On a freezing cold February evening — Valentine’s Day, to be exact — my housemate Esther and I decided that, in lieu of

Getting the first customers wasn’t glamorous. Their first customer — V. K. K. Chandra — came from a link, which Sachin posted on Chandra’s blog. Binny and Sachin would literally spam their website links on all book-related forums and comment sections they could find.

Often times when entrepreneurs plan their ventures they get obsessed with the Grand Plan. If they’re going to build an e-commerce website, it’s going to have all the products in the world.

The Bansals’ initial idea was a product-review site. Their plan was to manipulate their website’s search engine optimization to show up among Google’s first search results and earn a commission by referring users to the products they reviewed.

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well-established have used a different name to separate their endeavors. J.K. Rowlings published her second book series under the name Robert Galbraith because she wanted her writing to stand on its own, and not be influenced by the success of her Harry Potter novels.

The Bansals understood that the challenge they were facing was that of trust. Most people in India did not trust online retailers due to poor customer support and overall user experience.

I’m not even talking about friends and family. While Sachin’s parents — business owners themselves — were supportive of Flipkart, pretty much everyone else thought poor Bansals were throwing their lives away.

By all measures, starting an internet company was considered a radical idea in India at the time. With no entrepreneurship culture in place, engineers were expected to get jobs — not invent them.

Amazon’s stint in India didn’t last long. With troubles in China, Amazon decided to withdraw from yet another difficult market in 2007. Much of the senior leadership left the company, along with its spirit.

The Bansals understood that the challenge they were facing was that of trust. Most people in India did not trust online retailers due to poor customer support and overall user experience.

Another thing the Bansals did was set up an eBay account and sell books with “Flipkart” stickers on them. These stickers advertised a lower price compared to eBay — incentivizing the customer to look for their next book on Flipkart.

“As the French writer André Gide put it, “Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But, since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.” — Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist

Sachin and Binny didn’t bother themselves with being original — for all practical purposes, they stole the entire business idea of their former employer, Amazon. Which, apparently, isn’t such a bad thing.

They knew that Amazon chose books for a reason. Books are easy to categorize and display online. Books do not perish — so you can store them for a long time. They’re also easy to get (most of them are.)

Both of them, however, saw Amazon’s success firsthand — and decided to follow its footsteps. 500 Rupees and a few late nights later, an online book store was born, registered under a domain Flipkart.com.

“When all suppliers are substandard, there’s no value in comparing them. […] The Indian market, on the other hand, had failed to pick up primarily because the shopping sites were notoriously poor in usability, product quality, delivery — nearly every aspect of e-commerce.”