IKT India
Seed-stage B2B handloom marketplace. Promoted from intern after 6 months. Led seller-side product with a 4-engineer team shipping across web, mobile, and ops integrations.
Role
Product Manager
Duration
1 yr 3 mo
Type
full-time
Location
Hyderabad, India
Vendor Growth
across multiple states
Monthly GMV
price-floor A/B scaled to 500+ SKUs
Gross Margin
held order volume flat in test cohort
48-hr First-Listing Rate
seller activation metric
Overview
IKT India is a seed-stage B2B handloom marketplace connecting traditional Indian artisans with retailers. I joined as a PM intern, got promoted after 6 months, and owned the seller-side product with a 4-engineer team shipping across web, mobile, and ops integrations. The core job was growing the vendor network and making the unit economics work at scale.
The
Challenge
When I joined, the platform had ~20 vendors, 25% gross margins, and a seller funnel that leaked everywhere. Artisans signed up but never listed. The ones who listed dropped off within 60 days. And a 4-engineer team meant every feature had to be earned.
Low activation: many signed up but never completed KYC or listed products
High churn among vendors in the first 60 days
Complex onboarding for non-tech-savvy artisans in rural India
Thin 25% gross margins threatening unit economics
No analytics infrastructure: we were flying blind on seller behavior
My Approach
Discovery & Research
Conducted 15+ seller interviews as an intern and mapped the end-to-end journey. Identified 3 critical drop-off points that informed the PRD for a redesigned verification flow.
Verification & Catalog
Shipped seller verification automation and bulk catalog upload with the 4-engineer team. Streamlined the KYC-to-first-listing path, cutting seller setup time from 3 days to 6 hours.
Pricing Experimentation
Ran a concurrent A/B test on 50 SKUs with price floors against a matched control group. Order volume held flat in the test cohort, so I scaled the winning variant to 500+ SKUs and renegotiated supplier terms.
Seller Acquisition Playbook
Owned weekly CAC, GMV, and gross-margin reporting. Prioritized expansion regions by weaver-cluster density and grew the vendor base from 20 to 75+ across multiple states.
Analytics & Retention
Built a seller-health dashboard in SQL + Mixpanel with 7-day inactivity triggers (email + SMS) and follow-up outreach, lifting 60-day active-seller retention by 20%.
Key Decisions
Shipped seller verification automation with bulk catalog upload
Context
Interview data showed most vendors dropped off between KYC and first listing. Bulk upload removed the friction of adding products one by one.
Outcome
48-hour first-listing rate went from 30% to 60%. Seller setup time dropped from 3 days to 6 hours.
Tested price floors on a 50-SKU A/B cohort before scaling
Context
Gross margin was 25% and threatening unit economics, but leadership was worried raising floors would kill volume. A concurrent test with a matched control was the only way to prove the trade-off.
Outcome
Order volume held flat in the test cohort, so I scaled to 500+ SKUs and renegotiated supplier terms, lifting gross margin to 40% and doubling monthly GMV.
Built the seller analytics dashboard before adding new features
Context
Without visibility into seller health, we couldn’t act on retention. I pushed to pause net-new features for a sprint and invest in instrumentation.
Outcome
60-day active-seller retention improved 20%. 7-day inactivity triggers let us intervene with at-risk sellers before they churned.
Results & Impact
Over 15 months (intern → PM), scaled the marketplace from 20 to 75+ vendors, doubled monthly GMV, lifted gross margin from 25% to 40%, cut seller onboarding from 3 days to 6 hours, and improved 60-day retention by 20%.
Learnings
What did this teach me?
The biggest lesson was the power of talking to sellers directly. Field context changed what “simple” meant for different user segments. Data-informed decisions beat gut feelings, but you need qualitative context to interpret the numbers correctly.
What would I do differently?
I would have invested in analytics infrastructure earlier. We lost months of behavioral data because tracking wasn’t set up. I also would have pushed harder for a mobile-first seller experience from day one; many artisans primarily used low-end smartphones.
Skills Used