Business Ideas: Modernising Direct Selling & Real Estate Agents, Opportunities in Branding, Zetwerk for Jewellery

Thanks for listening to another episode of The Indian Dream.

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As always, Business Munchies is an exploration of business ideas and how they can be leveraged in order to build new businesses or scale up existing businesses. This week, we had an interesting line up of strange ideas, we hope you like them!

Business Ideas Discussed on this Episode:

  1. Update on the Seasonal Fruit D2C Idea: Sahil got an update from his friend who built this kind of business in the past. His friend said that, "Indian avocados are seasonal, I had not come up with products to sell in this offseason. There were chances of low quality produce. Last mile delivery was not as established as it is today." These problems can be easily overcome with today's infrastructure and somebody can build this business. The customer base will remain the same across different fruits and seasons.
  2. Trend of Urban people moving to Rural areas to build High Tech Farms: Seaweed farming was discussed in the Union Budget and we dug deeper into it and found the largest Indian farmer and processor. We found the 3rd largest Indian farmer of Mushrooms as well. High tech farming of new age crops like Mushroom & Seaweeds are increasing across the country in addition to the latest techniques such as hydroponics. We'll explore all these ideas in detail in future trends episodes.
  3. Modernising Direct Selling Agents (DSA's) for Banks: Siddharth has previous work experience in B2B lending and during this time he saw how far behind the technological curve Banks and NBFC's really are. DSA's, who sell unsecured loans for banks, are a market of more than 1000 crores across India, get commissions of about 3-3.5% on the loan size but operate their entire business on paper without any digitisation. There is space for a newcomer to digitise the customer relationships (think policy bazaar but for B2B lending) and streamline the loan disbursement process to make it much simpler.
  4. Modernising Real Estate Agents: We were inspired by this tweet which said that "Real Estate Agent has to be, on average, the laziest group of professionals. I guess that's why the few that are highly-competent hustlers clean up." This Tweet was referring to American Real Estate agents but we feel like it applies to Indian agents as well. This is a huge market and it is ripe for disruption in the way it operates, right from CRM softwares for Real Estate Agents (all of them use whatsapp right now) to a new way to sell houses online.
  5. Branding: Branding is more important than ever in today's world because it is so simple to build businesses these days. However, there is still a big demand supply gap between good branding/digital marketing agencies and what is actually needed in the market. We discuss the various branding related businesses that you can build including an automated product photography software which allows you to upload a green screen photo of your product and then automatically puts that product in more appealing settings and backgrounds. 
  6. Zetwerk for Jewellery: Inspired by a Tweet by Siddharth Ram which said, "Help jewellery designers to get their designs into wearable jewellery. Enable them to distribute It's a huge problem today for designers. They work for mere Rs 30K in a jewellery store shipping 40-50 designs a month which are worth lakhs of rupees"