I was updating another row in the inventory sheet when I realised I had been at it for two hours and we still hadn’t sold anything.
This was early days. Vedikaura existed as a name, a concept, a registration, and a spreadsheet. That was it. The spreadsheet was growing faster than the business.
I made the first tracker before we had confirmed suppliers, before we had product photos, before we had a single listing live. I made it because doing nothing felt worse than building the infrastructure for things that didn’t exist yet. Looking back, I think it was also a way of making the business feel real when it had almost no external evidence of being real.
The first version had columns for product name, supplier, country of origin, unit cost, quantity available, quantity to order, lead time, and notes. By the third version, I had added columns for Amazon listing status, image status, description status, pricing status, and a column I titled “Mohit confirmed authenticity” which was just a yes/no field but felt important to have explicitly.
Mohit looked at it once and said something like — “you’ve made a spreadsheet for things we don’t have yet.” He wasn’t wrong. But he also started using it within a week.
The thing about an inventory sheet in the early days of a spiritual products business is that it forces you to make decisions you’re not ready for. How many units of something do you order when you don’t know if anyone will buy it? What’s the minimum viable inventory for a product category — how many different rudraksha mukhis do you stock when each one has a different significance and a different customer looking for it?
These aren’t questions with clean answers. They’re judgment calls made on incomplete information, which is what all early business decisions are.
I made a lot of conservative calls in the beginning. Small initial orders. Enough to get listings live and learn what was actually moving before committing to more. Some of those calls were right. Some of them meant we ran out of something that was performing before we’d reordered. Learning either way.
The inventory sheet isn’t glamorous content. It’s not the part of building Vedikaura that makes for a good Instagram post. But it’s the part I spent the most time on in the first few months, and it’s the part that made everything else possible.
There’s something grounding about a spreadsheet when you’re building something uncertain. It’s the most concrete thing you have. It tells you what you have, what you need, what’s coming, what’s overdue. In the absence of revenue or proof that any of this is going to work, a well-maintained tracker is the closest thing to control you’ve got.
If I were starting again, I’d build the tracker on day one — before the first supplier conversation, before the first photo. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to exist.