Steve Koruthu

DIBS | Live shopping for India. Sneakers, fits, accessories bought live, delivered free in BLR. Join the next drop ↓

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

if anyone’s interested in shopping or just sitting in on livestreams where different people come in and sell their stuff, yall can join here

mostly clothing, sneakers, accessories..mostly fashion stuff.
free delivery in BLR as well

https://t.co/nGORd1fBAc

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

remember those tv shopping channels where someone would spend 20 minutes showing off a product?

now it's happening live on your phone.

sellers go live, show products, answer questions, and people buy right there while watching.

in china, this has grown into a trillion dollar industry.

shopping is starting to look a lot more like entertainment.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

I've been building DIBS because of stuff like this. but real talk, even if you never use DIBS, just start saving your buyers somewhere.

WhatsApp Groups + a Google Sheet is fine. just don't lose them.

what do you do with your old buyers right now? genuinely curious.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

looked at 1,054 reseller IG accounts.

here's where money is leaking on every drop.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

the part that bugs me most: almost no one I look at
has any way to remember their old buyers. no list,
no WhatsApp group, nothing.

so every drop starts from zero. all those people who paid you last time? gone.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

A lot of people from Bangalore randomly pulled up to the DIBS livestream today.

First time we’ve gone live as sellers in a long time, and honestly forgot how fun this format is.

People asking questions about DIBS, talking in chat, and buying pieces in real time just felt more like a community catch up than a shopping stream.

Had fun!

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

your 500 followers can outsell someone's 500k.

kept seeing this while building DIBS.

took a while to understand this simple thing.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

a seller with 3,000 followers just sold 5 out of 6 items in a livestream.

zero ads. zero virality. 120 people in the room.

meanwhile accounts with 75k -100k+ followers were getting 18 viewers on theirs.

the reason is the most underrated thing in indian d2c right now

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

yeah, but anyways if you are interested in seeing how we our livestreams works

you can check in the link in my bio and join our community.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

Building my startup in the live ecommerce space has been really tough this month.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

Then Instagram and WhatsApp banned a lot of accounts and channels.

Finding good sellers became super hard.

A lot of sellers are actually frustrated about their Instagram and a lot of social channels getting banned, especially the small-scale sellers. This is something that has been talked about on Reddit and Instagram as well.

I have personally seen a store owner and a close connection of mine who has been banned five times and he literally gave up on making a new IG account.

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

Anyone got proven ideas on how to market marketplace-type companies?

How do you smartly acquire both buyers and sellers without burning too much cash?

Best growth hacks, channels, or tactics that actually worked?

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

We’ve been doing live shopping events for a while now, and honestly it’s been really fun seeing people pull up, bid on pieces, and grab steals live.

We’re finally coming back this Wednesday with another drop 👀

Mostly jackets, windbreakers, and some really clean pieces lined up.

Would genuinely love to see y’all there.

Free delivery across Bangalore as well 🙌

If you’re interested, here’s the link:
https://t.co/PFUF02UCum

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

@scaling_shields DAILY

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

been talking to a bunch of IG shop owners and WhatsApp sellers this month

same story every time

accounts getting banned at random. no warning, no reason given

meta wiped 10M+ accounts this year and the ones getting cooked the hardest are sellers running their whole biz through IG and WhatsApp.

anyone else seeing this happen in their circle?

[Steve Koruthu @KoruthuSteve]

I wasted 2 months building my startup by only relying on Reddit for users.

We did content on it. Not enough to grow real momentum, but enough to keep showing up.

I'd post, wait, post again, wait. Then one day they banned me. Then again. And again.

Each ban came with a wait. No new account, no new path, just refresh and hope. It was hard, and honestly embarrassing.

We tried Instagram ads next. Pointed them at our registration page. People saw the ads. Almost nobody signed up. The gap between impressions and conversion was wider than I want to admit.

Now I'm trying to build something on X. Two days in, ten people in the community from writing alone. Not much. But it's a start I actually own this time.

From my perspective, we did one platform at a time instead of building a system we could divide across all of them and compound.

If you've grown a small account from scratch, what made the difference for you?