I dont buy into the prevailing wisdom that eCommerce in India is dying (dead). For venture investors the eCommerce category might be “been there, done that”, but smart entrepreneurs always see opportunity in being contrarian.

There are some very interesting eCommerce companies doing good work (growing revenues, making margin and excelling in service)  in India. While the mainstream companies are spending money on advertising, acquiring customers expensively and offering deep discounts, many niche sites are building their reputations with an excessive focus on service and unique (relatively) products.

While there are 1.4 million Internet retailers in the US, there are about 2000 in India (ones that are doing more than 5 transactions daily). Most of the smaller ones that are doing a good job in the US are focused on either niche segments or markets. That I believe is a key trick that most niche eCommerce sites in India are executing the best on.

I wanted to highlight a few that I consider are doing a good job.

1. Shopo: I wanted to invest in this company before they took a seed round from a few investors. They are a good example of focus on fairly unique products and a good team executing well.

2. Allthingscustomized Another fairly crowded market, but the marketing techniques have been tweaked to make a margin on every customer order in this very competitive market segment.

3. Greendust: Looks and feels like yet another ecommerce site, but sells refurbished goods, with a good markup.

If you have an eCommerce site and are doing well, your best strategy is to keep your head down, focus on metrics and operations and ignore all the news and pundit’s opinions.

Zig, when everyone else Zags.

If facebook, Amazon and Barnes and Nobel are building their own tablets and “cell” phones, why is there not a cell carrier who only offers a data plan?

What about all those internet devices that are going to come on the grid in a few years. The Internet of things only need data, not voice.

No minutes for talking.

No SMS plan to send unlimited text messages.

Just a data plan.

Apparently I am not the only one who thought of this.

There’s a operator in Bangladesh who only offers a data plan. But besides that the market is wide open.

There’s a huge market potential for this I believe. Okay, maybe a large one. Or a relatively smaller one, but there’s one for sure.

Its a well known fact that the infrastructure costs of building a software / Internet startup have dramatically reduced. Although the costs of developers have dramatically gone up by the same percentage, the productivity per employee hired has also gone up dramatically. Given that a developer can now manage instances, push to production etc., the need for DevOps is moved to a much later day, lowering the number of people needed at a startup.

A decade ago most companies were focused on building a business – long term focus, building processes to scale and grow.

5 years ago companies started to focus on building a good product.

The new law of the valley startup (2012) is build a feature.

See if there’s any traction.

Build next feature.

See if traction has increased.

<Rinse & Repeat>

Why has this happened?

1. MVP: Most people are taking the Minimum viable product to its extreme (or bare minimum) and valuing a shipping feature over a feature rich product delivered later.

2. Try your idea out: Most of us have a idea (we think) is going to change the world. The world though, has other plans. It does not like change. Small, incremental changes are acceptable (maybe) but large ones, take time. So lets push a simple small change to the user (customer) and see their reaction.

3. Too small to fail. If all a feature takes is 3-4 weeks to build, the cost of the development is low. Amazingly low. And at that point, failure (or lack of traction) does not matter. Its okay for the product to not fit the market, because the product  was not built anyway. Its just a feature that was built.

4. It helps with prioritizing features of your product. If all you build is one feature, the next one is customer driven (mostly). If a feature does not get traction, it does not matter. Remove it to add another.

5.There’s no long term without short term. I heard PG say this from another friend. If you dont get some short term traction or wins, there’s no point in thinking what the world would look like when you are dominating it.

So my fellow entrepreneurs, build a feature.

Ship. See if it gets traction. Build more. Keep shipping.

I was at the Citrix Synergy conference (San Francisco) last week presenting Hey Maya.We were one of 5 companies presenting from a pool of 80 that applied to the Citrix Startup accelerator. Each company was given 6 minutes to present and 2 minutes Q&A by the judging panel.

The judging panel was a few VC’s (Ignition, Azure, Andreessen-Horowitz), and Jason Calacanis.

Besides these guys there were 6 others from Citrix.

We did not win. Script Rock did an awesome job and they deserved to win.

Jason did his best Simon Cowell impersonation and was thoughtful, constructive in his criticism and very specific in his feedback. The rest of the guys did not have much time to ask questions or provide feedback or did not really think much of our pitch – either ways, it was okay.

The surprising part is how many people just echoed his exact comments back to me, in fact using the same words he did and a good measure of cliche’s thrown in.

Either they all thought of the exact same thing, (which I doubt) or they all just followed his lead.

Every time you make your company’s pitch as an entrepreneur to VC’s realize that they are in the selection business. They see over 1000’s of pitches each year and are bound to notice patterns. Some of them are personable and thoughtful, but many are just pulling cliche’s from the bag.

“Its not a big market”, “You need to focus”, “Its not differentiated enough”.

While these high level pointers are largely useless, and most VC’s wont have more time to tell you any thing more, a few folks I have met actually offer solutions and not just problems.

If the market your targeting is small, are there other ways to position it such that you go after a big market?

If there are too many “features” you are looking to develop is there one that really sticks out to them as “something that has legs”?

If the product is not differentiated enough, are there 1-2 things that might make it different?

I would highly advice you to ask questions of the VC and put them on the spot to really offer “constructive criticism” and not just banalities.

You’ll then really know the good investors from the herd.

If you are like me, I would like to get more data from potential customers before I launch my product. Usually I need answers to question like:

1. What are the top 3 features you are willing to pay for?

2. At what price point would this become a must have product to you?

3. Where do customers go to look for information about my product?

I have tried Google Consumer Survey and its working out well so far.

If you are a startup I’d highly recommend the Rs.5 / response initiative ($0.10) and its a very small amount of money to spend as insurance to get live feedback from many customers.

If you want to learn about how to do it, here’s a simple tutorial.