Having been through similar circumstances, 4 IITians decided to finally come up with a personalised online solution. The new portal known as Gapoon helps one connect with the local tradesman.
Sharing his experience, exclusively with IndianMediaBook, Apoorva Mishra, CEO, Gapoon, said, “I had lived in various towns and cities and there was one common problem with each place – it was incredibly hard to find a good vendor for home maintenance. Every time I shifted houses, I would have to find a new local electrician, a plumber, someone to clean the house and so on. As a working professional, this became a drain on my time and resources, and I realized that several others were also facing the same problem.”
Gapoon eases the process and helps consumers hire professionals such as plumbers, electricians, computer repairmen, house cleaners, pest control, appliance repairmen, painters, and carpenters.
The inception of Gapoon
Post graduating from IIT Kanpur in 2013, Mishra’s professional choices needed him to move his base to Bangalore. That’s when he faced several hurdles and a tough time.
He realized the need of a reliable service provider that could be availed at a single click. Considering the importance of plumbers or electricians as good as doctors Mishra believes it is better to trust someone, who could rather deal with all your problems, regardless of which part of town you are in. That led to the birth of Gapoon in March 2015.
“Three of my close friends from IIT Kanpur were also in Bangalore during this time. And they were keen on combining our mutual strengths and making it a reality.” added Mishra.
The venture is angel funded as of now. Since the start, Gapoon’s strategy has been to increase the profitability and reduce the cash burn to as low as possible.
“Therefore, we plan our marketing, expansion and resources very carefully. As a result of our efforts, we stand asa 75 per cent gross profitable company today,” added Mishra.
The scope & opportunity
We live in a society and home maintenance is a basic requirement. Thus, undoubtedly the scope is huge in this space. The question is how far will consumersbe willing to struggle through multiple vendors and compromise on quality. This is where home maintenance providers like Gapoon enter the picture.
“Service providers like Gapoon are gaining ground – because we offer simple, easy solutions, reliable quality and warranty as well. The market is yet quite unorganized, but we are headed towards organizing at least a part of it, expressed Mishra.
According to Mishra, there is a huge scope for startups in this space. Commenting on the opportunity for startups, Mishra said, “It is a big space and there is space for a lot of people. Snapdeal recently conducted a case study regarding the size of home maintenance service industry in India. With 3 Billion+ jobs completed annually, it has been called one of the largest disorganized markets in India. So that gives a perspective on the expected opportunity in this space. The question is how many startups will be able to sustain the same level of quality of service they start off with.”
The online space does have a strong role to play, since it enables better connectivity and ease of operations. A majority of it is online. Most people today are always mobile and have much lesser time for home maintenance. Hence, it makes perfect sense for these solutions to be available online.
The challenges
The online home maintenance sector is unorganized, thus the first challenge is to find well-trained professionals as service provider partners. Team Gapoon spent more than a few months roaming the streets to find proficient vendors. Language barriers made this job extra demanding.
The second biggest challenge is retaining the loyalty of your vendors and customers, and matching them in the best possible way. To overcome with such challenges, Gapoon opted for analgorithm that matches the vendor to a particular requirement, and this is a constant learning algorithm.
Mishra informed that being a B2C market, reaching out to target customers and marketing with budget constraints for any start-up are one of the biggest challenges. But as the product is evolving, Gapoon has come up with effective ways and have implemented standard operating procedures to overcome such challenges.
The team Gapoon
The core team of Gapoon consists of 8 people and work force of 150 vendors. It has developed an in-house fully automatic lead dispatch system called CMS (Central Management System) through which it can electronically trace all the leads in each step until completion. Apart from this, there is a designated operations team headed by Nikhil Gupta, COO, which overlooks vendor on-boarding, quality control etc. Ankita Asai as CMO is responsible for the marketing operations and Ankit Bindal as CTO is taking care of technical operations at Gapoon.
The mechanism
At present Gapoon is based out of Bangalore.In nine months, the venture has managed to serve over 9000 customers and is planning toexpand its reach to other cities including Tier II cities in the next few quarters.
Mishra informed that Gapoon follows a very strict selection procedure for its service partners wherein they are selectively recruited, with their backgrounds verified andthen well trained. Once selected, we identify all the attributes such as location preference, job type etc. The venture collects fixed commission per transacted job in the on-demand service model.
Gapoon follows two revenue models. First is the marketplace model where a fix percentage commission has been charged from vendors per job.
Another one is the subscription model, GMC, where the users pay a fix cover cost for their preferred package.
The vision
Currently Gapoon is looking out for service portfolio expansion for which they might look forward to mergers. However, this is not the primary focus as of now.
On the business end, Gapoon recently introduced the Gapoon Maintenance Cover which is a subscription-based package model. Prior to this, the venture was running through a beta phase, and has now signed up with a substantial number of people. It intends to develop this product over the next few months.
“Geographically, we are looking at expanding to 5 cities in the coming quarters. We are in parallel working on service portfolio expansion. With our unique ability to control the service quality along with the addition of Gapoon Maintenance Cover (GMC – A Subscription based model), we are confident of capturing market across the country in coming months. GMC Packages also covers costs for any spare parts under Rs 200, and a warranty of 30 days on its service, which have been Gapoon’s standard value offerings, concluded Mishra.
