfort and the bigger the reward on the other side. We chase markets with sophisticated incumbents because they look validated, and then we spend years trying to be 10% better — and wonder why nobody switches. Nobody switches for 10%. Nobody ever has.

What it actually took (the part founders skip)

But — and this is where I have to be honest, because the inspiration-poster version of this story is a lie — the leap looked effortless only on the day the QR code went up. Underneath it sat a decade of unglamorous plumbing. That’s the resilience stage, lived out at the scale of a nation.

UPI didn’t fall from the sky. It sat on Aadhaar for identity, on bank accounts opened through Jan Dhan, on the rails NPCI built, on the absurd collapse in data prices that put a smartphone-with-internet in the hand that holds the cart. Every one of those was a costly, boring, multi-year valley where it was all effort and no visible reward. The magic the seller experiences is the output of a system that paid an enormous bill upfront so that she would never have to.

That’s the pattern I keep coming back to in everything I write: effort that ends effort. The work isn’t to make change easy from day one. The work is to absorb the difficulty into the design — to stay through the valley yourself — so that the person on the other side experiences the effortless version. Her switch was effortless precisely because someone else ate the friction on her behalf. The mastery was deferred, never the work.

The job was never to ask a billion people to try harder. It was to make the right thing the lazy thing — and then to do the brutal, invisible work that makes that possible.

ONDC, and the thing not yet decided

Which brings me to ONDC — the Open Network for Digital Commerce — and why I watch it the way I do. The ambition is to do for commerce what UPI did for payments: turn a few walled gardens into open rails anyone can plug into. On paper, the logic is identical.

But the arc isn’t decided yet, and this is the honest part. UPI rewarded the buyer almost instantly — sending money got dramatically easier, so the discomfort of switching was over in a day. For commerce, the buyer often already has a perfectly smooth experience inside an app they like. If ONDC asks them to give up that smoothness for an open network that’s currently clunkier, the discomfort is real and the reward is invisible. People don’t stay through that valley for a noble architecture. They stay through it only when mastery is obviously waiting on the other side.

The seller side, though, is where the real payoff lives — small merchants who today have no leverage and punishing economics. That’s the cart again. That’s the side with nothing good to defend, which means that’s the side where the jump can be enormous. Whether ONDC wins won’t be settled by how open it is. It’ll be settled by whether someone, for someone, makes the new way so unmistakably better that staying with it costs nothing.

The takeaway I’d tape to a fridge

So here’s what the leapfrog decade taught me, as a first-generation builder still in the middle of his own valleys, not writing from the far shore:

Stop trying to be a little better. A little better is a tax people pay grudgingly until they stop. Find the place where the old way is genuinely painful — the cash box, the merchant with no leverage, the form nobody can fill — and make the new way unmistakably better there. Then do the unglamorous, expensive, decade-long work of staying through the valley, so the other person feels it as effortless.

That’s the difference between a feature and a leapfrog. India didn’t adopt the future because we were told to. We adopted it because, for one second, the gap between wanting and having simply vanished — and that second was engineered.

If you want the longer version of how I think about engineering those crossings — in business and in the other seven spheres of a life — it’s the spine of the book, and there are tools to actually do it over at the resources. And if you’d just like to know who’s saying all this and why, here’s me.

Build the thing that ends the effort. The adoption takes care of itself.