Swiggy One: Building India's most loved membership program
Championed a membership program to move high-frequency users from churn risk to loyalty.
- Membership Programs
- Retention Strategy
- Consumer Monetization
- Growth Marketing
- Unit Economics
- Loyalty
Anuj Rathi
Co-founder and CEO at profound.me
From their time as
SVP, Revenue and Growth at Swiggy
Swiggy • 2021
Overview
Anuj diagnosed a retention issue using cohort data and user insights, championed a membership program as the structural solution, modeled dozens of alternative versions, and launched Swiggy One within months. The program became one of India's best-run consumer memberships and enabled a significant rebalancing of marketing spend from acquisition toward retention.
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The Story
When Swiggy's post-COVID cohort data came in, the signal was hard to argue with: new users were not converting into high-frequency customers, and users who had ordered weekly for years were churning faster every quarter.
Anuj had been making the case for a membership program well before the data turned. When retention offers anchored on free delivery and targeted coupons started returning materially more than acquisition spend, and the gap kept widening, the mandate was there.
He brought the executive team together to lock the strategic frame, then built a cross-functional team to map the design space properly. The team worked through dozens of program versions, varying benefit bundles, pricing tiers, and positioning angles, until the configuration with the broadest appeal and the best unit economics separated itself.
They stress-tested the shortlist against the business model and launched within months of starting.
The program performed close to plan. Over the following quarters Anuj kept iterating on the activation and retention loops, cutting benefits users found too complex to value and sharpening the ones they actually used.
The larger consequence was a rebalancing of Swiggy's marketing mix: acquisition spend came down significantly, and the freed capital moved to membership and retention. The economics carried the argument, and they held.
Ownership Snapshot
Broad role
SVP of Central Revenue and Growth, owning product, marketing, and lifecycle management across Swiggy's consumer business.
Goal
Improve repeat rates and prevent high-frequency user churn by building a membership program to anchor loyalty across categories.
Direct ownership
Owned the full program design, business model, pricing architecture, and go-to-market for Swiggy One from concept through launch and iteration.
Team execution
Led a cross-functional team spanning product, design, marketing, and analytics to model, test, and ship the program within three and a half months.