
Trading on online classifieds platforms requires little investment, but the returns are good enough to make a qualitative difference to entrepreneurs’ lives.
A smartphone wedged between his shoulder and his ear, Diwakar Singh, 19, is negotiating the price of a Royal Enfield motorcycle with a customer. No, he’s not a salesperson at some Royal Enfield store in a city. Singh is sitting at his roadside wooden kiosk in Sitapur, a small town in Uttar Pradesh about 90km from state capital Lucknow.
Singh talks to the buyer even as he repairs a motorcycle, spanner in hand, pushing him to raise his offer of Rs 50,000 by another Rs 8,000.
Trading on online classifieds platforms requires little or no investment, but the returns are good enough to make a qualitative difference to these entrepreneurs’ lives
Singh is thankful to one of his former customers, who pushed him towards making the entrepreneurial move. “One of our customers at the shop I used to work at told me about the online trading platforms and explained to me how they could be an opportunity to change our lives,” recalls Singh.
Singh’s mentor also gave him a loan of Rs 2,500 to start a business. Singh and Sunny used the money to set up their own shop and started selling vehicles online through people they knew in town, using the local cyber cafe to access the internet.
“Initially, we struggled a lot. We printed pamphlets, gave commissions to brokers and tried various methods to expand sales, but we couldn’t make much money. Our business started growing only after we bought a smartphone and started using mobile apps to sell the bikes,” he says.
“My smartphone has helped me create a business and now helps me expand it every day” — Diwakar Singh, micro-entrepreneur
Technocrat Nandan Nilekani had said during the Future of Jobs in India Summit, organised by FactorDaily in association with Careernet in November last year, that the unicorn (like Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Quikr) and startup “ecosystem” would create thousands of jobs. He had added, however, that “these jobs are not going to be what we thought of as jobs.
“These guys are quasi employees, quasi entrepreneurs. The guy who’s driving a taxi for Ola, he’s getting a loan from a bank, he’s taking the risk of buying an asset. He’s like an entrepreneur except that he’s connected to a platform,” Nilekani had said.
This is exactly what the platform ecosystem is doing — creating quasi or micro entrepreneurs.
“These guys are quasi employees, quasi entrepreneurs. The guy who’s driving a taxi for Ola, he’s getting a loan from a bank, he’s taking the risk of buying an asset. He’s like an entrepreneur except that he’s connected to a platform” — Nandan Nilekani
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