Decide what to sell

The best first product is not the most exciting one. It is the one you can make or buy this month, sell at a price people already pay, and post to a courier without a special box. Start there. You can add the exciting product once the boring one is paying for itself.

Three places a first product comes from

• Something you make. Food, candles, jewellery, clothes, art, printed goods. Your cost is materials plus your time, and nobody else sells exactly yours.
• Something you source. From a wholesale market (Sadar Bazaar, Chickpet, Crawford Market, Surat for fabric), a local manufacturer, or a maker who has no online presence. Your cost is the buying price plus the trip.
• Something you already sell offline. A boutique, a sweet shop, a nursery, a bookshop. The product exists, the suppliers exist, and the question is only how to reach people beyond your lane.

Check that people already want it

You are not looking for a product nobody sells. You are looking for one that people already search for and already pay for, where you can be the easier or nicer option. Three ten-minute checks:

1. 1Search the product on Instagram and look at the five accounts that come up. Are there comments asking price? and how to order? — that is demand nobody is serving well.
2. 2Search it on Google and on Amazon. Note the price range you see. If the going price is lower than what it would cost you to make it, pick something else now rather than after fifty orders.
3. 3Ask ten people you know — not whether they like the idea, but whether they bought something like it in the last year, from whom, and what they paid. People are polite about ideas and honest about receipts.

Keep the first batch small

Buy or make enough for ten to twenty orders, not two hundred. The first batch teaches you the real cost (the packaging you forgot, the courier that charged for volume, the product that breaks in transit). A small batch makes those lessons cheap. Stock you cannot sell is the most common way a new business loses its first ₹20,000.

Write down

One line: I will sell ______ to ______, and the first batch is ______ pieces. If you cannot fill in the middle blank — who it is for — go back to the Instagram check and read the comments again.