Little story on how I met Suumit and invested in one of the fastest growing companies I’ve ever seen https://twitter.com/suumitshah/status/1303421724541681664

A while back @FurqanR sent me Rankz, as an interesting site to checkout. I go there and it’s slick. It’s Ahrefs, but cheaper. And with a content engine built in (smart, because that’s your next step after you learn what keywords to rank for)

Anytime I see a cool product- I go meet the founder. Twitter search Rankz, filter by people. Boom I find Suumit and reach out “what’s your story?”

We do a zoom call. He’s a young guy in India. Hair is messy as hell. Wearing a “Bannan”. We chat it up. His story is fascinating. I can tell he’s a SEO/growth expert. Noted for the future. We’re about to hang up I ask the money question..”so, Rankz is cool..but what’s the dream?”

He says well... and shows me an app he built 3 days before. It’s called @mydukaanapp .

Basically:
1) India is made up of millions of tiny shops with mom & pop shopkeepers

2) covid killed foot traffic

3) to help them stay afloat, he built “Shopify for shopkeepers in India”

It’s blazing fast and stupidly simple. Just open the app, take pictures, set your price, and share to WhatsApp.

That’s it. No store themes, plugins, Domain names, etc...

Remember most shop keepers can barely use technology. WhatsApp is the internet

I checkin 24h later. 300 stores created. Wow.

We look at the shops. Local shoe store. Man selling sweets. Woman selling scarves.+ I realized @suumitshah is special..

1) shipped it fast
2) got 300 customers
3) already had talked to 50’of them
4) built a dashboard to track kpis

I start thinking of investing. I tell a few friends, let’s lead a $2M round.

We struggle to arrange a call due to calendars, time zones, and general wussyfooting.

Meanwhile dukaan grows like crazy. I call him back: dude why is this taking so long to organize an investor call??

“We added over 500k stores this month”

Me:

Also me:

Indian government praising them for helping get India’s SMBs back on their feet.

Millions of products added to the digital shops.

Who knows how many businesses saved from failure, and how many families fortunes saved.

Proud to be a friend of Suumit, an investor in Dukaan, and have him leading Indian investments for the All Access Rolling Fund

Oh I forgot my favorite part.

During our first zoom call I started taking screenshots bc I realized something special was happening.

First of the product demo. And then of his desktop background. A kid in India with a Tony Montana background. I’m all in.