Introduction

As lockdowns became the new normal, businesses and consumers increasingly “went digital”, providing and purchasing more goods and services online. The opportunity came with a lot of hurdles for small businesses in terms of lack of clarity on how to set up a shop online, or revamping an already existing business on social media handles such as Instagram. Millions of businesses operating on Instagram face similar challenges while handling everything from taking orders to collecting payment. The hurdles include lack of automation due to which the whole process becomes time consuming, unsalable and monotonous. Sellers trying to market their products through influencers may get demand for their products, however they lack capabilities to cater to that demand. Timely response from a seller to the potential customer is also a major problem as delays lead to missed opportunities. 

When Supriya wanted to start up last year, she began her journey by researching on Instagram to look for products other businesses were dealing in. She came across many business accounts having up to 500k followers and observed that the owners and team were manually handling the process of fulfilling orders without any storefront or automations. These sellers were in dire need of Instagram specific solutions to serve their customers effectively. Surpriya roped in Abhishek to work on this gap.  This is how the idea of Instasell was born. 

Instasell is a mobile first e-commerce website builder for Instagram businesses and is building solutions specific to Instagram in the short term for automated conversions, post scheduling, content analytics, marketing automations etc. In the long term, it aims to grow into a tool that can be used by sellers globally to manage and grow their businesses on all social media platforms like Instagram, Tiktok, Pinterest etc. Instasell lets its users convert their Instagram business page into an online e-commerce website in 2 minutes. All in all, it makes the process seamless by automating order taking, payments and logistics. Additionally, it helps in collecting user data which can be analyzed to get business insights. The objective is to make selling on Instagram a lot more simpler with three broad steps. The seller/trader just has to upload products from Instagram, followed by sharing an e-commerce website link. Henceforth, sellers can collect orders, payments and ship the products seamlessly.

Market Opportunity

The social commerce market size stands at 600 Billion USD and is growing at the compounded rate of 30%. Out of 100 mn Active Instagram business accounts, Instasell is currently targeting 10mn businesses getting more than 100 orders every month. The annual subscription charge is around 200 USD while they also charge 2-3% transaction charge per order which makes this revenue opportunity worth 7 Billion USD. 

100X.VC Thesis 

Instagram and other social media handles are witnessing a lot of traffic all over the world when it comes to people selling and buying. The founding team is experienced in both e-commerce as well as the technical background to build this out. Abhishek had run an e-commerce business on Instagram and scaled it to about $300k  in revenue and Supriya had experience building tech for commerce at Amazon. Both the founders are capable of scaling the business in this new wave of social commerce. 

Conclusion

The severity of problems which businesses face while selling their products on Instagram or any other social media handles suggests that Instasell is working on a relevant solution. We wish the team luck!