The number of companies (big ones, public ones!) where I can't for the life of me figure out what they sell from their website is truly astonishing. I understand that 1) if I can't understand it I'm not in their market, and 2) they probably want to be vague so they can sell their prospects whatever they ask for [1] but I still feel that they could gain a lot in the long term through brand awareness and people like becoming or meeting their target customer (but not having had any idea what that company did) by making a clear articulation of what the hell they do.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.
partly it is because in India you need licensing to sell fireworks , the demand is very very uneven, during Diwali season it is 10-30x compared to the rest of the year.
the fire hazard and pollution issues and till a while back child labour concerns as well is why it is regulated
The permanent year around sellers are few and serve as dealer than retailer . During the season they do both .
It was more sourcing a dealer on the fly and pretty common for fireworks .
Price is very fluctuating and there are huge markups due to the nature of demand .
Discerning buyers go to largest shop/wholesaler to get best price.
I knew a wholesaler/ early e-commerce player in this space (bigger players do not this due to regulatory challenges ). He will make his orders in January for delivery in august for season starting in sept/oct and typically paid 10%-15% list price at most.
Your "funny story" is very fitting here... there's a lot of value hidden in just knowing how to interface with AWS.
Lot of companies are actually the middleman between you and AWS (e.g. Heroku which provides managed databases, Redis instances, etc. which are all hosted in AWS.) Meaning that you are not the client of AWS; Heroku is.
[1] Funny story, I was at a market in India and asked a guy selling toys and things if he had any fireworks. He asked me a lot of questions about what I wanted, but I couldn't see any evidence of him having such a wide variety of stuff. Then he sprinted off and asked his neighbor vendor to watch his stall. He came back 5 minutes later with a ton of fireworks to my liking, I bought what I wanted and then he went back to the fireworks guy with his leftovers. I assume that in a split second he negotiated a deal with that guy where he borrowed the fireworks, sold me what he could, and took the rest back. I don't know what he marked me up but I hope it was a lot.