Tuesday, June 07, 2011

The Business Guy

Update: For various reasons, we paused AceSeller and are not working on it currently.

Given the fact that ecommerce is just taking off in India and we did not have enough market knowledge, it was very clear from the beginning that considerable effort would have to be put into doing Customer Development, Vendor Partnerships, Sales and Marketing (the business side of the startup) for AceSeller.

And then there were three
A recent chance meet over coffee with Rakesh, who recently quit his job at Directi to pursue his own startup; heard about what we were working on and was interested in collaborating with us given his background working with large high-volume ecommerce websites (most recently at Cleartrip).

Doing what it takes
At this point I already had a scrappy prototype of AceSeller ready in PHP, but it was time to take a call. Now that we had Rakesh on board, who could take care of the tech, I could choose to stop focusing on developing the software and instead focus on the business side of things.

It was a tough choice to make, but in the end if you really want to make your startup work, you have to do what it takes. In our case it was clear that someone had to take care of the businessy stuff and that someone turned out to be me. 

And that's how I became the business guy at AceSeller.

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