1) The Founders
Rakesh Gupta, Jeet Narayan Singh and Gagneet Singh Ahuja worked together at Noida Software Technology Park Ltd's JAINHITS, a distributor of satellite services to the media industry. Rakesh has a background in sales and business; Jeet is a B.Tech in Electronics and Telecommunications; and Gagneet is a finance professional with 10-12 years experience.
2) The Trigger
"Often we spent our entire weekend doing home repairs and running other errands. This got us thinking that there has to be an avenue that simplifies all these irritating but unavoidable tasks," says Jeet. A few players such as UrbanClap, HouseJoy and Quikr catered to this need, but the trio had a different business plan. "The existing players were mostly aggregators, so we decided to come up with an end-to-end business model where we hired our own technicians," says Jeet. They bootstrapped their venture in 2016 with Rs 1.25 crore. In just two years, the company turned cash positive.
3) The Differentiator
Existing players only provided a booking engine. Lifeasy has its own manpower. "We provide soft training as well as technical skills so that our technicians can multi-task. We have in-house trainers and a few outsourced ones," says Rakesh.
Lifeasy says it has no losses on its books. "The aggregators spend Rs 60-70 crore on marketing, and get only 15-20 per cent of what customers pay. We do not burn cash on marketing and get 100 per cent of what customers pay," says Jeet.
The start-up also caters to large companies, including banks and hospitals.
4) Challenges & Growth
"Finding technicians who could multi-task was a challenge. But we found that handpicking and training them is easy," says Rakesh. Demand was not an issue either, but growth and expansion were. "Typically, if you are growing slowly, you can keep adding technicians gradually, but when you have to enter many territories, expanding the network is a challenge because you are trying to do a lot of things in limited time," says Rakesh.
Lifeasy plans to expand in Mumbai and Bengaluru in 18-24 months. Efforts to raise funds are already on.