We Will Never Be a Mobile-only Platform: Sulekha CEO
With over 200 categories like coaching, home and office service, entertainment, among others, it is the Craigslist of India, for consumers to find everything they need. Its CEO, Satya Prabhakar, has come a long way from being a first mover in the online classified business to seeing new players enter the now crowded marketplace. The company has recently received Rs 175 crore in funding and is looking to expand the platform and invest in technology and branding.But the next gen of Internet—the app-only model is making its presence felt in the dot com businesses. We spoke to CEO Prabhakar about how he's coping with competition, the advent of digitization and app-only platform, and has still managed to remain relevant for local businesses and users.
Read: IT's a Propeller Towards Fast Growth: Satya Prabhakar
You have been in this business since 2006. How have you managed to beat the competition and stay relevant
It was the year 2007 when we launched in India. In the same year, after we received funding from Northwest Venture Partners, there were 40 local services companies which received various funding for their ventures. There were some of them who conquered the business aspect of the equation. They were able to scale in terms of geographical spread, and add new customers. But as times changed and businesses moved away from the yellow pages paradigm, they weren't able to transpose their businesses online successfully. In short, they couldn't cross the chasm.
Around the same time, a number of digital start-ups were born. They, however, succeeded in capturing the user base, but not local businesses. If you look at the local classified business, every category is a market place by itself. Therefore, you need to create a balance of users and customers in every city category. That's the challenge of local service opportunity. That's why some businesses find it so difficult to exist.
At Sulekha, we succeeded in capturing a mix of both–local businesses and users. And we seek to improve user experience on users and customers.
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What has been the role of technology in your success
Technology is at the heart of what we do. Every day, we get 30,000 requests from users, and every user need is different from the other. Therefore, it’s not a one man’s job be able to match the need in real time and get the right business to connect with the user in a minute. We use analytics in order to capture user needs and connect them to relevant businesses.
How did you adapt to the changing online ecosystem
There are three fundamental drivers for both users and local businesses. The first is to reduce the time of getting a job done. The second is to reduce the cost of getting the need fulfilled and finally, the third is to decrease the hassle. For instance, for users, the hassle could be calling a business, and the business not calling you back or picking the wrong and low-quality business.
For local businesses, the hassle could involve the time it takes for them to get a prospective customer and close the sale or to find out how much he spends on a customer acquisition.
Therefore, we strive to increase the quantity of responses, to improve their quality, and to increase the agility in getting the need fulfilled. By staying focussed on these three things, we are able to determine what kind of technology investments we need to make, and hence, adapt better to the online ecosystem.
You launched a mobile app for android in 2013. How are you strengthening the mobile platform Do you plan to expand to other platforms
Most local businesses are extremely small and they are looking to pay small sums of money and receive targeted leads from Sulekha. They neither have brand presence, nor equity. So Sulekha offers an affordable, low-cost, highly targeted way to procure users, and mobile is one of the ways to do it. We have created an extremely successful mobile app for our users and local businesses such that consumers or businesses won’t have to open their laptops or desktops. Today, about 40 percent of our leads come from the mobile app. We have developed the app in-house and launched it on the Android platform. We are optimizing the app every two weeks. We will also be launching the app for iOS and Windows platforms in the next few weeks.
With some e-commerce orgs moving the mobile way, do you see yourself becoming a mobile-only platform as mobile advertising in India picks pace
There’s no need for us to do that. I don’t understand the logic to go mobile only. In the last 3-4 months, about 30 app-only companies were launched. A lot of these companies that are mobile-only will find it difficult to be discovered. In Sulekha’s case, we will be on all the platforms where our users are. We will not exclude any medium to reach our users. By 2017, we expect 75 percent of all our transactions will happen through the mobile app.
With new funding, what's your strategy towards rebranding Do you plan to incorporate payment services in the future
Our marketing and branding team will focus on the three fundamental drivers–time, cost and hassle–and the marketing campaign will encourage people to download the app to use it as well as browse the Web for Sulekha With new funding, we aren’t significantly changing what we do. We will continue to excel in one core service that we offer, but will expand in terms of cities and categories, and in turn, grow our users and businesses.