Should you build an ecommerce platform for small businesses in India?

Asking small businesses in India to get their own ecommerce store is like selling them retail space in the remotest part of town.

The first problem to solve for small businesses is to help them get more customers.

I learned this the hard way with AceSeller.

How can I help small businesses get more customer? is a better question to ask than Should I build an ecommerce platform for small businesses?

The former is a problem statement looking for a solution and going down that path will lead you to many interesting solutions. The latter is a solution looking for a problem, where you already think you know the solution and you're just looking for validation.

The Business Guy

Update: For various reasons, we paused AceSeller and are not working on it currently.

Given the fact that ecommerce is just taking off in India and we did not have enough market knowledge, it was very clear from the beginning that considerable effort would have to be put into doing Customer Development, Vendor Partnerships, Sales and Marketing (the business side of the startup) for AceSeller.

And then there were three
A recent chance meet over coffee with Rakesh, who recently quit his job at Directi to pursue his own startup; heard about what we were working on and was interested in collaborating with us given his background working with large high-volume ecommerce websites (most recently at Cleartrip).

Doing what it takes
At this point I already had a scrappy prototype of AceSeller ready in PHP, but it was time to take a call. Now that we had Rakesh on board, who could take care of the tech, I could choose to stop focusing on developing the software and instead focus on the business side of things.

It was a tough choice to make, but in the end if you really want to make your startup work, you have to do what it takes. In our case it was clear that someone had to take care of the businessy stuff and that someone turned out to be me. 

And that's how I became the business guy at AceSeller.

Stumbling upon a problem

Update: For various reasons, we paused AceSeller and are not working on it currently.

While researching a startup idea of selling quality limited edition t-shirts online, I realized that selling online in India was not easy nor cheap and there weren't any options targeted specifically towards the Indian market and solving its problems.

Around the same time I also happened to meet a lot of fashion designers and artists (thanks to my wife) that were trying to connect with their customers online (blog, Twitter, Facebook) and over and over again I stumbled upon online conversations where their customers would ask how they could buy their products online and saw them being sent an email address instead!

It looked like I had stumbled upon an interesting problem to solve with a sizable market and it was time to validate it.

Synchronocity

Meanwhile, Jinesh was also looking at selling t-shirts online at around the same time and had experienced firsthand the obstacles to setting up an online store in India. We got talking and he was soon on board taking care of design.

And that's how the startup journey of AceSeller began...