The Problem No One in Tech Talks About
In India, millions of Kirana (local retail) stores still manage accounts in physical notebooks.
Credit entries.
Customer balances.
Daily transactions.
All written manually.
When I visited local shop owners, I noticed something:
They don’t need “another dashboard.”
They need something simple.
Something they already use.
They use WhatsApp.
That’s where DukaanMitra started.
Why WhatsApp-First?
Most SaaS products assume:
Laptop access
Dashboard literacy
English fluency
But small shop owners:
Prefer Hindi
Use mobile
Trust messaging apps more than dashboards
So instead of building a traditional SaaS panel first,
I asked:
What if the accounting system works inside WhatsApp?
The Architecture Behind DukaanMitra
Under the hood, it’s a full multi-tenant SaaS.
Tech Stack:
Firebase Authentication
Firestore (tenant-scoped architecture)
Custom RBAC using claims
Server-side AI processing
WhatsApp message parsing layer
Aggregated analytics engine
Data model:
tenants/{tenantId}
customers/
transactions/
analytics/
Every shop = isolated tenant.
Security rules enforce strict tenant boundary.
The AI Layer
When a shopkeeper sends:
“Ravi ke khate me 500 likh do”
The system:
Parses natural language
Detects customer
Identifies amount
Creates structured transaction
Updates balance
Logs analytics
All without manual dashboard interaction.
AI runs server-side.
Never exposed to client.
Rate-limited per tenant.
Why This Is Harder Than It Looks
Most AI demos work in isolation.
But in production SaaS:
You need cost control
You need tenant isolation
You need role control
You need audit logs
You need failure recovery
AI + accounting + multi-tenancy = serious engineering.
Security First Mindset
In DukaanMitra:
No frontend-only role checks
No shared tenant collections
Separate staging & production projects
Strict Firestore rules
Custom claims-based RBAC
Because financial data cannot leak.
The Real Mission
This is not just a tech experiment.
The mission is simple:
Help small Indian businesses move from notebook → digital
Without forcing them to learn complex systems.
If tech cannot adapt to users,
it’s not innovation.
What I’m Exploring Next
Smarter AI transaction categorization
Credit risk scoring for local shops
Analytics dashboard for shop health
Cost-optimized scaling
If you’re building multi-tenant SaaS, AI agents, or WhatsApp-based systems —
I’d love to connect and exchange ideas.
— Amit Sharma
Founder @ DukaanMitra
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