Here's a story we hear constantly: A business owner—let's say she runs three supermarkets in a mid-sized city—needs software to manage inventory. She has two options.
Option A: Enterprise software. SAP, Oracle, whatever the big vendors sell. It's powerful, comprehensive, and completely overkill. It'll cost lakhs to implement, require months of training, and she'll use maybe 10% of the features. Most importantly, it's not designed for how her stores actually operate.
Option B: Consumer apps. Spreadsheets, free inventory apps, WhatsApp groups. Cheap and accessible, but they weren't built for business operations. They break down at any scale, have no accountability, and create data chaos.
What she actually needs—purpose-built software for retail inventory management in the Indian context—barely exists. So she ends up cobbling together a mix of Option B tools and hoping for the best.
The missing middle
This gap between enterprise and consumer software is massive in India. In the US, it's filled by "vertical SaaS"—software built for specific industries. There's software specifically for dentists, specifically for auto repair shops, specifically for yoga studios. Each one understands the exact workflows of that industry.
In India, this category is underdeveloped. Partly because the market was smaller until recently. Partly because the focus has been on horizontal tools (payments, communication) rather than vertical operations. Partly because building for specific industries requires deep domain knowledge that most software companies don't have.
The result: millions of small businesses running on inappropriate tools, wasting time on workarounds, and accepting inefficiency as normal.
Why this matters now
Three things have changed that make this problem both more pressing and more solvable:
Smartphone penetration. The person managing a small store or clinic now has a powerful computer in their pocket. Software doesn't need to be desktop-based or require expensive hardware.
Internet access. Reliable mobile data means cloud-based tools actually work. You can build software that updates in real-time across locations without complex infrastructure.
Rising expectations. As people experience good software in their personal lives—food delivery, ride-hailing, banking—they expect similar quality in their work tools. "It's always been this way" is no longer acceptable.
The opportunity is to build the vertical software that should exist. Not adaptations of American products. Not scaled-down enterprise systems. Purpose-built tools for specific Indian industries, designed around how those industries actually work.
What purpose-built looks like
Good vertical software has a few characteristics:
- Opinionated workflows. It doesn't try to be everything to everyone. It has a specific way of doing things that matches how the industry operates. This is a feature, not a limitation.
- Fast time-to-value. A store owner should be using the software productively within hours, not weeks. No lengthy implementations or training programs.
- Mobile-native. The primary interface is a phone, not a computer. Desktop is secondary at best.
- Integrated communication. WhatsApp, SMS, and voice are part of the workflow, not separate tools. That's how Indian businesses communicate.
- Appropriate pricing. Not enterprise pricing. Not free. Sustainable pricing that small businesses can afford and see clear ROI from.
Where we're focused
We started with retail inventory management (ShelfLife Pro) and veterinary clinic management (CliniCore). Not because these are the biggest markets, but because we understood them well enough to build something useful.
The pattern is the same: find an industry with obvious operational friction, spend time understanding exactly how they work, build specifically for that workflow, price it appropriately.
We're looking at other industries now. The criteria are simple: Is there painful friction in daily operations? Are existing solutions inadequate? Can we understand the domain well enough to build something good?
If you're running a business that's stuck in the missing middle—too small for enterprise, too serious for consumer tools—we'd like to hear about it. Not to sell you anything, but to understand what problems need solving.
The gap is enormous. We can only fill a small part of it. But every industry we address properly is one more set of businesses that can stop wasting time on workarounds and start operating efficiently.