The “New Normal” of retail is online. Don’t shut down your store nor your dreams. Pay a monthly fee for all services. Just like the dropper bottle. One drop of low investment at a time until that beard grows over time.

Whether you are looking to pick up a side hustle or want to take your existing retail business online into the recession-proof world of Online retail, we are here to provide you with services in a ‘pay as you go’ model.

These are some of the services you can expect from us

I like the number “8”. Because from left or right, it looks like it is Infinite. Only math guys will get this.

eCommerce is growing and not everyone has the capital to get things going. So I came up with a pricing structure that makes it affordable for anyone in India who knows nothing about technology but wants to start an Online retail business & build a brand. A farmer in Kerala (this is a state in South India) can afford our services to sell his product to the big cities & also export internationally. We set up & handle everything. All he has to do is go out into the fields

Let me give you a peek into what the process looks like if you have no website, no logo & no idea how to manage vendors & procurement of products & ensure their timely delivery (India & Worldwide).

So in conclusion, in 8 days you have an eCommerce store with products, and all you need to do is spread the word by Digital Marketing. You need not look anywhere else. We have a team with a proven history of generating demand and boosting online sales within weeks.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions.

India needs to push manufacturing and logistics. Join us in doing so.

Things have been a little, strange lately. Everywhere. Design students say that a new culture will be born out of this period and will have its spill-over effects on for not just months but on several years to come. Popular opinion also suggests this forced upon change to New World Order was much needed for a lot of those who were betting and building technologies and solutions that were “too far advanced” to be adopted. A lot of us wouldn’t be relevant (economy value-add point of view) after the storm settles unless they seriously up-skill themselves to keep up.

Hyper Cycle Map by Gartner Inc graphically represents maturity and adoption for technologies and applications. This assists an organization to understand where a product/technology is on the maturity curve and in turn help assess the risk profile of pursuing it.

As a Founder or CEO of Product, there are pressing questions like “Do the rewards outweigh the risk?”

I am no expert but these factors came out consistent whether in IT or Engineering from my personal experience. The following items act as a North Star to almost any business.

More the items your technology is able to tick off, the better are the chances of you staying afloat. Why? because as a consumer, you are always striving to achieve most of these. In short, build what your consumer wants. Yes, Henry Ford also said, “If I asked them what they want, they would have said Faster Horses”.

But I am no Henry Ford.

Also, the 3 Ts that I saw mattered were

Everything else is noise.

The economic impact will be pretty bad. But not for those who have the ability to entertain & deliver over the internet to all those who all of a sudden have few places to go and less to do. In the US all the 330 Million have been asked to distance themselves to curtail the spreading and the infrastructure has been set up for those who require treatment.

Aid from governments are coming to support the impacted sectors and from financial institutions to encourage spending. Stock markets have crashed with higher volatility than the 2008 economic crisis.

The oil war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, the Stock markets before and after the Pandemic are all topics running under the radar amidst the Pandemic

What are the unprecedented changes that induce shock and that one silver lining? Wait. is there a silver lining here?

Hourly paid workers are at the highest risk — The contract workers. They are the ones who will have the rug pulled off from under their legs in times of economic uncertainty.

Work from home means higher productivity — Quite recently a study was conducted at a Chinese Tech Giant who wanted to encourage their employees to work from home to mitigate the high costs of leasing office space in Shanghai. The ones who worked from home were also under observation for 9 months and their productivity was up by 13%. That’s phenomenally high considering you already saved money from the cost of maintaining an office space. Also, their quit rates were extremely low.

Long term effects on Mental Health — If Social Distancing is to go for more than 6–8 months, there is an impending danger around the corners related to mental health stemming from a feeling of isolation & depression which could lead to the therapists getting paid more than ever before. Overall it looks pretty bad for the extroverts.

For C level employees & Management — If you were to listen to a financial expert, they would give you a rather counterintuitive approach to what looks like a blip where the older investors would want to sell everything and liquidate. You shouldn’t look. Don’t act on emotion. This is a phase that shall pass very soon

Commuting to work is dead (If it can be avoided) — Satellite towns will increase and young people paying exorbitant rents to live in overpriced neighborhoods will soon be an extinct concept. Why would they want to go back to the 30-minute commute?

Air Pollution — Lowest in years!

Institutionalized Education will die — Students will pick courses only those that train them to learn hands-on skills. Why would someone get an admit to an institute where they teach methods and formulae? Tough questions here. Home-based teaching has begun

Highlighting the silver lining amidst this black cloud seems like an audacious attempt but here are a few.

The pandemic highlighted everything urban humans are up to when life is normal outside. This is just data and the silver lining is not relevant right now. We should maybe not wait for the next pandemic to curtail Air Pollution and let us maybe not ignore Climate Change and call it a hoax.

Some thrive in chaos while others have a compulsive need to achieve perfection. Let us look at what are the trends when it comes to launching your eCommerce website or a new product into the market.

I am personally a fan of building that Minimum Viable Product, pushing into the market, testing the waters, pivoting in real time to stay afloat. This reduces the damage in case the product does not react as expected in the market, also is much less riskier since the amount of resources poured into it is minimum. Course correction gets a lot easier.

There are a few frameworks built as a result of extensive research. The HEART framework can be used for gauging both the quantitative and qualitative metrics of a product. A product could be your website or a mobile app. It could also be the overall measurement of your organisations sales and yearly goals in terms of revenue and sales.

After you have constantly filled up the whiteboard above, make sure you get really creative. Like there cannot be rules to confine you. As long as you stay within the ethical limits of any jurisdiction, you are good to go. Become a growth hacker. Overnight. Sounds silly but in the times of technology an 8 hour night is a time duration during which a LOT can be achieved, and lost.

The next immediate step is to create a persona. Marketing and growth hacking is built on the fundamentals of your persona. Whom are you selling to? After this you swiftly move into your AARRR framework I talked about on another blog (The pirate metrics)

The next steps are fairly straighforward

With a growth hacking mindset, a data driven approach and a systematic framework, you can scale anything from scratch as long as you have the persistence and tenacity

P.S this is a documentation of our journey at www.soukapps.com check us out and feel free to drop a message or be a guest at our podcast

Plan your work and work your plan. Even Vasco Da Gama who accidentally discovered places had a north star metric. It was the North Star. He had to constantly make sure to find land as the ship ran out of supplies. Running a business can be turbulantly similar. Never run out of Money. So what’s your North Star?

Think Vasco Da Gama, think Pirate! What do pirates yell all the time? AARRR….The Pirate Metrics

(A)cquisition (A)ctivation (R)evenue (R)etention (R)eferral — Mind Blown? No pun intended

Taking a shot at each one of them (I love my puns today!)

Acquisition — How are you reaching out to your potential customer base? How do they know you exist? The various ways people reach out are, by calling and striking a conversation, Emails, SEO, Targeted Facebook Ads etc

Metric — Cost per click, Sales team spends, Paid Ads, Email open rate

Activation — Now that you have managed to get some of those eyeballs to your website/app, the next step is to provide them an epic user experience. Increase the overall engagement

Metric — Subscribers, Number of Sign-up

Retention — Making sure that they purchase multiple times from your website or use your services regularly. After all you have probably spent a ton of resources and money acquiring them. Making the most out of them is a business imperative

Metric — Daily & Monthly Active Users, Churn rate (customers leaving you is churn), time from last visited

Revenue — Money. Making sure you have enough to pay your bills

Metric — Bank account

Referral — What is your street cred? Are your existing users turning into evangelists for your service? are they saying good things about you? If they refer their friends to come your way, then you gave achieved some amount of success

Metric — NPS Score (Net promoter score), Viral Index

For Airbnb, Activation is when someone makes a booking, Retention is when they do it every 6 months, Referral is when they spread the love and get more signups.

Its better to have some sort of overall framework when it comes to running a business. I personally hate the term “Spray and Pray”

At Soukapps, we work with various sizes of businesses and the owners are pretty good at their core business of manufacturing their core product. What they really need is a technology partner who would get on top of the tall buildings and sing about their brands OUT LOUD. Here we are data driven and always have designed an AARRR framework unique for each business.

Be a pirate! AARRR!!!

Best!

By 2025, 71% of the expected population of the earth will be unique mobile device users. Also, 70% of earth is water.

Yikes! Talk about domination.

With 5G being accessible to gadget makers, there will be a surge in the video upload, download & transfer. We are also seeing a rapid change in the way we are interacting with technology. Voice is becoming an important medium.

There are a few obvious user preferences that serves as a guiding light to the way technology is going to take shape. Because user-centric design. Every technological advancement is an answer to a problem someone faces or have previously faced. Sometimes I think that it is basically for lazy people to get by with even lesser effort.

So, the easiest way to predict the future is to predict what we are like right now or better yet, what is that kid 10 years younger to you going to want. How would he want to live his upcoming future?

To start off, there are a few things we all can agree. 70% of Gen X & Gen Y prefer to make purchases, view products, pay for it and basically interact with technology using an application/app. There is a higher degree of personalisation, curated content, also offers unparalleled sense of security while making payments.

If you are a vendor, your sales is likely to increase by more than 50% if you had personalised data about your consumers. A mobile app gathers a lot of contextual information about your consumer. So cheers to more money!

Now depending on how deep your pockets are, you could choose between an expensive native app (Only recommended if you have recurring users) or a hybrid app. This is works on any device as it is responsive to the browser. Some call it the progressive web app.

Why is an app successful as opposed to a generic website is because an app is proactive in nature, sending out relevant information to the customer after discovering their needs by notifying them only data of interest. This is a huge catalyst to boosting sales.

Turnover from the Mobile Ecosystem will contribute to 3% of the global GDP by 2021. Not investing on a Mobile App is a lost opportunity which otherwise could have turned into revenue.

At Soukapps, we love talking about the future and also are building for the next iteration. Feel free to strike a conversation with us.

With information on their fingertips, your average consumer is always almost sold by the time they step into your store or visit your e-commerce website/app. So how can you build a sustainable business? By being extra sales-y? Nope.

So there will be changes in the way you sell. If you are a business owner & you are thinking short term trying to win a buck without creating that intrinsic value in your brand then you are going to see some dark days.

Why?

Because Subscription economy. Sounds like one of those things you’d call in sick and go to the movies instead of wasting another minute of your day trying to learn. But this is going to make you more money in the long term and it is more sustainable. Why? because in the subscription world, everybody wins & people like winning.

Let us go back in time a little. Remember until the 90s if you wanted to listen to one song, you’d have walk down to that store, wait for the album to release, stocked in inventory hoping it hasn’t sold out and purchase that whole album for $18-$20. A few years after, Apple.inc launched the “itunes” and you could now purchase just that 1 song for 99 cents. Not the entire album. Now with Spotify & Pandora, you don’t purchase songs anymore. You lease them. Storage, transmission, delivery everything is taken care of. All you need is a “SUBSCRIPTION”.

The good part about this model is the way it completely changed delivery. Upfront costs have been eliminated. Access has be democratised. This has made consumers powerful than they ever were before. They don’t need to pay high upfront fees to have access to products or services & bascially get things rolling. A small business owner now has access to the same grade of technology of that of a multinational corporation. A true new world order.

Now, pivoting a little, When you are out there trying to purchase any software from 2020 and onwards, make sure you ask them if they have a “pay-as-you-go” payment model. Never pay thousands of dollars to a vendor just because that is how it used to be a decade ago.

Remember, the power is yours!

Today, if you are looking for a vendor providing a product or a service, you need to pick those who are confident enough to charge you a minimum fee to start off and knows you’ll renew their monthly subscription after that first month because they are providing you an exceptional ‘post-sales’ experience.

Software robustness, post sales customer support, dedicated implementation specialists are going to be a part of the “post-sales” offering of only those vendors who truly care about their revenue and making their customer successful because they know both of those go hand in hand. As a customer, its that simple thumb rule to pick a vendor

Best!

Starting out is probably not that difficult if you have the right tools, a right mindset & a pinch of discipline!

Tools! I think the best performing tool for email marketing today is Klaviyo! These guys are gold! I personally build my website within 50 hours and I used this tool called “Elementor”. I had zero experience on anything to do with a website. Being a Mechanical engineer, i was used to working in HVAC and industrial grade mechanical equipments and had very minimal digital marketing experience, I feel a lot of stuff out there isn’t as hard as it might seem.

In the beginning you gotta document everything you are doing! That itself is such original content. With consistency & discipline, one day you will hit the take-off point of the J-curve. But rain or shine, you gotta be genuine and just wake-up, dress-up, show-up.

Be regular & maintain the engagement with the industry thought leaders through your blog posts, your podcasts & make connections. Don’t try to monetise for at-least the first few months. If luck would have it, people will show you the right door to pay your bills sooner than a year hitting the clock. But don’t be sales-y. It is such a turn off after 2019.

It is okay when in the first few months no one other than your mother is reading your blogs & listening to your podcasts. This is the part where most people give up. You will get past this stage. Just have faith & keep going.

To build early momentum, you can give away stuff for free that would otherwise have costed money. Track your funnel conversion for those freebies, then retarget the same funnel traffic. In-short build that rapport with no quid-pro-quo in mind. Capitalism probably starts with communism as an undertone.

Podcasting is a very good gateway to get people to passively engage with you, specially when you are starting out. Its also because you are pretty much giving away useful content for free. The stuff you probably spent plenty of hours learning from life experience or from really smart, succesful & inspiring people.

We at Soukapps have our frequent giveaways. Listen to us on Spotify and we are active across most social channels. Check us out and feel free to reach out and be a part of our journey!

At Soukapps, we are also building an online community where we are dedicated to guiding people achieve financial freedom. We will be regularly covering topics that can help you take your business off the ground.

Stay tuned for more guys!

Bye for now

Create the freedom you deserve. Work from anywhere by setting up your online E-commerce store.

Dropshipping. What is it? when to start? where to learn? what should be your budget? How much money can you make?

So, what is dropshipping?

There are manufacturers (suppliers) in China who does manufacturing at a fraction of the cost. What costs $4 to be made in the United States can be manufactured in China for $1. #margins.

So how to take advantage of this model?

Stage 1

Find an agent from “upwork”, skype with them, their services among others include making sure your item reaches you from China within 7–12 days.

Stage 2

Create your store, upload the items you are selling (Selection is a whole another episode), sync your bank account to receive payments

Stage 3

Marketing using Facebook & Instagram (Do not get paid Ads unless you have identified a clearly winning audience).

Why? because Marketing is an amplification tool. If you amplify your succesful organic sales & automate it with a paid Ad, you will multiply that goodness. On the contrary, if your organic sales looks like a turd and you automate that using paid Ads, you will get a big fat turd! Nobody wants that!

Stage 4

Find influencers on social media. They are for social proof. Get on Instagram or Tik Tok, find an influencer with a large fanbase, offer them a percentage commission on every sale they bring you. This way they make more money with every post & you get your social proof. Winner winner, chicken dinner!

Budget — $100– $200 to start off..

Where to learn? find us at Soukapps.com & we will set you up for success!

End of a decade signals to a lot of change coming up. More kids will now be homeschooled, Number of Solopreneurs will increase, Online retail sales profits will beat physical store, Brick n Mortar Profits!

Setting up your online store seems daunting. Soukapps is here to — Simplify!

Taking your store online would ideally require 3 major steps - Attract visitors to your store, display the list of your items & allow them to pay for the items.

Shopify is a platform that makes it easy for you to build your online store with lightning speed (Website or Mobile App) without any technical skills.

Shopify ecosystem has 2400+ apps that provide various functionalities to help a business owner sell more! Apps make the stores more successful.

An average store uses 8 Apps as of 2019. Using the right apps is directly related to an increase in your revenue

We will be posting daily updates on our Instagram TV, Snapchat & Tiktok channels with tips & tricks on how to boost your Online sales in 2020!

Stay tuned for more. 

Bye for now!