I built v1 of Chiblu like most marketplaces start - except it wasn't one yet. It was a directory. A list of makers. Their bios, their photos, a way to browse, contact, follow. You could find a maker on Chiblu, but to actually buy from her you'd leave and take it to DMs. Free during pre-launch. I hadn't figured out how I'd charge yet - I told myself I'd sort that out once people showed up.
By month two, 30+ makers had signed up. The dashboard looked right. Numbers were trending up. I told myself the product worked.
Then in December 2025, I booked a stall at a pop-up in Mumbai.
What I went looking for
I'd done the right things on paper. Forms. Calls. A waitlist. Plenty of makers telling me what they wanted. I knew what makers said they wanted.
But I'd never sat next to one while she tried to sell something. So I paid for a small folding table, packed two days of patience, and showed up - in a row of other stall owners running the exact businesses I was building for.
The plan was to demo Chiblu to passing makers and watch what happened.
What actually happened was different.
The four things makers showed me
The maker in the next stall started talking to me. Then the maker across from me. Then a textile artist walked over because she'd heard I was building something for people like her.
Over two days, the same four problems came up. Not in the language they'd typed in my forms. In the language they used when they were tired.
1. DM overload. Every maker I talked to was running their whole business through Instagram DMs. "I get 30 messages a day. By the time I reply, half of them have bought from someone else."
2. Screenshot chaos. Customers ask for screenshots of every variation - this color, that angle, that fabric, that print. Makers were sending hundreds of photos a week to people who never bought.
3. No trust on DMs. Buyers wanted to pay. But sending UPI to a stranger based on an Instagram message felt sketchy. Makers were losing sales at the exact moment they should have closed.
4. Lost in the crowd. The ones who'd tried big marketplaces - Amazon, Etsy, Flipkart - all had the same complaint. "We're listed. Nobody finds us. We're three pages deep behind someone selling mass-produced versions of the thing we hand-make."
I'd missed all four. And they all had the same root. A directory points a buyer at a maker and then steps back - the conversation, the trust, the payment, the sale all happen somewhere else (usually Instagram DMs, badly). The four problems weren't a layout problem. They were everything that goes wrong in that "somewhere else."
Makers didn't need a better list of themselves. They needed a place where the whole transaction lived - discovery, storefront, trust, payment, in one flow. That's not a directory. That's a marketplace.
From directory to marketplace
I came back to Bangalore and rebuilt for the next four months. The directory became a marketplace - the whole transaction moved onto Chiblu - and for the first time, it had a price. Four big calls came out of the pop-up:
The biggest call was the first one. Turning the directory into a storefront. Every maker gets their own custom storefront, not a listing. Real product pages. Real variants. Real share-able URLs. The opposite of a screenshot-by-DM workflow.
The second: SEO indexing from the first day. Every product page is its own URL. When a customer searches for "hand-block-printed cotton kurta Jaipur", they find the maker - not page three of Amazon.
The third: marketplace trust signals. Verified seller flags. Buyer protection. UPI through Chiblu, not stranger-to-stranger. The platform becomes the intermediary that Instagram DMs can't be.
And the fourth: a price. v2 launched with a flat monthly subscription for sellers - the same fee for everyone. Once Chiblu actually solved the DM, screenshot, trust, and discovery problems, it stopped being a directory you'd forget you joined and started being a tool worth paying for.
Four months later
v2 went live in February. Steady month-on-month growth since:
(from 13 in Feb)
(from 20 in Feb)
each month, avg
Steady, not exponential. Which is also not the point of this post.
The point is: the four problems makers showed me at a Mumbai pop-up are still the four problems v2 is solving. Every new seller signs up because of one of those four things, not despite them.
The forms missed it. The pop-up didn't.
What I learned about research
You can't fix what you can't see. Forms abstract away the part that matters - the moment a maker realizes she's lost track of 12 DMs while replying to one. Surveys average out the urgency.
That's why v2 looks the way it does. Not because of the form responses. Because of the pop-up.
Your product is what you build after you watch someone try to use the first version.
Chiblu is live on the App Store. Building something? Tell me what you'd build.