The Journey of Dukaan: Subhash Choudhary on Building From 0 and Scaling to 1 Million in a Month

Subhash’s journey starts in a small village in Bihar: Subhash Choudhary comes from a poor family in Bihar, his father passed away when he was  just 3 years old and his mother worked as a tailor to support his  education until he cleared his 12th. At the age of 17, he moved to  Mumbai, learnt the basics of computer hardware and secured a job at  Zenith Infotech.

He learns Digital Marketing and starts a side hustle: When he saw the  company fire a large part of its workforce, he realised how insecure his  job was. He decided to take his destiny into his own hands by learning  digital marketing and starts his own side hustle which starts earning  more money than his full-time job.

Subhash meets Suumit on Facebook and learns about entrepreneurship:  During that time, he is connected with Suumit Shah on Facebook and they  both share a common interest in building products, which brings the two  closer. Suumit had a keen interest in the Indian startup ecosystem and  the two end up going to a number of startup events and learn more about  entrepreneurship.

They start their entrepreneurial journey together: Suumit and Subhash  decide to put their skills together and start a digital marketing agency  to help small businesses and startups to grow their business using the  internet. The two end up building two successful businesses Risemetric  and Rankz.

Pandemic pushed them to help their local shop owners and Dukaan is born:  Coming from a shopkeeper's family, Suumit realised hardships local  store owners were facing during the lockdown as their business was  offline and was forced to shut down. That's when they decided to build a  product that would help these small local stores in their neighbourhood  to go online and continue their business and that's how Dukaan app was  born. Within a month, they had managed to take nearly 1 million stores  online without even raising any funds.

How the Dukaan app was transformed by using input from their customers:  While building Dukaan, the input and feedback they received from their  early customers was crucial in transforming their product from a simple  platform for taking orders online to building a more comprehensive  product where store owners could keep track of their orders, receive and  send a notification to their customers on WhatsApp and add new  categories.

Their investors showed confidence even amidst the controversy with Khatabook: Their investors continued to back them despite their initial  friction with Khatabook which was later resolved.

Things to keep in mind when building the core team at a startup: It's  important to build a team that believes in the vision and is committed  to the idea. That's how Dukaan created a small team of 12 people that  helped them scale to more than 2 million customers in such a short time.  Subhash believes that people can learn the skills if they are  passionate about the product that they are building. The guy who built  Dukaan's android app was his first-ever android app.

If you enjoyed this video and would like to learn more about Subhash Choudhary and his journey, you can follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/subhashchy Twitter: https://twitter.com/subhashchy

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