When Harsh Vardhan Mandad and his Mumbai flatmates brainstormed ideas for the next killer app, they fuelled the sessions with late-night deliveries of local fare. The curry rice and spicy wraps inspired their big breakthrough.
They started Tiny Owl, a smartphone application that helps hungry city dwellers scour nearby eateries for deliveries. The service now handles 2,000 orders each day and has caught the interest of venture funds including Sequoia Capital, an early backer of technology giants such as Apple and Oracle.
India is becoming the land of the errand app. A growing number of start-ups cater to people who want to avoid the poor roads and polluted air, and can afford to do so because of the plentiful cheap labour. Almost anyone can use an app to have someone pick up groceries, drop off a letter at the post office or prepare a lunch that runs to 75 rupees (Dh4) with delivery.
“People today want to do as much as possible with their phones,” says the TinyOwl co-founder Mr Mandad, who graduated from Mumbai’s Indian Institute of Technology in 2012. “It is a friction just to go out – there’s the heavy traffic, pollution and waiting involved for a cab.”
The start-ups are carving out niches by serving certain neighbourhoods, realising the “hyper-local” strategy long envisioned in more developed countries including the US.
Need your bike serviced, your dry-cleaning picked up or even your own errand boy for a few hours? There are services for all that. There are also at least a dozen start-ups focused on food and grocery delivery, with angel investors and venture capital firms lining up to invest.
Traffic snarl-ups in big Indian cities are an everyday occurrence – something that has translated to fewer visitors in stores.
“Earlier it used to be a pastime to go to the malls on a weekend,” says the retail consultant Ashok Deenadayalu, who has had a 24-year career at some of the nation’s largest chains such as Reliance Retail and Metro. “Now it’s just a torture.”
Mr Mandad's Tiny Owl raised US$16 million from investors including Matrix Partners and Sequoia Capital in its second funding round in February. The size of the potential market in India makes it attractive for entrepreneurs to build businesses that are near-replicas of existing services in the West, and tweak them for Indian realities. Tiny Owl's model is similar to that of Chicago-based GrubHub, while the Yumist founder Alok Jain compares his service to Rocket Internet's EatFirst service that offers £7 (Dh38) lunches of coq au vin and other dishes to Londoners.
“In India, street food isn’t hygienic and getting proper meals in the office is a huge pain,” says Mr Jain, who worked at Yelp’s Indian competitor Zomato.com before starting his own venture. “We’re not in this to run a restaurant.”
These companies put a modern, tech-enabled spin on a traditional food delivery service that has existed for more than a century in some Indian cities. For instance, Mumbai delivery men, known as dabbawalas, pick up home-cooked lunchboxes from about 130,000 households each morning, deliver them to the respective office workers by the afternoon, then carry the empty containers back to the homes.
Each lunchbox is picked up by a man in a bicycle or push cart, loaded on to local trains and then onward to buses or more push carts for the final hop to the recipient’s office. This Mumbai institution traces its roots to 1890, when India was still a part of the British Empire.
Yumist’s service adds a twist to the tradition. With the press of a button in the app, customers can choose between two lunch options each morning and can opt out any day. Delivery men are typically in their 20s, wear uniforms and use their Android phones to manage orders.
Another start-up, called GetMyPeon, found its niche helping time-strapped corporate executives deposit cheques or pick up flower bouquets. The Mumbai-based company provides a concierge service that offers English-speaking, Android phone-toting, errand boys on demand.
“People come to us with all kinds of requests; someone wants a bill paid, another left his iPhone charger at a friend’s party and wants us to pick it up,” says Bharat Ahirwar, who started the service in 2012 and now has about 2,000 customers.
These services are not without their challenges, and some pay little attention to customer service, says Shrutin Shetty, founder of A-Team Business Consulting which advises start-ups.
“Companies need to realise that a beautiful app or interface is not enough,” Mr Shetty said. “It’s the back end that matters.”
* Bloomberg News
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