Impact
I pitched it during the lockdown. Two years later it was half of DotPe’s revenue.
9M+
small businesses on Digital Showroom
About 30% of the Indian market · [signed up or active?] · [as of when?]
50%
of DotPe’s revenue, $1.5M
Within two years of launch · [OK to publish?]
7M+
users in the first year
From launch, on Android, iOS and the web
100+
people across product, engineering, design, sales and ops
Grown from a team of 2 engineers
Context
In 2020 the lockdown closed shops that had never sold online.
[Two or three sentences on the market in early 2020: how many small merchants India had, how few sold online, and what the lockdown did to their sales.]
DotPe was a pre-seed startup building commerce and payments tools for Indian merchants. I joined as its first employee, after the founders recruited me out of BCG.
The idea came from home. When Covid hit, a family apparel business lost every order overnight, and I helped them start selling directly to customers. That kept them going, and it convinced me thousands of shopkeepers needed the same thing. I pitched Digital Showroom to DotPe’s founders and investors as a second line of business. [What convinced them?]
Problem and users
[What a shopkeeper couldn’t do in April 2020 that Digital Showroom made possible.]
[The user’s situation in one or two sentences, in their terms.]
Primary user
- [Who: e.g. kirana and neighbourhood store owners, restaurants]
- [What they used before: phone orders, WhatsApp, nothing]
- [What was broken for them]
Their customers
- [Who bought from these stores]
- [What they needed to keep ordering during lockdown]
[A real quote from a merchant, from research or support calls.][Name or description, city]
Research: at the peak of Covid I got a government permit to interview retailers in person. [How many you met, and the one finding that shaped the product.]
My role
I owned the product and its P&L, from the pitch to 100+ people.
What I owned
- Pitching it to founders and investors as a new business line
- Full P&L for Digital Showroom, which grew into a general manager role
- Pricing, and the features we charged for
- The partnership with Google that brought Google Shopping to small businesses, a first in India
- Leading a 100+ person org across product, engineering, design, sales, marketing and support, with 9 direct reports
What the team owned
- [Engineering: who led it and team size]
- [Sales and onboarding: who led it]
- [What DotPe’s existing platform provided, e.g. payments]
- Reported to
- [Title]
- Team at launch
- 2 engineers and me
- Team at peak
- 100+
- Direct reports
- 9
- Functions
- Product, engineering, UI/UX, sales, marketing, support
Key decisions
The main decisions, and one I’d change.
Shutting the app down while it was going viral
The choiceTwo weeks after launch, with installs doubling every hour, I took the app offline until a security hole was fixed.
Options consideredMost of the room wanted to patch it while it stayed live and keep riding the wave.
WhyAn engineer who had joined a month earlier spotted signs that someone was probing the system, and a flaw that could leak merchants’ financial data. Their trust mattered more than the spike.
What happenedTwo months later it went viral again. In November 2020 it was the #1 trending app on Google Play in India, and it won the Retailers Association of India’s Best Startup award.
Making money from domains
The choiceI launched a domain up-sell, based on how merchants were using their stores.
Options considered[What else you looked at: subscriptions, transaction fees, ads?]
Why[What in the usage data pointed to domains]
What happenedDomains drove 80% of [Digital Showroom’s / DotPe’s?] revenue, and made us India’s 3rd-largest active domain seller.
[Decision 3: one that didn’t work]
The choice[What you decided]
Why it seemed right[The reasoning at the time]
What went wrong[What happened]
What I changed[The fix and what it taught you]
The product
A store, payments and orders, set up from a phone.
Everything a small business needed to sell online came built in: catalogue, marketing, payments, orders, customers and delivery. [How a merchant gets started, in one sentence.]
[Screenshot: merchant sets up a storefront on a phone]
[Flow 1: setup. What the merchant does and how long it takes.][Screenshot: customer-facing storefront]
[Flow 2: a customer places an order.][Screenshot: merchant order and payments view]
[Flow 3: the merchant fulfils and gets paid.]Catalogue and storefront
Products, prices and photos, published as a store with its own domain.
Payments and orders
Payments, order management and delivery in one place.
Marketing
Social and paid marketing, plus Google Shopping, Search, Maps and Google My Business.
For restaurants
Kitchen order management, analytics and a catalogue with staff roles.
Execution
From a pitch in the lockdown to the top of Google Play.
[Go-to-market in one or two sentences: how merchants found it and got onboarded.]
- Dec 2019Joined DotPe as its first employee
- 2020Pitched Digital Showroom to the founders and investors
- [Month 2020]Launched with 2 engineers [what shipped first]
- Two weeks laterWent viral, then went offline to fix a security hole
- Nov 2020#1 trending app on Google Play in India, across categories
- 15 Aug 2021Featured in Google Play’s Made in India collection
- [2021]7M+ users within a year of launch
- [2022]50% of DotPe’s revenue, $1.5M
- Mar 2023Left to start Xari
[The experiment or channel that mattered most, and what it showed.]
Results
[One line on the business outcome.]
[Chart: merchants over time, launch to 2023]
[Source and definition of the metric.]Product sales grew to 50% of DotPe’s revenue, $1.5M, within two years, and about 0.2M people used it every day across Android, iOS and the web. Today 9M+ small businesses use it, about 30% of the Indian market.
[What came from your work versus the market and the team. Be specific.]
[A merchant or teammate quote about the result.][Who]
What I’d do differently
[One line summarising the biggest lesson.]
- [A specific lesson, tied to a decision above]
- [A specific lesson about scaling the team from 2 to 100+]
- [What you’d do differently if you started it again]
Stories
More on Digital Showroom
Next product
Xari AI
AI that researches, writes and publishes blog posts so small businesses show up on Google. We got to $100K ARR after two pivots, with no outside money.