Behind the scene
It’s quite surprising that after building a successful facilities management company, Vineet Pandey and Vishal Panchal launched RaghuKaka an online marketplace for home and lifestyle services. The main object of RaghuKaka is to set standards, use technology and years of honed processes to make hiring services as easy and reliable as buying products from eCommerce.
The reason behind this move is very simple and obvious too that owing a venture that employs over 700 skilled professionals for the corporate sector is easy, but whenever they looked to hire local service providers for household requirements, they were frustrated dealing with the unorganized options available.
Speaking about the idea behind RaghuKaka, Vineet Pandey, Co-Founder & CEO, said, “We realized that this was a big opportunity and the capability we had in delivering complex corporate facility solutions could be migrated to the retail sector as well. Raghukaka is an endeavour to bring this expertise and to the household market in India and was in the works since June 2015, and finally launched full steam by January 2016.”
Raghukaka is a self-funded venture by its founders and recently in month of April 2016, it has received angel investment from a senior corporate executive, an IIT 1995 Alumni and currently a Senior Director with a large Consulting Organization.
Market Size & opportunity
The opportunity in home service provider market in India is huge, as anything and everything that is consumed by households requiring skilled expertise comes under the scope of Home Service Providers. From Professional Anti-Bacterial Home Cleaning to Pest Control to Electricians, plumbers, AC Servicing, Kitchen Appliances Repair to Interior Designers to even Yoga Tutors; home owners constantly hire experts to keep their homes and lifestyles running.
However, Pandey opined that this market is largely unorganized, fragmented and completely non-standardized. Critically there are no skill certifications that exist which can bring a semblance of comparative yardsticks to measure capability and service deliverability
According to Pandey, it is estimated that there are over 20 million self-employed service providers targeting the home services market in India. By value, the market opportunity stands at anywhere between USD 12 billion to USD 18 billion.
The team RaghuKaka
The founding team of Raghukaka is backed by facilities Management Company, with over 700 employee base. Its current team has dedicated resources in Operations, Merchant Acquisition, Marketing, Product, Technology, Customer Service, Quality and Corporate Support.
Mechanism of RaghuKaka
Home service providers at RaghuKaka have been on-boarded as its service partners, after analysing them on various parameters such as Background Verifications, Skills, Customer Base, Quality of service delivery, years of experience etc.
Raghukaka generates over 300 requests a day from its various channels such as Call Centre, Mobile App, Website, etc.
The venture follows a commission based business model by passing confirmed orders to these service partners and charges a commission on every successful service delivery ranging from 15 per cent to 25 per cent.
Road ahead
RaghuKaka recently opened a walk-in home service store at Viviana Mall, with an objective to get close to the customer base and interact with them physically to understand their needs. With ecommerce itself a growing industry, Raghukaka believes in having all channels of touch points open to connect with their customer base.
Currently it is only present in Mumbai, Navi Mumbai and Thane. “We want to be the most recognized brand in Home Services within the next 2 years in Mumbai. We are keen to expand our services to all the metros of India in the next 2 to 3 years, concluded Pandey.
By: Raghvendra Shikhrani
This article was earlier published on IndianMediaBook
http://www.indianmediabook.com/startup-of-the-week-raghu-kaka-to-expand-its-reach-in-all-metro-cities-in-next-2-3-years/
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