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

Millionaire Mondays by Backstage with Millionaires

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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