What to sell in India: find the gaps people search

You do not have to guess what to sell in India. People type what they want into Amazon every day. Some of those searches come back with nothing good. Those gaps are called null sets, and finding them costs you ₹0 and one evening on your phone.

This guide shows you how. It also shows you three ways to find the same gaps offline, without any tool at all.

What a null set is

A null set is a search that finds no good answer.

Someone wants a face serum in a 50 ml bottle. They type it. Almost every result is 30 ml. The demand is real. The shelf is thin.

That gap is a product waiting to be made.

Ananth Narayanan built brands this way. He runs Mensa Brands, which buys and grows Indian consumer brands. On WTF is with Nikhil Kamath Ep #11 (released 7 October 2023), he said some of his brands develop products "primarily through thinking through search".

He described the method in one line. Find "where are people searching and not finding anything", he said, "and that's what you start launching".

His own example was exactly the one above. Vitamin C serum was not new, he said. But people were searching for a format few sellers offered: "They're searching for vitamin C 50 ml."

That is the useful part. The gap is usually a size, a format or a variant. It is rarely a whole new idea. You do not need to invent anything.

How to decide what to sell in India, for ₹0

Do this on your phone tonight. It costs nothing.

1. Open Amazon. Type a category word you know. Something like "face serum" or "cotton kurta".
2. Let autocomplete finish it. You will see the phrases the box offers you. Treat them as a hint about what gets typed, not as proof.
3. Write down every suggestion that names a size, format, quantity, material or use — "50 ml", "for oily skin", "500 g", "plus size".
4. Search each one. Look hard at the results.
5. Repeat on Flipkart and Meesho. The same word often has different gaps on each.

Do thirty of these over an evening. Keep the ones where the results looked thin.

Now rank them. Put the terms autocomplete offered you first and most often at the top — the box surfaces them for a reason. That order is your shortlist. Narayanan's own version of this step is to "stack rank them by volume", so the most-searched gap with no answer sits first.

Where the gaps usually are

You will find more if you know where to look. In India, the same five gaps come up again and again.

Size and quantity. A product exists, but not in the size people want. Trial sizes for a first-time buyer. Large packs for a joint family. The 50 ml bottle when everyone sells 30 ml. This is the most common gap and the easiest to fill, because the product already works — you are changing the container.

Price step. There is a ₹200 version and a ₹900 version, and nothing at ₹450. Look at the price filter on any category page. A wide empty band in the middle is a gap you can see in five seconds.

Climate and use. Products built for a different country. Sunscreen that suits humid coastal weather. Hair oil for hard water. Fabric weight for a Chennai summer rather than a Delhi winter.

Regional and language. Search in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali or Marathi and you get a different result page than in English. Fewer sellers optimise for those terms, so the shelf is thinner there.

Season. Wedding season, Diwali, exam months, monsoon. Search demand moves in a shape you can see on Google Trends, and stock often does not move with it.

Run your thirty searches with these five in mind and your list will be twice as long.

The part most people get wrong

You are looking for a full page of wrong answers, not an empty page.

Sometimes Amazon does say "No results". More often it shows you something close instead. You search for 50 ml and get 30 ml, then a moisturiser, then something unrelated. The page is full, so you assume there is no gap and move on.

That full page is the gap. People asked for one thing and the site offered another, because the right thing is not there.

So check every result page twice. First: are these actually the thing I searched for? Second: if not, how far off are they? The further off, the bigger the gap.

Free tools, and what each one actually does

Three free tools, three different jobs. None of them replaces the next.

Autocomplete shows you the gap itself. Free. Works on a phone.

Google Keyword Planner gives you rough size. It is free and needs a Google Ads account, but no advertising spend. You can filter by India and by language. The catch: without active ad spend it shows ranges like "1K–10K", not exact numbers. That is enough to rank ideas. It is not enough to size a market.

Google Trends shows direction, not size. Google's own documentation is clear that the numbers are scaled 0 to 100 and are not search volume. A score of 80 does not mean many people. It means 80% of that term's own peak. What Trends does well is show movement: is interest in this rising or falling over time? You can filter down to city level. But be careful comparing two cities — each place is scored against its own total searches, so a high score in a small town does not mean more people than a low score in Mumbai.

Use Trends for direction, Keyword Planner for rough size, autocomplete for the gap.

What the paid tools cost

You do not need one to start. You will hear the names, so here is what they actually cost.

Prices from each company's own pricing page, checked 7 August 2026, converted at ₹95.15 to the dollar. Both bill in dollars, so your bank adds a foreign transaction fee on top.

Start free, and pay when the tool would save you a real decision.

The free tier and autocomplete get you a shortlist. That is enough to pick a first product.

A paid plan earns its money later, and for a specific job: when you are developing your own products and need to compare dozens of variants, track how demand for a term moves month by month, or check a category before committing to a production run. At that point ₹9,400 is small against what a wrong batch costs.

What it does not do is tell you whether people want the thing. That part stays offline.

What about Amazon's own data?

Amazon gives sellers a free tool called Brand Analytics. One of its reports, Top Search Terms, shows what people search for across the whole site — not just for your own brand. That sounds perfect for this.

Two catches.

You probably cannot open it yet. It needs a Professional seller account and enrolment in Amazon Brand Registry. Brand Registry normally requires a registered or pending trademark. If you have not launched anything, you do not have one, so the tool is out of reach until later.

It may not show what you need. Amazon's own description covers which terms people search and which products they click. It says nothing about searches that returned nothing. So even once you can open it, do not expect it to hand you a list of gaps.

It is worth knowing about for the day you have a registered brand. It is not the way in.

Also: before using any tool that pulls data off a platform, check that platform's seller rules. They change.

Three ways to find the same gaps offline

Search data tells you what people typed. It does not tell you why they hesitated, what they asked the shopkeeper, or what they picked up and put back.

These three routes cost nothing and often beat the screen.

Ask the people who already know

Every marketplace has category managers — the people who run one product area, decide what gets stocked and see the sales data you cannot. Former ones will talk. Current ones usually cannot.

Find two ex-employees of Myntra, Nykaa, Ajio or Amazon on LinkedIn who ran your category. Message them. Ask exactly this:

Is there an opportunity in this category?
Is there an opportunity at a certain price point?
Is there an opportunity at a certain design?

Three questions, thirty seconds to send. The answers come back specific — plus sizes, oversized, pop culture — because these people spent years watching what sold and what did not.

This is the highest-value free research available to an Indian founder, and almost nobody does it.

Ask your kirana owner

Raj Shamani, who builds brands at House of X, pointed out that in India the shopkeeper is a key influencer. In a distribution-led market, he said, the shopkeeper is who convinces the buyer.

A kirana owner knows what customers ask for. They also know what customers ask for and leave without buying. That second list is a null set, and it is free.

Walk into three shops near you. Buy something small first — you are taking their time. Then ask these four:

What do people ask for that you do not keep?
What did you stop keeping, and why?
What sells out fastest?
What do customers complain about after they buy?

The second question is the one that saves you money. It tells you what already failed on that shelf, and why. That is a dead gap someone else paid to discover.

Do this in three shops in one afternoon and you will hear the same two or three things repeated. Repetition across shops is your signal.

Go and watch

Kishore Biyani, who built Big Bazaar, said you have to keep your eyes and ears open and follow whatever is getting popular.

Standing in a shop and watching what people pick up, hesitate over and put back is not old-fashioned. It is the only way to see the hesitation. No dataset records that.

Where this method does not work

There is a trap here, and Narayanan named it.

Not all platforms work by search. He divides them in two.

On a search-led platform you type what you want. Amazon is one. On a visibility-led platform you browse and get inspired. Myntra and Ajio are those.

On a visibility-led platform, search tells you less. Narayanan's advice there is to read the visibility triggers instead.

Look at the filters the platform offers. Look at what it puts in "what's new" and "what's hot". Those rails show what the platform is pushing, and the filters show what shoppers sort by. That is your demand signal there.

Is the gap real, or is it dead?

Here is the fair objection: if nobody sells it, maybe there is no money in it.

Sometimes that is exactly right. A gap can be empty for a good reason.

A gap is probably dead when:

• the product needs a licence you cannot get
• it is too costly to ship at that size or weight
• the format genuinely does not work
• one big seller already owns the demand under another word

A gap is probably live when:

• people keep typing it, month after month
• close substitutes sell well, so the need is proven
• the only thing missing is the size, the format or the variant

Then test it. Narayanan put the underlying rule plainly: "You cannot sell something what they don't want."

He did not say how to check that. Here is what we would do. Ask ten people who fit your buyer. Not friends. Ask what they use now and what annoys them about it. If nobody names your gap, you probably found a dead one, and you just saved your money.

Trends are local

One warning about copying what works abroad.

Nikhil Kamath asked the group whether to follow what is big overseas. Narayanan and Shamani both rejected it.

Raj Shamani put it most simply: "The belief system is different everywhere. So I don't think what works there will work here."

Narayanan said the same about products they chose not to bring to India, because he did not think they would appeal. It has to be local to your market, he said.

A gap in an American search box is not a gap in Indore.

What this costs

The whole method runs at ₹0. That is the honest version of what Narayanan called data that is "free and easy for anybody watching this podcast".

Limits

Be clear about what this does not do.

It finds gaps, not businesses. A gap tells you what to make. It says nothing about whether you can make it, ship it or price it well.

It favours things people search by name. Someone types "50 ml vitamin C serum". Nobody types the name of a product that does not exist yet. This method finds variants of known things. It will not find the next new category.

Free tools give you ranges, not numbers. You can rank ideas against each other. You cannot calculate a market size, and you should not pretend to.

Gaps close. If you can see it, others can too. Speed matters more than secrecy.

It works better for goods than services. A service gap rarely shows up in a marketplace search box.

You have a shortlist. Now what?

A gap is not a business yet. Three cheap checks, in this order, before you spend anything on stock.

1. Does anyone want it enough to say so? (₹0, one evening) Ask ten people who fit your buyer. Not friends — friends lie to be kind. Ask what they use now and what annoys them about it. If nobody names your gap unprompted, you probably found a dead one.

2. Will they pay? (under ₹1,000, one week) Put up one page or one Instagram post with a clear price and a way to pre-order. Run a small radius-targeted ad to your own city. You are not selling yet — you are counting how many people click a price and do not flinch. Refund anyone who pre-orders if you decide not to build.

3. Can you actually make it at that price? (₹0, a few calls) Search IndiaMART for a manufacturer in your category and ask two questions: what is your minimum order, and what does one unit cost at that minimum? If the numbers do not leave you a gap between cost and the price people accepted in step 2, the gap is real but not yours.

Most ideas die at step 3, and that is the point. Each step costs more than the last, so you are spending your cheapest resource first.

Start tonight

Open Amazon. Type one category you know well. Write down ten autocomplete suggestions that name a size or a format.

That is the first ten minutes. You will know by tomorrow whether there is anything there.

If you want the rest of the picture, read our guide to growing an Indian brand from zero to 500 crore, and the piece on why Indian shoppers buy what they buy. When you have picked your product, naming it well is the next decision that is hard to undo.

We are building a network of founders doing exactly this in India. Run the method, and tell us what you found — we publish what works, with your name on it if you want it there.

Source: WTF is with Nikhil Kamath, Episode 11 — "WTF Goes into Building a Fashion, Beauty, or Home Brand?", released 7 October 2023, with Ananth Narayanan, Kishore Biyani, Raj Shamani and Nikhil Kamath. Tool prices checked 7 August 2026.