A match made in heaven for service pros, clients

The 11-year old Chennai based outfit returned to profitability in 2017, thanks to significant enhancements to the platform, including moving the infrastructure to the cloud. 

Satya Prabhakar, the CEO, tells us, “We refer to our platform as a matchmaker, connecting service professionals with prospective leads i.e. customers. We help these customers find the ‘right’ services as opposed what an aggregator does. Our top four cities are Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai. Almost 20 per cent of the total searches come from Chennai.” 

There are 65,000 SMBs live on the platform. He explains, “Per month, we generate between 2-3 million leads. The conversion rate varies across cities and categories. It usually hovers around 20 to 60 per cent. It’s because to employ low-cost services such as movers and packers, people take shorter time to decide. On the other hand, people looking for play-schools are known for being notoriously selective. When you look at large value services like architects, it’s a minimum four-month lead time before you fix on a service provider, owing to the back and forth such deals entail.” Talking about the company’s transition period, three years ago, Satya says, “Our hand was forced into making this transition from being a Yellow Pages provider to a Local Services Need Fulfilment role. If you consider pure play listings or information services, search engines do a commendable job. Google is great when it comes to access or retrieval of structured information (like a directory).”

He elaborates, “But, as we had absolutely no work there, we had to move up the value chain, both for the business and the user. We realised there was an opportunity in providing customers with qualified leads for service professionals. We had a hard time, jumping over the chasm of value addition, but we have managed to do it. Today, we are at a break-even point, profitability wise. The company will be looking at entering Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities shortly.”