From Being a Social Media Manager to Building His Own Startup | Suumit Shah | Journey of Dukaan

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.

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.