teaJunction
mjunction is one of India’s largest B2B e-commerce companies. teaJunction was a 0→1 bet: bring transparent digital price discovery to a centuries-old, relationship-driven wholesale tea trade.
India’s wholesale tea trade ran on opaque, relationship-bound auctions with no transparent digital price discovery.
You can’t launch a two-sided marketplace half-built. Liquidity is the product.
Designed for trust first — in a relationship-bound trade, the digital mechanism had to feel as reliable as the handshake it replaced.
Sequenced supply and demand carefully so neither side showed up to an empty room.
Kept the mechanism simple enough that traders who had never bought online could transact on day one.
Building a marketplace in a traditional industry is 20% product and 80% earning the right to change how money moves. The tech was the easy part; the trust was the work. This is where I learned that mechanisms — not features — are what compound in a marketplace.