LAZY INDIAN’S GUIDE TO GOOD LIFE if in Mumbai
area
God bless entrepreneurship. Now
you don’t have to move out of the house. You can have your virtual personal
assistant, service provider for household chores, pacakaged ready-to-cook food ..
Service Charges
At Your Service Mumbai
Service Charges
At Your Service Mumbai
What: Your very own virtual personal assistant
Where: Mumbai
How much can a good telephone and internet connection help
in setting up a business? Quite a lot, if you go by 27-year-old Bharat Ahirwar’s
10-month old business At Your Service Mumbai (AYSM). A virtual personal
assistant service, AYSM gives you a PA all for 10,000 a month to take care of
anything from handling official documentation, setting reminders, researching
for places to eat to organising payment of bills and more. How it works? You
hire an assistant, Ahirwar gives you one of his three trained staff. The
helpful voice calls you at 9 am everyday to check on the chore list. She signs
off at 6.30 pm with a full report on what happened, what’s pending, what’s
needed.
“It’s cheaper than the standard PA, which comes for 15,000 and even then may not be trained,” he says. And he doesn’t like to call it a concierge service — “they are over-priced and task-oriented”. The former marketing professional started out with BigHelp, a Mumbai-based PA service firm for singles. It shut down in 2010. But Ahirwar saw potential in this field. Hiring three office assistants and 2 office boys who run errands for an additional 100 — he set up AYSM. To attract the client he gives a ten-day free trial. “We also handle ticket bookings, holiday planning and even shopping chores,” he says. In fact, he has helped a client charter a plane and scouted for best jazz bars in Paris.
Today, they have 22 annual clients and also service monthly clients, most of them expats and NRIs. When push comes to shove they even act as translators between their expat clients and their domestic help! Ahirwar, who has three clients in Pune, plans to start an At Your Service Pune soon and in 6-8 months shift the action to Hyderabad and Chennai. “Anyone can get leads calling online yellow pages but it’s the end-to-end coordination that we provide which simplifies life,” he says.
“It’s cheaper than the standard PA, which comes for 15,000 and even then may not be trained,” he says. And he doesn’t like to call it a concierge service — “they are over-priced and task-oriented”. The former marketing professional started out with BigHelp, a Mumbai-based PA service firm for singles. It shut down in 2010. But Ahirwar saw potential in this field. Hiring three office assistants and 2 office boys who run errands for an additional 100 — he set up AYSM. To attract the client he gives a ten-day free trial. “We also handle ticket bookings, holiday planning and even shopping chores,” he says. In fact, he has helped a client charter a plane and scouted for best jazz bars in Paris.
Today, they have 22 annual clients and also service monthly clients, most of them expats and NRIs. When push comes to shove they even act as translators between their expat clients and their domestic help! Ahirwar, who has three clients in Pune, plans to start an At Your Service Pune soon and in 6-8 months shift the action to Hyderabad and Chennai. “Anyone can get leads calling online yellow pages but it’s the end-to-end coordination that we provide which simplifies life,” he says.
What: Connects the consumer to service provider for
everyday chores
Where: Mumbai
Co-founder and techie Tanvi Surti lets us know at the very
beginning that this is not a new concept. Task-related sites have been existing
in the US
for many years now. Taskrabbit being one of them. Chachii, of course, takes the
core idea — of liasing consumers with appropriate labour — from there. But
working in India
has its own peculiarities. Firstly, it’s not a web-based model — they are still
beta-testing the website. “We are connected to our labour force of 100
[includes plumbers, packers & movers, maids] through SMS as they are not
web-savvy,” she says. Surti, who has in the past worked with Microsoft in the US, started
Chachii with business partner and fellow techie Nikhil Goyal in 2010.
The major challenge was to make people understand that they are “not a concierge service or a maid hiring firm”. Chachii works on the basis of tasks given. People go online and detail tasks and immediately they send out 10 messages to their workforce and whoever responds first gets the job. They get the commission. It can be anything simple like picking up movie tickets to grocery shopping, cleaning up duties, flower delivery or requests for household repair — from painters, plumbers or electricians. “The customer has to mention a timeline and budget and we will match their request with a vendor in our network,” she explains. Surti says everyday has been a challenge from getting the right quality of people — they interview and verify each vendor with them — to explaining the nitty gritty of working of the module. The back-end — the SMS platform — took them around 10 months to make. “Most of our clientele is the younger tech-savvy generation in the 25-35-year age bracket — a majority being working singles and nuclear families.” Incidentally, if you refer a vendor you get redeemable Chachii credits. They plan to take Chachii to Bangalore — “because they understand technology better there”.
Packaged Right
Heat 2 Eat
The major challenge was to make people understand that they are “not a concierge service or a maid hiring firm”. Chachii works on the basis of tasks given. People go online and detail tasks and immediately they send out 10 messages to their workforce and whoever responds first gets the job. They get the commission. It can be anything simple like picking up movie tickets to grocery shopping, cleaning up duties, flower delivery or requests for household repair — from painters, plumbers or electricians. “The customer has to mention a timeline and budget and we will match their request with a vendor in our network,” she explains. Surti says everyday has been a challenge from getting the right quality of people — they interview and verify each vendor with them — to explaining the nitty gritty of working of the module. The back-end — the SMS platform — took them around 10 months to make. “Most of our clientele is the younger tech-savvy generation in the 25-35-year age bracket — a majority being working singles and nuclear families.” Incidentally, if you refer a vendor you get redeemable Chachii credits. They plan to take Chachii to Bangalore — “because they understand technology better there”.
Packaged Right
Heat 2 Eat
What: Packaged ready-to-cook food
Where: Mumbai
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Or in Pankti Chheda’s
case, gives you a business idea. As a student in Manchester, Chheda has horrifying memories of
many a frozen vegetarian —which she is — meals and Indian ready-to-eat food
brands. “I faced a real problem and most of the options available are the kinds
you can’t eat beyond two days,” she says. This constant hunger for better food
made her convince her mother to create a tasty ready-to-eat packaged food that
doesn’t taste like rubber or worse, blubber. Together the mom-daughter duo have
launched Heat2Eat, a packaged ready-to-eat food line, that is compressed in
room temperature. “There’s a real demand out there — from Indian students to
hardcore vegetarian travellers — who like to pack their own food,” she says. No
need to carry your khakras and theplas from home, the Cheddas have simplified
your work with their own doggy bags for travellers. You can take your pick from
the poha, masala khichdi, upma, Gujarati dal and missal. Chheda is currently
using her Facebook and friend network for the brand and is busy recruiting a
band of student consultants. Food for thought, for sure.
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