Confused about which software to buy for your business? This startup will help you make the right choice

We know the world is going digital. Yet one chunk, and a massive one at that, is still far away from getting fully online – that’s small businesses. This digital divide in business is stark in Asia, especially India.

Of India’s 47 million small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), just 1.4 million have email access. Another 1.3 million are online through aggregators or listing services, Zinnov Research found.

Of the businesses that are online, even fewer are savvy enough to make full use of their web presence to connect more with their customers, manage their business better, or get the most out of ecommerce. A huge portion of them would undoubtedly love to do all that – if only somebody would show them how.

This is where SoftwareSuggest, a marketplace for business software, attempts to make a difference. It is a free service that helps Indian companies, professionals, and individuals to find the best software solutions for their business.

Founded by techies Ankit Dudhwewala and Piyush Patel, this startup headquartered in Ahmedabad lists over 1,200 software items in categories like accounting, enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human resource management (HRM), campus management, and ecommerce.

“For instance, in the accounting business function alone, we list 70 different choices. If a company needs more help to arrive at a decision, we will help them narrow down the search to three to five best matches as per their specific requirements, and let them pick one,” explains co-founder Piyush Patel.

Stumbling upon the idea

Piyush Patel and Ankit Dudhwewala, co-founders of SoftwareSuggest

Ankit Dudhwewala was working with Salud Care, a pharma company with over 500 employees, when he stumbled upon the startup idea. Salud Care decided to go for an ERP software, and started hunting for the best choice. “In 2008, Salud started the process of finding an ERP software and found a good match only in 2012 after trying out three vendors. In the process, the company not only incurred a direct loss of money, it also lost important data, had to train its 500-odd employees multiple times, and lost some key customers,” Dudhwewala says.

According to him, the problem was the lack of information regarding various software options available, an absence of credible reviews on the service quality of the vendors, and disparities in pricing.

So he roped in his friend Patel, borrowed money from family, and kicked off SoftwareSuggest in January this year to try and solve that problem.

Is India ready for a software marketplace?

But are India’s small business ready for all this? Not entirely, the entrepreneurs admit candidly: