NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, June 22, 2015

Krishna Lakamsani had plans to come back to India to start a new business right after selling his previous company in the US. However, he wasn’t sure what to pursue. During this time, he was searching for business opportunities where he could scale much bigger business than his previous startups.

Krishna had substantial experience in e-commerce and built his own e-commerce company in USA when he was just 22 years old. Later, he thought why not start with an e-commerce business, utilising all his experience.

After researching in India for almost six months with the help of a research firm, Krishna figured out that e-commerce industry requires innovation to expand its reach and prospects. “India has different challenges from banking to consumer behavior, logistics to internet penetration, and post purchase inertia; which were all required to be addressed,” says Krishna.

Krishna discovered that only a fraction of Indian consumers are buying online. “We started looking in different directions rather than going through red oceans of online e-commerce and concluded that why not create offline e-commerce for the remaining 98 percent Indian consumers through local neighborhood retail stores,” points out Krishna.

After freezing the idea, for the next one month Krishna and his core team did research on neighborhood retailers asking them if they can sell products to their customer which they never stocked. Much to his surprise most of them responded positively.