Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],

If you’re big on startup Twitter, chances are you came across this viral thread last week:

Choudhary is co-founder and chief technology officer of Dukaan, a two-year-old online-storefront provider for small businesses and direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands.

And Shopify is the US$40 billion-worth Canadian giant that Dukaan and hundreds of similar startups around the world badly wish they were.

The technical details in the Twitter thread aside, this is what Choudhary wanted you to take away: if you have an e-store on Shopify, it’s super slow. So, if you don’t want it to suck, switch to Dukaan.

The thread was nothing if not opportunistic, for just a day later, TechCrunch reported that Dukaan was venturing outside India. And co-founder and chief executive Suumit Shah hit the same talking point in the article as his colleague:

You could argue that taking on Shopify shows how ambitious Dukaan is, or you could dismiss it as a marketing stunt from a delusional upstart.

There may be an element of truth to both, but there is a third, existential reason why Dukaan is doing this.

Why Dukaan is taking aim at Shopify

There are few better ways to draw attention to a little-known startup than to take the name of a tech giant and add the preposition ‘of’ or ‘for’ into the mix.

When Uber was the company du jour in Silicon Valley, articles such as these abounded—there was an “Uber for healthcare” and an “Uber for dog-walking”. Recently, my colleague Shruti wrote about an Indian company that calls itself the “AWS (Amazon Web Services) of energy”.

When Covid struck, something similar happened with a bunch of ventures whose big pitch was that they would digitise the operations of small, family-run businesses, and take them online. Even if you didn’t explicitly know who they were targeting, you could probably guess from their names: Dukaan, Khatabook, Bikayi.

Central to this plan were kiranas, or neighbourhood grocery stores. So much so that this business was called kiranatech or dukaantech. With an estimated 12 million kiranas in India, it’s understandable why investors couldn’t control their excitement.

Khatabook, which began with a simple, free bookkeeping app, managed to get valued at US$300 million within a-year-and-a-half of its launch.