Let’s Customize
Business Idea
In a country like India customizing is not a new game, there are a lot of customizing options available in the market already. But here is one problem, that everyone likes having something unique or something which has been customized according to their needs and liking but they don’t know how they can access to best options available in the market. Our younger generation is capable enough to get what they want, they are quite familiar with the technology and they can easily find options available in the market, but most of the Indian population is not very comfortable in using technology. In the current market, there is no such service through which you can order customized things. Let’s take an example if someone wants to build a computer and he is not a tech enthusiast then so even if manually build computer will be pocket friendly and more efficient, that person will go for an expensive laptop or ready-made computers available in the market. If someone wants jeans of the fitting, he or she likes then how will they access those tailors who make customized jeans on orders, even if they can find a tailor who can make the job done most probably, they will not find the best tailor in the market who is known for his or her work. So, an idea comes to my mind that if we make a platform where anyone can customise their product on their own digitally on the app itself or get some good suggestions from the experts of that field. We just want to give freedom to the customer to use the things which are specially made for them and here we will play the intermediate service provider between manufacturer and customer. This is what start-ups like Swingy and Zomato are doing nowadays. We will make an application on which there will a lot of options for customization of different products where customize on their own and then place an order or make them customized by some experts and then place an order.
Market Demand
Nowadays the demand for customized things is increasing or we can say the personally customized product is much appreciated by the customers. To justify the market demand, we can take a simple recent example, Apple had launched their exclusive online store in India where on some of the products like iPad they are providing an option of free engraving of anything the customer wants on their iPad. Apple is a big tech giant and they are doing this why? The answer to this is that currently, they don’t have such a big market in India so they are trying to make their followers in India and trying to provide customer exclusive experience. The main idea behind the customization is to feel special and everyone likes to feel special just we have to make a special platform where we could provide the customer power to customize anything and everything in their style while sitting on their couch and using their smartphone. There are a lot of artists in India who are specialized in making handicrafts which a huge section of our population love to keep in their home. But again, there are such intermediates who buy those handicrafts for a very low price and sell one commerce websites like Amazon, Flipkart and there is nothing wrong in that too, but because of this those artists cannot sell their handicrafts on their real value. By the help of this platform, artists can sell their art on their own and by this customer can also interact directly with the artist get exactly what they want. Like there are some popular YouTube channels ZHC, Marco these guys are doing some small customisations in shoes and electronic devices. Isn’t it surprising that just by doing small custom they are doing massive numbers on YouTube and earning millions of dollars? In mathematical terms, this implies people like custom products.
Relevant Products in the market (Competition)
Currently, there is no such official platform in India where everything can be customized by the customer from clothing to cars everything. Maybe this is being done on small scale somewhere but not for masses. Many are just selling customized T-shirts or shoes maybe some car and bike modifiers also but not more than that, we have to create a unified platform to do this all at one just place.
Target Customers
According to the current scenario, the target audience is the youth of India and a middle-aged group of India. There is a great scope of customising products like desktop because in the past two or three years we have seen exponential growth in gaming and streaming community. Our Indian gamers are also doing insane numbers on YouTube from which a lot of young children are getting motivated towards gaming because they can see in front of their eyes that gaming can be done for making money also. We can say the same about the fashion industry also fashion sense of everyone is growing day by day just because of the availability of cheap internet services.
Technology Used
In terms of technology, we just need a group of highly skilled software developers because it is a big project in which we need to handle a huge database. Following will make the core of our application:
Backend: Java, Scala, Python, Go, Rust, NodeJS
Frontend: ReactJS
App: Kotlin (Android), Swift(iOS)
IAAS: AWS
DB’s: MySQL, Postgres, Scylla DB
Caches: Redis, Aerospike
Message brokers: Kafka, RabbitMQ
Service Mesh: Kubernetes ecosystem, Mesos, Consul
Load balancing: Hap Roxy, Kong
Data platform: S3, Presto, Druid, Snowflake, Flume, Flink, Hive, Spark, Storm
Search: Solr, Elasticsearch
CI/CD: Custom built tool over Jenkins
Monitoring: Thanos (by improbable), NewRelic (APM), Custom analytics systems built in-house
The solution to the Problem
To solve this problem we have to create a platform where we can provide a lot of self customization options using those if the customer wants to customize the order on his own. If a customer wants something new then he can contact our team and explain his idea to expert designers and then our graphic designers will provide some options designed according to his need then design finalised by the customer then will be sent to the manufacturer so that he could make the product as soon as possible. If any customer wants to give his size then we will provide a feature called branded size. In this feature, the customer has to choose any brand and give the size of that brand to us so that we can match it with our database of various brands and their sizes. Before all of the above, we have to create a database of service providers all around a district or in a metropolitan city like Delhi. Then we will sort the list of all those who have collaborated with us and the select the best service providers. After creating the database, we can start building an application.
Estimated Budget
According to my estimation development of the application optimized for both Android and iOS, it will cost around 6000–10000 us dollars. After the application development around 8000, us dollars will be required for marketing, delivery partners and payment of graphic designers. In totality, we need almost 14000–18000 us dollars. I know that it is a hefty amount of money which either needed to be invested by some investors or we have to be pitched to the government under start-up India scheme initiated by our respected prime minister Shri Narendra Damodar Das Modi.
Product Pricing and Description
Our application will be freely available on all the app stores we will make our profit by the same idea behind some successful startups like Swiggy, Flipkart etc. As we are not making our product we are just providing the access to the services available already in the market. There will be some exclusive offers and services provided which will not be free. In those paid services customer will get the following benefits:
· Faster delivery options.
· Five extra sample designs.
· More self customization options on the application.
· The purchased product will be listed for special sale for premium customers.
· Many more special offers will be revealed at the time of launch.
Marketing Strategy
We will market our product through every social media platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc. We will contact some popular influencers on every social media platform because nowadays social media is the most powerful tool to influence the youth especially. In starting we will start our services from one of the metropolitan cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata etc. We will contact the especially social media influencers who belong to that city as the audience will connect more to them. We will also take the help of Google ads to advertise our website and services.
Risk Analysis
This project is quite risky as per my calculation but if we find proper funding then definitely everything will be in our hand. Our prime focus will be on making our app interface easy to understand, service quality, marketing and reliability. The thing which can go wrong the most is that we will no able to find the investors. In that case, we also have a backup plan. Then we will not work on an investment model instead we will work on the bootstrap business model. We will start from a website and then start reinvesting a significant amount of money into our business. But if we get the investors easily then definitely rik will reduce because investors are those people who have a piece of great market knowledge, they only will invest in us if the idea pitched by us is capable of growing.
Timeline For Final Product
Step1: Collect the data of manufacturers from the market and then create the database. Sort the data of the manufacturers according to make expertise in the work. This will take at least two to three months.
Step2: Start developing the application and website for the company this will take at least 6 months if nothing goes wrong.
Step3: Then we will start testing all the functioning and fixing all the flaws, this will take 2 months.
Step4: Approaching influencers and real-life testing with real customers this will take another two months.
Step5: Finally launching our application and website.
