Suumit Shah is the CEO and co-founder of Dukaan, an app that helps small businesses by taking their stores online. Prior to starting his own journey as an entrepreneur, Suumit was the Social Media Manager for Housing and TinyOwl.

00:00 Introduction
00:40 Entrepreneurship: I don’t know what it means but it sounds cool
01:49 From being a social media manager to becoming an entrepreneur
04:18 Key learnings from first entrepreneurship experience
06:15 Story of Dukaan
14:24 Dukaan vs Khatabook
15:45 Dukaan overview
22:30 Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurship: I don’t know what it means but it sounds cool – Back in college, Suumit was designing websites and learned that he could make money on the internet. While he didn’t know what entrepreneurship meant, it sounded cool and he was already on track to being an entrepreneur without knowing it.

From being a social media manager to becoming an entrepreneur: Suumit started working for Housing and TinyOwl, where he was managing their social media – enabling them to rank their websites on search engines by focusing on search engine optimization (SEO). After this experience, Suumit decided to start his own digital marketing agency where he was doing the same but at scale for a lot more companies. He found it hard to scale his services company and that’s when he decided to create a product that would help the companies to use their product suite to execute different aspects of digital marketing campaigns on their own.

Key learnings from first entrepreneurship experience: In a service-based business, the best way to scale is by creating a product and monetizing it. That is exactly what Suumit did when he was unable to scale his digital marketing agency Rankz.

Story of Dukaan: A text from Jockey during the pandemic changed the course of both Suumit and Subhash’s lives when they realised the need for digitising local stores and helping them continue their business. Within a week of launch, the Dukaan app was already trending on Google Playstore. Feedbacks and requests from the customers kept coming in, which further helped them improve their product and today the Dukaan app has been downloaded more than 4 million times.

Dukaan vs Khatabook: Things got a little out of hand for a while when Dukaan had a legal tussle with Khatabook in regards to copyright issues and source code which led to Dukaan app being removed from the Play Store for 50 days. But things have now been resolved and both Dukaan and Khatabook are busy scaling their businesses.

Dukaan overview: A user first create his/her store using Dukaan app, they can then share the link of their store – which contain all their inventory and catalogue, to their existing customers and they are good to go. Now Dukaan is also enabling the store owners to expand and scale by providing simple marketing tools as well.

Advice for aspiring entrepreneurs: The best way to learn to keep trying things. What you learn today might help you build something a couple of years down the line. If you have an idea, go and try it out – you will either learn or you will succeed. It’s much better than killing your startup at the ideation phase, which is the most common problem.

If you enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about Suumit Shah and his journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter:

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/suumitshah/
Twitter: twitter.com/suumitshah

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