Speaking about the inception of Butterfly, Luv Gupta, Founder & CEO, Butterfly said, “To make the whole exercise so simple that more people are encouraged to start following their passion and to take an hour or so from their hectic lives to do something that they truly love. So we have created a mobile based platform that disseminates information about the listed and registered merchant(s) services viz. activity details, location, pricing, schedule etc to the user, thereby leading to online or offline subscription of the respective service.”
In May 2015, Butterfly raised its first set of investment from Chandrabhanu Patta joshi, Founder, Glossaread and he joined the venture as an advisor on operations and business. Later in September 2015 it raised the second round of angel funds by a group of HNI investors that helped Butterfly in launching its services Delhi. Presently the app is operational in Delhi/NCR and receives 500 transactions on monthly basis; its turnover is 3, 00,000 rupees approximately.
Opportunity v/s challenges
According to Gupta, in terms of numbers the opportunity is as big as $1 Billion/year in our country. Today consumer can buy everything online, from needle to a house, and these services that are consumed by millions are still not aggregated online.
He informed that the major challenge is changing the consumer behaviour. When Butterfly was launched, it was difficult for consumers to adapt because they had never paid and booked for a gym session, dance classes or a cooking course. But its changing very fast and now people are warming up.
“We get requests and queries wanting to know when we will expand to Bangalore and Mumbai. And it’s from both the consumers and the service providers. The trend is changing with them as well. They also want online presence and want to adapt to our methods of doing business, added Gupta.
Also team Butterfly realized that the selections of services which they are aggregating are quite similar to that of any belonging to a hyper local system. No amount of marketing and benefits can break the consumer from their traditional methods to start using Butterfly. To deal with this, they decided to penetrate the consumers through the signed partnerships. Butterfly is capitalizing on years of their local presence and customer relationships.
The team
The day to day technical and business operations at Butterfly are managed by a team of 10. Gupta informed that every Tuesday morning, they organise team meeting to review the activities and performance of previous week, followed by planning of week ahead.
The business model
Butterfly follows two revenue models. First is commissions from the service provider on transactions done via ButterflyApp. Second is Butterfly for Business.
“After intensive research and understanding we have built a complete backend management ERP solution for these vendors to structure their business. They can manage payments, accounts, consumer behaviour, customer relationship, analytics, inventory and everything else. Right now it’s in the trial stage, starting May we will initiate a monthly subscription model around it”, expressed Gupta.
In commission based model Butterfly charge a certain percentage of the total business driven through the products. Also, team is constantly working on understanding the service provider’s pain points and challenges that has resulted in us building Butterfly for Business. To all its signed partnerships it has given this web based platform to ease their work and to bring some structure in their management.
Demographics
The primary target of Butterfly is 18+, the young adults and working professionals. Gupta believes that in this certain group all of them want to follow some kind of hobby or an activity.
According to the analytics of Butterfly 40 per cent of its consumers have an interest towards fitness related activities, followed by music, dance and sports. Within sports, Tennis has been a big surprise. It is much more sought after than the usual suspects like cricket and football.
Future plans
Lots of acquisitions are taking place in the industry, but Butterfly is not planning such things at the moment. However, Gupta mentioned that his venture is open to a mutually benefitting alliance where it can work on a content sharing, revenue sharing or similar kind of business models.
Gupta informed that an engaging social platform is already in the pipeline which will bring like-minded people together with chats, forums and blogs. The venture is also working on e-tailing products associated with all these activities in order to become a complete solution provider to the consumer.
“Our vision is to make Butterfly the largest destination of hobbies and activities in the country. In two years we would be present in the top 20 cities and would be aggregating approximately 5 lakh services coming from more 40,000 service providers across the country”, concluded Gupta.
