We need revolution, not disruption
I have been following Startup World & Technology Companies (aka Silicon Valley) for almost two years now. I started my career working with Tech Company, after sometime I got frustrated because my role was into back end operations. I quit. Joined another product company, but this time it is Tangible Manufactured Product, not a tech product. Somehow this passion for technologies is leading me to think about new product ideas, and also feeling guilty that I cannot built a product on my own. I am not a programmer, so I cannot churn out / play with code. But, I feel ideas are worth, and thought to write a post on my latest product idea.
Recently, I was on 2 week long vacation, was enjoying my days off with family. Most of my Under Grad buddies are local merchants who act as a middlemen to sell goods. Here I refer to goods like hardware industrial equipment, garments or something tangible in nature. They deal with huge data - sales, inventory, sales turnover, credit sales etc. One of my friend asked details about how he can get one software to deal with this huge data? On the spot I asked him to get in touch with low tier IT service firm, those are the guys who can build this kinda software.
Then after I came back home, I started to dig deeply into this idea. In India there are millions of local merchants like him who deal with huge data. They have started to face one problem "Where do I stand end of the day?". Because of their over dependency on manual work, they don't know where they stand. They are not sure how much stock he/she sold, at what discounts, either credit sales or cash sales.
Am talking about local merchants who are fairly educated to operate a computer, they have Facebook Profiles, they own smartphones also they do chat on Whats App. These merchants are hunger to implement automation in their business. But, there is no product in the market which will fulfill these merchants requirement.
Universal small / medium enterprise product which can eliminate manual work.
Easy to use, as these merchants don't like complex software (keep clean design, more work per click)
Equipped with hardware and software - one complete package
Pricing - this is crucial part of the Business. Price of the product be within 300$. Merchants don't want to spend money on things from which they cant make profit
Software & Hardware should be built in such a way that it can be changed depending on the nature of business, to which it is being used.
With this product - Merchants must be able to track their day to day business records, sales turnover, inventory status etc
Distribution is God in India
Distributing this product in a vast country like India is a conundrum . Convincing merchants to buy this product, when they are used to write their day sales on a piece of paper. Local problems exist as initial people who use this product will play crucial role, because in India words flown from mouth to mouth are more powerful than TimesSquare electronic boards.
There is huge potential for this product to become like what Oracle is for big corporations.