I've been tracking 3,500 Indian D2C brands every week for a year. Some of what the data shows I genuinely didn't expect.
A year ago I started running a weekly data pipeline on the Indian D2C market. At the time I thought I'd do it for a few months, get a clear picture, and stop. I haven't stopped because the data keeps showing things I didn't expect.
For context: impuls8 now tracks 3,500 brands across 429 micro-niches, with Instagram, YouTube, Google Trends, Reddit signals, and Meta ad presence all updated weekly. We also have 54,975 product listings with actual price points mapped by niche. This is what a year of running that consistently actually shows you.
The thing that surprised me most early on was how misleading brand count is. I used to look at a niche with 12 brands and assume it was 4× harder to enter than one with 3. That's not right. In almost every niche we track, the actual competitive threat is 2–4 brands — the ones with genuinely rising Trends scores and growing social followings. The rest launched, got some initial traction, and are now coasting on Amazon listings. They show up in the count. They don't show up in the fight. There are niches in our weekly movers right now with 10+ brands where the top 2 are growing fast and the other 8 are essentially flat. You're not competing with 10 brands. You're competing with 2.
The pricing data took longer to make sense of, but it's the thing I find myself coming back to most. With 54,975 listings you can see the actual ₹ bands that are congested vs thin — not "premium vs budget," the specific ranges. In specialty coffee, the ₹350–₹650 range has 9 active brands. Above ₹1,200 in the D2C channel there are fewer than 3. The people who'd happily pay ₹1,500 for 250g of single-origin are being served by imports and tiny artisanal roasters with no distribution. That band is just empty. Same pattern in natural skincare — a ₹400–₹700 cluster with 15+ brands, almost nobody credibly above ₹1,200 with a clinical story. The premium end isn't defended, it's just unoccupied. Most founders go where they see other brands, which is the congested band. The data makes the empty one obvious.
The Reddit pipeline is the signal I trust most for actual unmet demand. We mine Indian subreddits for threads where someone describes specifically what they want — not a general complaint, but "I need X" — and the replies have no Indian brand recommendation in them. The gaps that show up consistently: Indian swimmers asking about hydration products for water-based training, with every reply pointing to an American brand or nothing. Adjustable dumbbells under ₹5,000 coming up constantly in r/Fitness_India with "import it" as the only answer. Women's gym wear designed for Indian body proportions mentioned repeatedly in r/india with real frustration, always answered with international brands or "just buy men's fit." These aren't trend signals. These are people describing exactly what they'd buy if someone made it, and getting no Indian brand name in response.
The ad data was the most counterintuitive finding. We pulled Meta ad presence for 62 brands across 5 niches — 87% are actively advertising. The headline number is less interesting than the outliers. There are brands with 200,000–300,000 Instagram followers running zero paid ads. In gold jewellery, one of the highest-followed brands in the niche has no active Meta campaigns at all. Their entire acquisition is organic. A new entrant with even a small media budget is not competing with them on paid — the paid channel in that niche is far less contested than the organic follower counts suggest. The opposite situation is baby care, where brands with relatively small followings are running 25–30 active creatives simultaneously. The paid battle there is aggressive even at small scale. That's useful to know before you decide how to enter, not after.
The other thing the weekly data shows clearly: the brands growing fastest right now are almost never the ones you'd pick from Indian startup media. Funded brands with press coverage and large follower counts are not the ones with the fastest week-over-week Trends momentum. The fast movers are mostly names I'd never heard of — small brands in specific niches that clearly found a customer segment or channel or product angle that the established players haven't prioritised. Their Trends scores are rising 3–5× faster than the incumbents in their categories. The signal is in the trajectory data, not in who got covered on YourStory.
The last pattern I keep coming back to is adjacency. When you look at the full 429-niche map, the most consistent thing you see is a dense niche sitting right next to a nearly empty one, serving the same customer. Whey protein has 10+ serious players — plant protein for the same fitness community has 2–3. Hair growth serums are saturated — scalp care as a distinct product category (exfoliants, scrubs, scalp routines) has almost nobody despite the r/IndianHaircare community having clearly moved in that direction. PCOS supplements have 4–5 growing brands — postpartum nutrition for the same woman a few years later has essentially no Indian D2C option. The adjacency play is usually easier than finding a genuinely empty category from scratch, because the customer already exists and the category proof is already done one step over.
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What's the niche you're looking at? Drop it in the comments and I'll pull what the data shows for it.
