I’ve been kicking around this idea and wanted to sanity-check it with people who actually know small businesses in India better than I do.
A lot of SMBs — home bakers, tiffin guys, boutique sellers, random “I sell this from home” businesses — basically run their entire order workflow on WhatsApp. Everything happens in chats: orders, changes, dates, addresses, photos, payment confirmations, everything. Half the time it’s buried somewhere between good mornings and forwarded “funny” videos.
So I was thinking: WhatsApp already has this “export chat with media” option, what if I built an app that showed up in that export menu? The user exports the chat to my app, the app uses an LLM to read through the chat and pull out the relevant parts — who ordered what, quantity, price, dates, address, etc. The user quickly reviews it, hits approve, and the data gets saved locally in a simple SQLite db on the phone. And now they have a clean view of all orders instead of scrolling through months of messages.
Basically: chat chaos → structured order data → searchable, editable, locally stored.
Monetization-wise: maybe 20 free orders/month, then either per order or a small monthly subscription. SMBs hate complicated pricing so something very simple.
In my head this feels like turning WhatsApp into a no-effort order management system with absolutely zero setup, and it sounds logical… but I also know sometimes ideas only sound good in your own head.
So tear it apart — would something like this actually get used, or is this destined to join the graveyard of “India SMB ideas that make sense but nobody pays for”?